“My lord is no gnat!” she laughed. “I do not understand. Even Fuji-san rests broadly upon the back of Dai Nippon, and Dai Nippon upon the back of the great fish. How then could my lord go beneath? Did my lord see the great fish?”
“I saw greater things than the fish of our myth. Beyond the seas are lands vastly greater than Nippon. I have sailed in the black ships and seen the power of the tojin. Tell me quickly. Has word come of the fleet from America?”
“No more, my lord, than a message from the tojin at Deshima that the black ships had sailed for Dai Nippon and would force the Shogunate to open other ports than Nagasaki.”
Yoritomo’s eyes glowed. “We are in time, brother! All now turns upon the wisdom or folly of the Elder Council.”
Kohana rose to her feet barely in time to mask my face from the gaze of the child-maid. She had returned to announce that the bath was ready.
“Go bid the landlord prepare his best dishes for my guests. Then see that no one enters unannounced,” said her mistress.
She Dropped Her Blue Robe from Her Graceful Shoulders
The child turned away in smiling obedience. Yoritomo signed me to rise and follow Kohana, who took up a lantern and thrust open one of the screens of the inner wall. We walked along a smooth planked passage twenty or thirty paces to a little room with sloping slatted floor. Beside the door stood clothes-racks, on which hung thin towels of cotton print. Three or four buckets of cold water ranged along the wall, and at the lower end, half sunk below the level of the floor, was a great tub, or wide-mouthed barrel, from which warm vapors were beginning to rise.
The geisha hung her lantern to a convenient hook, and unwrapped her long crepe obi, or sash. In a moment she had slipped off her gold-brocaded robe and disclosed a still more beautiful under kimono of azure silk embroidered with gold dragons. Loosening the inner obi, she dropped her blue robe from her graceful shoulders, and stood before us as nude and as unconscious as the nymph of the public bath. Though I was aware that she was a member of a profession that her people class little above the courtesans, one look into her earnest, smiling face convinced me that her thoughts were innocent of all immodesty.