LITMIR.BIZ

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      "As usual, she didn't care about her appearance in the least, and when she came back home, she'd be wearing her shabbiest kimono, intending to have it mended by our mother, and so Noe wore it nonchalantly, the cotton bulging out of the kimono seams. The strings for tying her haori half-coat were always twisted pieces of paper. When our mother, unable to look on with indifference, said, 'At least why not set your hair when you come back to the village, since every soul is looking at you!' Noe would declare arrogantly, 'Before long, women will be wearing their hair like mine! Just wait and see.' When I think back to that now, my elder sister's prophecy has actually come true, hasn't it?

      "Yes, about the time she was killed, she was often wearing foreign-style clothing. Her hair was bobbed, and she even wore a hat. Osugi was a born dandy, and it being his way to be finicky about clothes, he was extravagant in appearance. I guess my elder sister was influenced by him. Osugi was quite particular about their children's clothing, and Mako-san was made to wear the kind of stylish outfit Osugi liked. So even when we looked after the children here, he made them wear only European dress and brought them wearing the latest fashions. In those days no children in the rural districts wore European clothes, and girls with a Dutch bob were even rarer. Certainly it was quite unusual for a woman to wear European dresses in 1923, even in Tokyo, don't you think? But there was something becoming about my sister in her European attire. She was exceedingly confident that whatever she wore or whatever she did was suitable, so it seems everything and anything became her.

      "Oh yes, I just remembered something very interesting about Tsuji. When I returned home after escaping from the family I had married into, my first marriage having failed, it was just then that Tsuji first came to our house and I happened to meet him. At that time he said he would take me up to Tokyo to make me an actress in the Imperial Theatre, and he kept insisting he could definitely turn me into a success. Even Noe was in earnest about it and encouraged me. It sounds strange to remember that now, but when this was told to me, I somehow felt it wouldn't be a bad thing to appear on the stage, having always liked singing and dancing, and I came to want to go. But for some reason or other my father was against it and wouldn't let me. In those days Sumako Matsui, who acted the parts of Nora and Katucha, had created a sensation all over the country, not to mention the actresses at the Imperial Theatre, so I couldn't deny I had a longing to become an actress. Though my father was fond of singing and dancing and even forced his daughter to dance on the stage as one of his favorite diversions, he nevertheless felt that being a professional actress was worse than being a geisha, obsessed as he was with the old-fashioned idea that no woman should degrade herself by becoming an actress, the word for actress, kawarakojiki, equivalent to beggar.

      "Oh, is it my marriage you're asking about? The first was when I was seventeen and married a very wealthy man from a neighboring prefecture after he took a fancy to my looks. But since he was a person who had never had to worry about money, he was deceived by a swindler just after our marriage and went prospecting for gold with him after he had told my husband they could find a gold mine in Kagoshima.

      "The moment they arrived there, they indulged in all luxuries regardless of expense. They continued their foolish diversions by being spectators at the theatre from morning till night after reserving box seats for a full month and by having geisha parties at teahouses, even asking me to join them, and then when they finally went into the mountains, there was nothing to take out because it was all nonsense from the first, so little by little my husband got in financially beyond his depth and in less than six months found himself quite penniless. The swindler made off with all my husband's money, and I was turned into a prisoner by being forced to stay by myself at the mine while my husband went down the mountain to raise some cash. The money he sent me was seized on the way by his associates, and all of them absconded. The time kept passing and I still couldn't come down from that mine. All the villagers around me kept watching me because everyone connected with my husband had bought everything on credit and had avoided paying their bills at the inns and eating houses and grocery stores. Finally even I ran out of food, and all my clothes were taken away one by one so that I was left only in my kimono undergarment and the long cloth around my loins. For three days, from morning to night, I spent my time in bed. The children who occasionally came to peek in at me soon found me in bed whenever they came and once, thinking I was dead, raised a great outcry.

      "Someone advised me there was no other course than to run away at night, so I escaped by the skin of my teeth, but when looking like a beggar I finally found my way to my husband's house, I was told it was no longer ours. My husband had received such a severe shock he had become deranged and entered a mental hospital. While I was nursing my husband, who immediately after enjoying the very heights of luxury had been thrust into the very depths of poverty and who had gone berserk without understanding what was what, my aunt Dai, who had married me off to him, came to see me and suddenly made me go back with her. I was still young and unable to make heads or tails of what it was all about, but in only one year I had been raised to the summit of life and flung to its very abyss, and that was how it ended for us. It was then that I met Tsuji. If my disposition had been like my elder sister's, I probably would have ventured up to Tokyo regardless of my father's opposition and would have let Tsuji make me into an actress. There's no knowing about one's destiny. I had learned a costly lesson by my marriage, and I felt no man deserved to be called such unless he could overcome adversity when put to the test. My next marriage was to a person twenty-seven years older than me. My sister said at that time as if treating me with contempt, 'Why on earth marry a man whose age is so different from yours! Will it satisfy you?' And since I couldn't forget her words, I also said to her when she married Osugi, 'Why on earth do you want to marry a man who has so many women around him? Will it satisfy you?'

      "She said quite calmly, 'As for those women, I don't care how many there are. Because I'll be the one to monopolize him before long!' Well, it absolutely turned out the way she said. That was really strange. And even about her death she told me, 'After all, we won't die normally on straw mats. In all probability we'll be murdered when we least expect it. So if that time should come, never be confused or grieve over me. Even if we should be killed, we ourselves will be happy because we have always done what we felt was worth doing.' Even those words turned out to be true. Yes, at that time we were informed by the Dentsu news agency even before the special edition of the newspapers came out. Perhaps because we had often been told of such a possibility by my sister, we merely thought, 'Well, at last it's so,' and we were neither too surprised nor too suddenly saddened. Even our parents told me they felt the same way.

      "My second husband ran a house in a red-light district in Osaka and later in Shimonoseki. Although my sister had principles, she never criticized our business. Nor did Osugi. Instead, though, their taking money from us seemed like the most natural thing in the world. They often came to our house in Shimonoseki. At first my husband, his age being what it was, couldn't understand them in the least and didn't like to associate with them, and so after receiving my sister's letter, I always went to the station to meet them and handed them some money there, and that was how I met them to talk over many things. But gradually my husband was able to understand them, and my sister and Osugi came to see us at home. Yet what troubles we had after they arrived! Without fail, we would be summoned by the police and even asked what time they woke up and when they ate. The questioning took all day, and it disgusted us! During their stay with us, two or three detectives would be standing around our house watching. It was an absolute torment! So finally when my sister reached the station, she herself telephoned the police and told them they had just arrived. In the end there was the spectacle of the police carrying her luggage and riding the children on their backs and sending all of them up to our house.

      "Speaking about misery and happiness, I have never been as miserable as the time my sister and her husband were killed and my father and uncle Dai came back from Tokyo with the children. Because my sister was killed twenty days after the birth of her last child Nestor, this last baby couldn't even hold its head properly. The older children were two-year-old Louise, three-year-old Ema, and Mako, who was seven. Yes, I'm counting their ages in the Japanese way so they were even younger. My father was carrying the baby in one arm while holding Louise's hand with the other, and my uncle was leading Ema and Mako with both his hands.

      "Each time they arrived at one of the stations between Tokyo and Shimonoseki, many newspaper reporters suddenly crowded onto the train,

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