"Of course, I love him," cried Sadako, starting up from her sorrow. "You see me. I am no more virgin. He is my life to me. Why cannot I love him? Why cannot I be free like men are free to love as they wish? I am new woman. I read Bernard Shaw. I find one law for men in Japan, and another law for women. But I will break that law. I have made Sekiné my lover, because I am free."
Asako could never have imagined her proud, inhuman cousin reduced to this state of quivering emotion. Never before had she seen a Japanese soul laid bare.
"But you will marry Sekiné, Sada dear; and then you will be happy."
"Marry Sekiné!" the girl hissed, "marry a boy with no money and leave you to be the Fujinami heiress, when I am promised to the Governor of Osaka, who will be home Minister when the next Governor comes!"
"Oh, don't do that," urged 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 Sekiné. 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 ingé. 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.