“No.”
“Very well; I will tell you, then. My house, though seemingly apart, because of its situation on the hill, is built in the heart of an Eta settlement.”
“Eta?” repeated Wistaria, mechanically. She had heard the word somewhere before, but just what it signified her mind at the moment could not recall. So she repeated the word again, as though it troubled yet fascinated her. “Eta!—Eta!”
“Eta,” repeated her father. “In other words, the social outcast, the despised pariah class of Japan.”
Then silence fell like a swift, blank darkness upon them. Wistaria trembled with a creeping horror she could not fathom or grasp.
Somewhere, somehow, vaguely, dimly, she had heard of this class of people. Perhaps it was at school. Perhaps her aunt had instructed her in their condition. One thing was certain, she was suddenly made aware of just what the one word Eta signified.
It described a class in Japan upon whom the ban of ostracism and isolation had been placed by an inviolate heritage and a cruel custom. So virulent and bitter was the prejudice against them and the contempt in which they were held, that in the enumerations of the population they were omitted from the count and numbered as cattle.
Herded in separate villages, their existence ignored by the communities, none but the most degraded tasks were assigned to them—that of burying criminals, slaughtering cattle, that of the hangman and public executioner.
Whence they had come, why they were held in the contempt of all other citizens, what their origin, none could tell. When had there been a time in the history of the nation that they did not exist? Some old histories aver that they were originally captives from the great Armada of the Tartar invaders who dreamed of conquering the sacred realm. Others declare that they were the descendants of the public executioners from time immemorial; and again, more recent students assert that they were descendants of the family and retainers of Taira-No-Masakado-Heishimo, the only man in Japan who ever seriously conspired to seize the imperial throne by armed force. Whatever their origin, they were the outcast people of the realm. They were not permitted to mingle with or marry outside of their own class, and any one who chose to marry among them must either suffer the penalty of death or become one of them.
The long silence which ensued after Shimadzu had spoken the word Eta was broken by the Lady Wistaria.