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Updated: June 8, 2025
The first object to catch my eye, when the shoji were pushed apart, the next morning, was a string of the ubiquitous paper fish, dangling limp in the motionless May air from a pole in a neighboring yard; highly suggestive of having just been caught for breakfast.
I opened my eyes to see a golden gleam flooding the still-shut shoji, and a diamond glitter stealing through the cracks that set the blood dancing in my veins. Then, with a startling clatter, my princess rolled the panels aside. Windows are but half-way shifts at best. The true good-morning comes afield, and next to that is the thrill that greets the throwing your whole room wide to it.
"You ve'y lazy, Mister Sun, this morning," she said, shaking a finger at him in reproof; "where you the have been? Why you not come the more early and make light for my busy?" She tied the long sleeves of her bright kimono out of her way, and twisting a bit of cloth about her head, fell to dusting the shoji and setting the small room in order.
From one room the shoji were pushed open; and drunken men could be seen with kimonos thrown back from their shoulders showing a body reddened with saké. They had taken the geishas' instruments from them, and were performing an impromptu song and dance, while the girls clapped their hands and writhed with laughter. Beyond the tea-house, the din of the festival was hushed.
Cats are ungrateful 'Feed a dog for three days, says a Japanese proverb, 'and he will remember your kindness for three years; feed a cat for three years and she will forget your kindness in three days. Cats are mischievous: they tear the mattings, and make holes in the shoji, and sharpen their claws upon the pillars of tokonoma.
One rainy morning, being already in an ill humor over some trifling household affair, she was startled and annoyed by the sudden vision of Tatsu's head thrust noiselessly into her kitchen. Rudely she had slammed the shoji together, calling out to him that he had better be off doing the one thing he was fit to do, rather than to be skulking around her special domain.
Consult her now," said Kano. The old dame threw aside the shoji like an armor, and walked in. "Yes, ask me what I think! Ask the old servant who has nursed Miss Umè from her birth, managed the house, scrubbed, haggled, washed, and broken her old bones for you! This is my advice, freely given, make of the youth her jinrikisha man, but not her husband!" "Impertinent old witch!" cried Kano.
About six this time, we were shown to the large room, which is always surrounded by gold screens and shoji, which slide back before the windows. Cushions are placed about three feet apart on three sides of the long and beautifully shaped room. In the middle of one side they are piled up so the foreign guests of honor may sit instead of kneeling Japanese fashion.
Asako admired the pale white shoji, the sliding windows of opaque glowing paper along the side of the room open to the outdoor light, the fusuma or sliding partitions between room and room, set in the framework of the house, some of them charmingly painted with sketches of scenery, flowers, or people, some of them plain cream-coloured boards flecked with tiny specks of gold.
I see the broad shoji of dwellings beyond the river suffused with the soft yellow radiance of invisible lamps; and upon those lighted spaces I can discern slender moving shadows, silhouettes of graceful women. Devoutly do I pray that glass may never become universally adopted in Japan there would be no more delicious shadows. I listen to the voices of the city awhile.
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