is that money is
made from men's lust and the pain of Women. He told in the book
how girls are tricked to come to Tokyo, how their parents sell them
because they are poor or because there is famine, how the girls are
brought to Tokyo ten and twenty at a time, and are put to auction sale
in the Yoshiwara, how they are shut up like prisoner, how very rough
men are sent to them to break their spirit and to compel them to be
_jor[=o]_. There is a trial to see how strong they are. Then, when the
spirit is broken, they are shown in the window as 'new girls' with
beautiful kimono and with wreath of flowers on their head. If they
are lucky they escape disease for a few years, but it comes soon or
late--_rinbyo, baidoku_ and _raibyo_. They are sent to the hospital
for treatment; or else they are told to hide the disease and to get
more men. So the men take the disease and bring it to their wives and
children, who have done no wrong. But the girls of the Yoshiwara have
to work all the time, when they are only half cured. So they become
old and ugly and rotten very quickly. Then, if they take consumption
or some such thing, they die and the master says, 'It is well. She
was already too old. She was wasting our money.' And they are
buried quickly in the burial place of the _jor[=o]_ outside the city
boundary, the burial place of the dead who are forgotten. Or some, who
are very strong, live until their contract is finished. Then they go
back to the country, and marry there and spread disease. But they all
die cursing the Fujinami, who have made money out of their sorrow and
pain. I think this garden is full of their ghosts, and their curses
beat upon the house, like the wind when it makes the shutters rattle!"

"How do you know all these terrible things?" asked Asako.

"It is written in your father's book. I will read it to you. If you do
not believe, ask Ito San. He will tell you it is true."

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. Francis
of Assisi and Tolstoy, is "to compare the tortoise with the moon."
Japan is imitating from the West its worst propensities--hard
materialism, vulgarity and