with about twenty girls, fifteen or sixteen years old.  He and the other clerks of the Yoshiwara first made them jor[=o].  From those twenty girls he made very much money.  So he married the woman who kept the house.  Then he hired a big house called Tomonji.  He furnished it very richly; and he would only receive guests of the high-class people.  Five of his girls became very famous oiran.  Even their pictures, drawn by Utamaro, are worth now hundreds of yen.  When our great-great-grandfather died he was a very rich man.  His son was the second Fujinami.  He bought more houses in the Yoshiwara and more girls.  He was our great-grandfather.  He had two sons.  One was your father’s father, who bought this land and first built a house here.  The other was my grandfather, Fujinami Gennosuke, who still lives in the inkyo.  They have all made much money from girls; but the curse was hurting them all, especially their wives and daughters.”

“And my father?” asked Asako.

“Your father wrote a book to say how bad a thing it is that money is made from men’s lust and the pain of Women.  He told in the book how girls are tricked to come to Tokyo, how their parents sell them because they are poor or because there is famine, how the girls are brought to Tokyo ten and twenty at a time, and are put to auction sale in the Yoshiwara, how they are shut up like prisoner, how very rough men are sent to them to break their spirit and to compel them to be jor[=o].  There is a trial to see how strong they are.  Then, when the spirit is broken, they are shown in the window as ‘new girls’ with beautiful kimono and with wreath of flowers on their head.  If they are lucky they escape disease for a few years, but it comes soon or late—­rinbyo, baidoku and raibyo.  They are sent to the hospital for treatment; or else they are told to hide the disease and to get more men.  So the men take the disease and bring it to their wives and children, who have done no wrong.  But the girls of the Yoshiwara have to work all the time, when they are only half cured.  So they become old and ugly and rotten very quickly.  Then, if they take consumption or some such thing, they die and the master says, ’It is well.  She was already too old.  She was wasting our money.’  And they are buried quickly in the burial place of the jor[=o] outside the city boundary, the burial place of the dead who are forgotten.  Or some, who are very strong, live until their contract is finished.  Then they go back to the country, and marry there and spread disease.  But they all die cursing the Fujinami, who have made money out of their sorrow and pain.  I think this garden is full of their ghosts, and their curses beat upon the house, like the wind when it makes the shutters rattle!”

“How do you know all these terrible things?” asked Asako.

“It is written in your father’s book.  I will read it to you.  If you do not believe, ask Ito San.  He will tell you it is true.”