Asako, her English sentimentalism flooding
back across her mind. "Don't marry a man whom you don't love. You say
you are a new woman. Marry Sekine. 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. But I believe there is a curse. You also,
you have been unhappy, and your father and mother. We are cursed
because of the women. We have made so much money from poor women. They
are sold to men, and they suffer in pain and die so that we become
rich. It is a very bad _inge_. So they say in Akabo, that we Fujinami
have a fox in our family. It brings us money; but it makes us unhappy.
In Akabo, even poor people will not marry with the Fujinami, because
we have the fox."

It is a popular belief, still widely held in Japan, that certain
families own spirit foxes, a kind of family banshee who render them
service, but mark them with a curse.

"I do not understand," said Asako, afraid of this wild talk.

"Do you know why the Englishman went away?" said her cousin brutally.

It was Asako's turn to cry.

"Oh, I wish I had gone with him. He was so good to me, always so kind
and so gentle!"

"When he married you," said Sadako, "he did not know that you had the
curse. He ought not to have come to Japan with you. Now he knows you
have the curse. So he went away. He was wise."

"What do you mean by the curse?" asked Asako.

"You do not know how the Fujinami have made so much money?"

"No," said Asako. "It used to come for me from Mr. Ito. He had shares
or something."

"Yes. But a share that means a share of a business. Do you not know
what is our business?"

"No," said Asako again.

"You have seen the Yoshiwara, where girls are sold to men. That is our
business. Do you understand now?"

"No."

"Then I will tell you the whole story of the Fujinami. About one
hundred and twenty years ago our great-great-grandfather came to Yedo,
as Tokyo was then called. He was a poor boy from the country. He had
no friends. He became clerk in a dry goods store. One day a woman,
rather old, asked him: 'How much pay you get?' He said, 'No pay, only
food and clothes.' The woman said, 'Come with m