“Will Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan,” I answered. “Surely you have heard of him.”
“Adams! Was that the English name of Anjin Sama?—and he your ancestor? You never told me!”
“How much have you told me of your family, Tomo?”
“But Anjin Sama, of all the kami—!” He gazed at me with a strange glow in his black eyes. “You know our belief, Worth, that the dead come back many times and are often born again.”
“The Buddhistic reincarnation,” I remarked.
“And the Shinto rebirth of the kami—the high ones,” he added.
“But what of Will Adams?” I demanded, aflame with curiosity. “I know that he married a Japanese wife and left children by her. Have they any living descendants?”
He looked away, with an enigmatic smile.
“You may learn more of your ancestor, brother, after we reach Yedo. There is an Anjin Street, whose householders still hold a yearly festival in his memory.—Come; it is time for us to be going.”
As he spoke, he rose and started around the corner of the temple. I followed him to the corner and back along the side of the decaying building, below the ragged thatch of the eaves. At the rear corner we came to a narrow gap in the shrubbery looking down upon the Tokaido. Yoritomo suddenly turned about, with his fingers to his lips, and drew me down.