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Updated: September 2, 2025
"Then why say prayers, if they are bad?" "It is just because they are bad," said Sadako, "that we must please them. We flatter them so that they may not hurt us." Asako was unlearned in the difference between religion and devil-worship, so she did not understand the full significance of this remark.
"You are wet through. You will catch cold." "Sa! Damaré! See!" She drew from her breast a short sword in a sheath of shagreen. "If you speak one word, I kill you with this." "What have you done?" asked Asako, trembling. "What I wished to do," was the sullen answer. "You have been with Sekiné?" Asako mentioned the student's name. Sadako nodded in assent.
Her meals were no longer served to her; she had to get what she could from the kitchen. The servants, imitating their mistress's attitude were deliberately disobliging and rude to the little foreigner. Sadako and her mother would sneer at her awkwardness and at her ignorance of Japanese customs. Her obi was tied anyhow; for she had no maid.
Fujinami San, not so very bad, keep same geisha girl very long time. Perhaps Ladyship see one little girl, very nice little girl, come sometimes with Miss Sadako and bring meal-time things. That little girl is geisha girl's daughter. Perhaps old Mr. Fujinami San's daughter also, I think: very bastard: I don't know!"
You can never be English again." The Fujinami had hypnotized Asako with this phrase, as a hen can be hypnotized with a chalk line. Day after day it was dinned into her ears, cutting off all hope of escape from the country or of appeal to her English friends. "You had better marry a Japanese," said Sadako, "or you will become old maid. Why not marry Ito San? He says he likes you.
But overwork brought on its inevitable result. It was a bitter disappointment for Sadako, who was a proud and ambitious girl, and it had not improved her disposition. After the first formalities Asako was shown round the house. The sameness of the rooms surprised her.
So Asako had to sleep on the floor alongside her cousin Sadako in one of the downstairs rooms. Her last possession, her privacy, was taken away from her. The soft mattresses which formed the native bed, were not uncomfortable; but Asako discarded at once the wooden pillow, which every Japanese woman fits into the nape of her neck, so as to prevent her elaborate coiffure becoming disarranged.
"Japanese style looks nicer," said Asako, thinking how big and vulgar a bedstead would appear in that clean emptiness and how awkwardly its iron legs would trample on the straw matting; "but isn't it draughty and uncomfortable?" "I like the foreign beds best," said Sadako; "my brother has let me try his. It is very soft."
So for several evenings Sadako read to this stranger Fujinami her own father's words, the words of a forerunner. Japan is still a savage country, wrote Fujinami Katsundo, the Japanese are still barbarians. To compare the conventional codes, which they have mistaken for civilization, with the depth and the height of Occidental idealism, as Christ perceived it and Dante and St.
Marry the man whom you love. Then you will be happy." "Japanese girls are never happy," groaned her cousin. Asako gasped. This morality confused her. "But that would be a mortal sin," she said. "Then you could never be happy." "We cannot be happy. We are Fujinami," said Sadako gravely. "We are cursed. The old woman of Akabo said that it is a very bad curse. I do not believe superstition.
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