[13] Many puns. Katsura = ‘laurel.’ Also, a katsura-tres was supposed to grow in the moon.

[14] The ‘next morning’ letter.

[15] The mogi or ‘First Putting On of the Skirt.’

[16] The two stars, Weaving Lady and Plough Boy, meet only on the seventh day of the seventh month.

Transcriber’s Notes.

Text notes:

  1. Footnotes have been renumbered and placed at the end of each chapter.
  2. The bastard-title page prior to the main title page and the half-title page preceding the main text have both been omitted. They contained the words “THE SACRED TREE”.
  3. For the HTML version, page numbers of the original printed text are displayed within braces to the side of the text.
  4. The original landscape orientation of the genealogical tables has been changed to a portrait orientation by the transcriber in order to provide a better view for eReaders. The Inkscape program was used to produce a SVG image that was then converted to a PNG image. The image is placed in the public domain.
  5. In order to facilitate word wrapping, ellipses in the middle of a sentence have been replaced with a group of three periods. This group has a leading and, unless a comma is present, trailing blank space added. Ellipses at the end of a sentence do not have a leading blank space, but closing punctuation has been added if needed.
  6. Missing periods and quotation marks silently added.
  7. Except as mentioned above and in the Change List that follows, every effort has been made to replicate this first-edition text as faithfully as possible, including non-standard punctuation, inconsistently hyphenated words, and other inconsistencies.

Change List: