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"Tama" is a novel by Onoto Watanna, a pseudonym used by the writer Winnifred Eaton. The novel was first published in 1910 and tells the story of a young Japanese girl named Tama who is sent to America to live with her aunt and uncle.

In America, Tama struggles to adapt to the culture and customs of her new home. She faces discrimination and prejudice from those around her and feels torn between her Japanese heritage and the desire to assimilate into American society.

Throughout the novel, Tama's experiences reflect the larger themes of identity, cultural displacement, and the immigrant experience. The novel also explores issues of gender and the challenges faced by women in both Japanese and American society.

"Tama" is considered a pioneering work in Asian American literature and is an important contribution to the representation of Asian Americans in literature. It remains a relevant and thought-provoking work to this day.
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Chapter One

FUKUI was in an unwonted state of excitement. For days the people had talked of but one event. Even the small boys, perilously astraddle the bamboo poles, the scullery wenches of the kitchen, the very mendicants of the street, the highest and lowest of the citizens of Fukui talked of the coming of the O-Tojin-san (Honorable Mr. Foreigner).
For at last the exalted Daimio of the province had acceded to the pleadings and eager demands of the students of the university, and, at great expense and trouble, a foreign professor had been imported.
Signs of preparation were everywhere visible. Vigorous housecleaning was in evidence. The professional story-tellers, who took the place of newspapers in these days, reaped small fortunes in their halls. Some of them opened booths on the streets and regaled their auditors with strange accounts of America and its people.
Already the Tojin-san’s house and household had been chosen for him, from the Daimio’s high officer and the four samourai body-guard, who were to protect him from any possible Jo-i (foreign hater), down to his body-servant.
An enormous old historical Shiro (mansion), two hundred and seven years old, was assigned as his residence, and was now undergoing certain remarkable changes. For heavy woollen carpets, with flowers and figured designs, were being nailed down over the ancient matting in the chief rooms. Strange articles of furniture, massive and heavy as iron, were pushed into the great chambers, under the supervising hand of a dapper, rosy-cheeked young samourai who was to serve as interpreter to the Tojin. His name was Genji Negato, and he had already lived among foreigners in the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama. He spoke the English language very well indeed, and his knowledge of the white man and his ways was extraordinary.
Now, as he ordered this or that article set in place, his full red lips curled smilingly under his little bristly mustache. He called the servants in one by one, lecturing each in turn in regard to his especial duties. Incidentally he regaled them with tales of the habits and desires of the white man.
Food sufficient for six ordinary mortals must be prepared for his individual consumption. Raw meat and game, slightly scorched before fire, were essential. A never-failing spring of what the original American had aptly called “fire-water” must be constantly flowing at and between meals and day and night. Such was the thirst of the white man. Brooms must be in readiness to follow the trail of the dust and mud-laden boots of the professor, since he would not remove them even in the house. Finally, his supreme favor could be won by having at hand always the sweetest and prettiest maidens to entertain and caress him. And so on through a strange list.
If the students of the college where the Tojin-san was to teach were elated at the prospect of his coming, their joy was hardly shared by his household. It was in a flutter of excited fear. Even the stolid, impassive-faced samourai guard discussed in undertones among themselves the degrading service to which they were reduced in these degenerate days. To guard the body of a mere Tojin! Well, such was the will of the Daimio of Echizen, and a samourai is the right hand of his Prince. His the task to obey even the caprice of his lord, or take his own life in preference to service too far beneath his honor.
In the humbler regions of the Shiro, however, the servants discussed the matter less pessimistically. Some rumor of the generosity and wealth of foreigners had floated across the vague tide of gossip. Anyhow, the preparations for his coming went blithely on here, and already odors of vigorous advance cooking were being wafted from the kitchen regions, warming and savoring the great chambers, and awakening into noisy life the vast army of rats and bats which had long made their homes in the eaves and rafters of the old deserted mansion, now for the first time in years to be occupied by a tenant.
Everything was quite in readiness when the cook’s wife’s baby’s nurse (for his entire family were, of course, also domiciled in the Shiro) missed a portion of her rice. She had turned about to give better attention to master baby-san, when, so she averred, a “white hand” reached out of nowhere and seized the remnants of her supper. She ran squealing with her tale to her mistress, who, in turn, rushed with it to her lord, the cook. He put aside his apron and sought Genji Negato, who solemnly called a council of war. To the four samourai guard the entire household looked for a solution and ending of the impending trouble.

Measures should be taken at once, it was unanimously decided. It would be to their Prince’s everlasting disgrace should the exalted foreign devil also become a victim of the dreaded Fox-Woman of Atago Yama, for, undoubtedly, this mischievous and irrepressible sprite of the mountains was at her tricks again. In the names, therefore, of the august Tojin-san, nay, in the very name of the Imperial Daimio of Echizen, it was the duty of the honorable samourai to spare in no wise the witch should she be caught trespassing upon the estate of the Prince’s guest and protégé.
They fell to telling weird tales of the latest doings of the fox-woman. A Tsuruga child had followed the witch-girl into the mountains, believing her glittering hair to be the rays of the sun, and stretching out his tiny hands to touch and hold it. To propitiate the dread creature, the parents had set out daily food at the foot of the mountains, and thus, for a time at least, the hunger of the fox-woman had been satisfied, but the child had never been the same again, fretting and crying constantly for the “Sun Lady.” As its peevishness continued, the parents revenged themselves upon its abductor, and ceased to set out the nightly repast, bravely facing down their fear of the witch’s certain anger and retaliation.
Since then she had been forced to seek her sustenance elsewhere. A basket of fish disappeared overnight from a vendor’s locked stand. A bag of rice was found on the mountain-side of the river, as if the thief, finding it too heavy, had dropped it in her flight.
And now—could it be possible that the most distinguished (though augustly degraded) guest Fukui had known in years was to suffer by the depredations of the fox-woman?
Samourai Iroka voted in favor of killing the witch outright. But not by the means of his own personal sword, for he was unmarried and had no descendants to pray for his soul should it be forced to pass along on a journey.
Samourai Asado feared for the safety of his wife and family in the event of his honorable sword being stained by the blood of the witch-girl. Once a similar goblin had torn the head and arms from the body of a sleeping babe, in revenge for the mere pin-prick of a samourai sword.
Samourai Hirata suggested referring the matter to the Daimio himself; but was urged against this by the others, for was not the fox-woman the one black blot upon the escutcheon of their exalted Prince, seeing she was indeed, and alas! of his own blood?
Finally, Samourai Numura, an ancient, grizzled warrior of the most stolid common sense, gruffly insisted that the matter was the affair of the Tojin himself, and from him alone should they receive commands upon the matter. It was agreed, therefore, that they should wait for the coming of the Tojin-san. Out of his vaunted western wisdom certainly should he be able to suggest the solution of the problem.
And, in the Season of Greatest Cold, while the snow whirled in feathery flakes over all the Province of Echizen, and the winds blew in laughing, whispering murmurs through the glistening camphor and pine trees, across the sacred bosom of Lake Biwa, and over the snow-crowned mountains between, the Tojin-san came to Fukui, the “Well of Blessing.”

Chapter II

THE room was so large that even with the seven lighted andon and the three ancient takahiras glimmering dully where they hung from the raftered ceiling overhead, it was chiefly in shadow. Set at intervals against the sliding walls were a few large pieces of heavy black-walnut furniture, grotesque objects in the otherwise completely empty chamber. The room itself was cold, but a kotatsu in the centre of the room had been filled with live coals, and over this the Tojin-san crouched. He sat upon the floor, close to the fire-frame, his knees drawn up, his hands encircling them.
After a long and tortuous journey over land and water, by boat, by horse, by kurumma, and often on foot—a never-ending, long-winding, cold journey, the Tojin-san was at last at home! This was Fukui, where he had contracted to live for seven years of his life; this vast, empty, bleak mansion was his house.
He had started upon the journey with an alert and quickened pulse, and an ardent ambition to serve, to raise up, to love this strange people to whom he had pledged himself. A short sojourn was made in Tokio and Kioto—days of sheer delight in a charm so new it intoxicated. Then, leaving the open ports, under the escort sent by the Prince of Echizen, he had taken finally that plunge into the great unknown country itself, where only half a dozen foreigners had been before him.
The journey had been one of many weeks. Crossing waters in a fragile craft, which tossed and heaved with every tide, he had come to know the true meaning of the Japanese saying that “a sea voyage is an inch of hell.”

For days his party had been snow-bound on a desolate mountain, far from even the smallest village or town, and, when finally they had issued forth, it was only to encounter new perils, in savage-souled ronins who hung about the vicinity of the Tojin-san’s party, their narrow, wicked eyes intent upon his destruction. How many white men before him had started upon a similar journey, in other provinces of Japan, and met the then common fate—a stab in the back, or in the dark! And the punishments, the indemnities, the humiliations forced upon the government by the foreigners, but added to the hatred and malice of the Jo-i (foreign haters).
But the Prince of Echizen was of the most enlightened school. No foreign teacher or guest within his province should suffer the smallest hurt! His edicts in the matter were so emphatic that they reached even the humblest of the citizens, and the Tojin-san, did he but know it, was practically immune from attack. Indeed, his pilgrimage was in the nature of one of triumph. Whatever their inner feelings toward the intruder, the people met him with smiles and expressions of welcome. Every little town and hamlet sent to him on its outskirts deputations of high officials. There had been feasts here and banquets there, and always and everywhere about him he saw the same brown face, the same glittering eye, the same elusive smile.
Now the last Daimio’s officer was gone, the last officious minister of his Prince had chanted his singsong poem of welcome, and the Tojin-san was alone!
Even the individual members of his household had dispersed. They had come in one by one in solemn procession, led by the samourai guard, who, as they prostrated themselves, sucked in their breath fiercely, expelling it in long, sibilant hisses. The cook, his assistants, and wife and family formed a small procession of their own, one behind the other, executing a series of such comical bows and bobs that the stern lips of the Tojin-san had softened in spite of himself, particularly so, when the tiniest one, a toddling baby no more than two years old, had solemnly brought its diminutive shaven pate to the floor, and had almost capsized in a somersault in its efforts to emulate its elders’ politeness.

Now the weary, half-closed eyes of the Tojin-san were seeing other faces, his mind travelling backward over other scenes, very far away. He saw a great, green campus, overshadowed by towering elms. Bright-eyed, white-skinned boys were singing huskily as they swept across the lawns into the tall stone buildings, which seemed to smile at them with maternal indulgence. The Tojin-san was seated at a desk, looking across at that sea of boyish faces. Strange how they had repulsed him; how he had even felt a bitterness that was almost hatred for them in that other time and place! And now! Now he caught himself thinking of them with a tenderness which almost stifled.
Then the jaded mind of the Tojin-san wandered out into another scene of the past, and out of a longer, darker memory a woman’s cold, unsmiling face mocked him.
“Marry you!” she had cried, and not even her native courtesy could suppress the note of horror in her voice. “Oh—h!” she had cried out, covering her eyes shudderingly, “if you could but—see—yourself!”
The Tojin-san had indeed seen himself that night. Glaring back at him in a tragic grimness his own fearful face had looked at him from the mirror. Not that he had not known the blight upon him; but he had been dull, stupid, slow to realize its full horror.
Time was when the Tojin-san was as other men, smooth-skinned, level-eyed, very good to look upon. But in a God and Man forsaken little town crushed between the mountains and the sea, a young and ardent doctor of long ago had given himself up to a sublime heroism. Shoulder to shoulder with a few—one or two only beside himself—they had fought the plague of smallpox. From this fight the Tojin-san had emerged marked! With the optimism and blindness of youth, however, he had gone back to the woman he loved, and she had struck at him!
There is a Japanese proverb which says: “The tongue three inches long can kill a man six feet tall.” The Tojin-san thought of this now. A woman’s tongue, the mere brutal smiting of her words, had wrought a curious effect upon his entire life. From that time on he had avoided women as he had not a vile plague. He led the life of an ascetic, wrapped in his books and sciences, making few friends, avoiding others, with the sensitive fear upon him that the whole world avoided and shrank also from him. And while still a young man—under forty—they had named him “Old Grind” at the university.
Then upon him suddenly had come a new upheaval, a pent-up, passionate longing to break away from the dull hopeless treadmill to which he seemed bound.

“Old Grind!” So age was to be clapped upon him while the vital fires of youth still throbbed in an agony in his blood. There was a new life, an exhilarating, more inspiring life to be led, out in that old-new world across the seas! It beckoned to those of adventurous souls and those who were weary of a drowsy, torpid existence, wherein hope of a new dawn had vanished beyond memory. The Tojin-san panted for this new life. He wanted to swing his arms in a wilder world, to breathe less vitiated air, to feel himself alive again! He had made of himself, for half a lifetime, a mummy for the sake of a woman he had not even really loved. It was fantastic!
Out of this curious rebellion against Fate which had swept upon him like a tidal wave, the Tojin-san had broken his bonds.
He was in the strange wild land he had yearned for, strange faces peered at him askance, and strange gods mocked him from their temples with their sphinx-like impenetrability. And he crouched, shivering, over a kotatsu in a great, historical yashiki, cold and empty as a very mausoleum, and the strong man within him recognized and fought the weakness come upon him—the aching, longing, praying, for the mere sight of a white, familiar face!
So still was the night, even the glide of a gaki (spirit) across the cracking snow without must have been heard. A breeze just trembled through the frost-incrusted bough of a camphor-tree, and it bristled and broke, the twigs snapping and bouncing down on the frozen ground beneath.
Something crept out of the shadows of the woods at the foot of the mountains, leaped like a fawn across the wide arm of the castle moat, and slid over the grounds between it and the shiro Matsuhaira. An army of crows which lodged in the attic of a dilapidated ruin of what had once been a go-down (treasure-house) suddenly began to flap their wings, calling to each other querulously and making short, futile, terrified flights. A rat fled from the go-down interior and scuttled across to the kitchen in the rear of the mansion, and the Tojin-san raised a startled face, listening to a new sound.
It was as if one without were tapping or scratching ever so faintly upon the amado (winter walls). He did not move, but fastened his gaze upon the point whence he had fancied the sound proceeded. Now it came from another direction and tapped lightly, timidly again, as a child might have done.
The Tojin-san came to his feet with a bound. He flung wide the screens of his chamber, now on this side, now on that, and now those opening upon the grounds. Not a soul was visible. Nothing but the white, still snow, glittering like silver under the moon-rays. He looked up at the outjutting eaves, felt along them with his hand, though a curious instinct told him insistently that the touch upon his screens had been intelligent and human. Slowly he drew them into place again, and, as he did so, a voice, low as a sigh, called to him across the bleak snow:
“To-o—jin-san! To-o-o-jin—san! To-o-o-jin—san! To-o-o—!”
Tojin-san! That was the name he had heard everywhere. The one they had given him. Some one was calling him, wanted him, needed him, perhaps!
It was a step only down to the gardens below. He took it at a leap, crossed the intervening lawn and plunged into the wooded grove beyond. On and on he followed the sound of the voice, still sighing across to him, now pleading, now wistful, now wild and now—mocking, with the tone of a teasing sprite which laughed through a veil of tears.
Suddenly he stopped, white-lipped. He had been within a step of the but half-frozen moat. One more, and he would have plunged into it. A shuddering sense of horror, of shock, seized him, and held him there rooted to the spot, bewildered, stunned, his ears still strained listening to the drifting voice, which had vanished across the heights and lost itself in the white looming shadows of the mountains.

Chapter Three

“YOUR excellency, though he live a million honorable years, could not estimate the augustly degraded chagrin experienced by my exalted Prince in my humble and servile person.”
So spoke the Daimio’s high officer, through the interpreter, Genji Negato.
The American held his shaking hands over the replenished kotatsu as the Daimio’s officer, hastily summoned by the guard, set himself the distasteful task of explaining to him the existence of the fox-woman.

A fox-woman, so he explained solemnly, was a female human being into whose body the soul of a fox had entered. In Japanese mythology the fox occupies an important position, and the fox-woman is a creature greatly to be feared. Her face and form, so said the Japanese, were of a marvellous whiteness and a beauty so dazzling that a mortal must cover his eyes to escape blindness. Her hair resembled the sun-rays, so bright and glittering its color and effect. Gifted with this beauty of face and form, but devoid of soul, she had but one ruling and controlling ambition. She spent her days and nights lurking about the mountain passes, behind and within rocks and caves, luring men—aye, and women and children, too!—to destruction.
Something in the half-skeptical smile on the taciturn face of the Tojin-san stopped the officer’s recital. His expression became troubled, revealing a sensitive pride unduly wounded. Plainly the foreign Sensei looked upon his explanations in the light of a fairy-tale.
“Your excellency disbelieves our legend of the fox-woman?” he queried courteously.
“Legends,” said the Tojin-san slowly, “belong to literature, and are tales to charm and beguile adults and deceive children. In the West we no longer heed them. We name them superstitions, and we’ve burned out our superstitions as we did our witches in the early days.”
The Japanese sat up stiffly, and in the chilly room he waved his fan regularly to and fro.
“You deny the existence of spirits in the West?”
“At least we do not create them out of our fancy or thought,” said the American gravely.
The officer said vehemently:
“They exist actively in Japan, honorable sir. Though you ignore them, they will force themselves upon you—as to-night, excellency!”
The Tojin-san frowned slightly. Then, thoughtfully, he emptied his pipe on the old bronze hibachi.
“You wish me to believe that my visitor to-night was a—spirit?”
“She was worse,” said the officer earnestly, “for she was invested with at least the form of a human being.”
“How do you know she is not human?”
It was the Japanese’s turn to frown. His narrow eyes drew sternly together. His voice was stubborn. He spoke as if determined to justify some indisputable course he had taken.
“She is unlike us in any way, exalted sir. No human being ever was created with such fiendish beauty. Her acts are those of the gaki, moreover. She is mischievous, impish, wicked, delighting as much in torturing and frightening the poor as well as the rich, little children as well as their elders. The birds of the air come at her calling and follow her whithersoever she bids them. Degraded dogs and cats, forlorn beasts of the mountains and the forests are her body-guard, defying mere human beings to molest or take her. Her home is among the tombs of Sho Kon Sha. She is of the Temple Tokiwa, long forsaken of men and accursed by the gods.”
The Tojin-san raised himself with a show of more interest.
“A temple housing your dreaded fox-woman!” he exclaimed, whimsically.
“Yes, alas so, excellency,” admitted the Japanese miserably. “Her mother was Nii-no-Ama (noble nun of second rank) and kin to our august Prince. She broke her vows to the Lord Buddha, desecrated and disgraced his temple. The gods visited their wrath upon her offspring. They gave it a body only—no soul, save that of the fox. She is beyond the pale, honored sir, and no clean being may look upon or touch her.”
The Tojin-san, sitting up erectly now, was holding his lower lip thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger.
“Your fox-woman then is some sort of outcast, who has lived all her life avoided by her kind?”
“She had the company of her degraded parents,” said the officer gruffly, “until she was the age of ten. Then a zealous band of former Danka (parishioners) assaulted the temple by fire and sword. The parents of the fox-woman met a deserved death, being literally torn to pieces before the very altar of Great Shaka himself.”
The Daimio’s officer paused, his little black eyes glittering with a fanatical light. Then the exhilaration dropped from his voice.
“But the ways of the Lord Buddha are strange. How could the devoted Danka conceive that Shaka would turn his wrath upon them also, for thus scorching his altar with unclean blood. Since the Restoration, excellency, our city’s history has been one of blood and poverty. Some assert the province is doomed. Others, more optimistic, that it is but passing through its new birth pains, and that, as of old, its history will be glorious.”
The Tojin-san puffed at his relighted pipe in meditative silence. Then, very quietly, he asked:
“Do you lay the misfortunes of your province upon this fox-woman, as you call her?”

“Aye!” said the officer almost fiercely. “The hand of Fate fell heaviest upon us after the assassination of the intruder. We have never recovered from the humiliations heaped upon us by—the countries of the West. The bombardment of beloved Kagoshima by the allied forces of the western nations followed almost instantly after the death by violence of—”
He stopped abruptly, and coughed in gruff alarm behind his now sheltering fan. He had been upon the verge of telling what had been forbidden.
The Tojin-san looked puzzled, baffled.
“I do not see the connection,” he said.
“Yet—it is so,” said the Japanese vaguely, shifting his eyes from the averted faces of the samourai guard.
Said the American forcefully:
“It seems to me an amazing thing that to-day when you are frankly hoping to join the nations of enlightenment, you still give yourselves up to barbarous persecution because of what, after all, is nothing but a legend fit for children only. For my part, I intend to sweep from my house vigorously the absurd belief I find actually seated on my hearth-stone.”
The Japanese said solemnly:
“There are several things in life it is impossible to do, exalted sir. We cannot throw a stone to the sun, or scatter a fog with a fan. We cannot build a bridge to the clouds. With this little hand I cannot dip up the ocean. We bow to the elevated wisdom of the West your excellency has come to teach us in honorable chemistry and physics, but, though we humbly solicit pardon for thus stating, there is nothing your augustness can tell us of our own beliefs—and knowledge.”
He made a slight, stiff sign to his attendants and they assisted him to arise. The American stood up also. He was smiling grimly.
“When the snows melt,” he said, “I shall ask for guides of your excellency, and personally make a pilgrimage to the lair of this dreaded fox-woman of the mountains.”
At that the Daimio’s officer’s face distinctly paled. His impassive features were anxious, troubled.
“What does your augustness seek to do?—regenerate one without a soul?”
“I wish merely to see her. She must be an interesting specimen—of her kind.”
“‘Making an idol does not give it a soul,’” quoted the Daimio’s officer, solemnly. “Honored sir, a snake has its charm to some, and the vampire is kin to the snake. In Japan we believe the fox-woman one form of vampire. Condescend, exalted sir, to beware.”
The Tojin-san laughed shortly, contemptuously. He was a man of gigantic stature, and as he stood there towering above his gleaming-eyed visitor there was something about his attitude careless, indifferent, fearless, and beyond the understanding of the Oriental. With a morbid recollection of specific instructions from his Prince, the officer restrained his fingers, turned almost automatically toward the two short swords hanging at his side.
“It is my duty, excellent sir,” he said with forced courtesy, “to convince you of the danger wherewith you seek to play. Condescend to permit the humble one once again to be seated.”
“By all means,” said the American, hospitably, and, in a moment, they were back seated upon their respective mats, their pipes refilled at the hibachi.

Chapter Four

“YOU have stated, honored sir, that the Fox-Woman of Atago Yama is but a superstition worthy of a child, and you have laughed, Mr. sir, at the possibility of danger from proximity with the forsaken creature. Thus spoke and laughed another before your time in Fukui. We of Echizen do not forget the very recent fate of Gihei Matsuyama.”
“And pray who was Gihei Matsuyama, and what was his fate?” asked the Tojin-san, good-humoredly.
The fanatical fire was back in the eyes of the officer. He had thrust forward his thin, yellow face and was regarding the Tojin-san with an almost venomous glance. His words, however, were pacific, and, as he talked, the American showed a greater interest with every moment.
“We sent seven of our youths to the universities of the West. They were chosen from the most intelligent and noblest of our families. Gihei Matsuyama was one of these, and in him we had particular interest, for he was of Fukui. After two years’ sojourn in Europe he returned for service in Dai Nippon, and we gave him a position of honor and housed him in an honorable yashiki hard by Atago Yama.

“As a youth—as a child, he had known the story of the fox-woman. His honorable sire and other male kin had participated in the slaughter of the parents of the creature. Now with this new wisdom he had acquired in the West, as fresh as new-spread varnish upon him, Gihei laughed to scorn the stories of her fiendish origin, and boasted he would dissipate them as the air does the steam. Making a bold and ingenuous wager that he would enslave the sprite, he set himself the task of tracking her. Unaided by even the counsel of the priests of neighboring temples, he blithely followed the trail of the witch over the river, through the woods and mountains and in and out of the cemeteries, until he had driven her to her final refuge—the Temple of Tokiwa, wherein no man had stepped since the accursed blood spilt before the eye of the eternal Lord.”
Here the Daimio’s high officer reverently bowed to the floor, ere he continued his narrative, his eyes gleaming more fiercely as he proceeded.
“As he hesitated upon the threshold, divided between a desire to penetrate its mysteries, and an instinct which peremptorily bade him depart, she came forth from the temple doors dancing, as the nuns of old danced for the gods, with her wild, unbound hair outmatching the sun, and her hungry, vivid, smiling lips scarlet as the deadly poppy. He, having looked upon her face, became blinded to all else on earth. Infatuated and maddened, he sought to touch, to seize the creature, when she fled suddenly before him, mocking him with the silver laughter of the sea-siren and hiding her face in the glimmering veil of her hair.
“Thus they sped on, she ever before him, with her luring hair streaming like a gilded cloud in the wind, springing as lightly as a breeze from rock to rock, over brooks and slender streams that melted in between, up this cliff and down that dell and through this valley, on and on she led the infatuated seeker.
“Suddenly, while his dazzled eyes were fastened solely upon her, and he reached forth a hand to seize her, she darted like a nymph over some unseen chasm of the mountains. He stumbled in her tracks, reached out vainly to seize her, saw not the gulf at his feet, and plunged headlong down into the abyss.”
The mask-like face of the Daimio’s officer quivered. He wiped his face with a hand that shook visibly. Then, rejecting his breath in that hissing fashion so peculiar to the Japanese, he added fiercely:
“This, honorable sir, is the story of Gihei Matsuyama and the Fox-Woman of Atago Yama. It belongs not to the lips only of the children, as you name them, but is true, well-authenticated history, which any one in Fukui can prove to you.”
The Tojin-san was silenced. He had followed the officer’s story with unabated interest. He had no word now in defense of this Japanese Lorelei. His voice was grave, stern:
“What did she do—when the boy disappeared?”
“There are different stories, honored sir. Some say she not even stopped in her flight. Others that she came of nights and hung over the edges of the chasm, shrouding her mouth in her hands and calling to her victim beneath as if she had the power to lure him back. But we have no certain version of this part of the tragedy. For the first part, we have the tale, four times repeated, from the body-servants of Gihei Matsuyama, who dutifully had followed their master upon his wild quest.”
The Daimio’s high officer arose and made several profound obeisances to the Tojin-san. His face had resumed its immobile melancholy. As he was backing formally toward the exit, bowing at every step, the American suddenly remembered his name. He took a step toward him, his hand impetuously outstretched:
“Pardon me, the boy you speak of was—near and dear to you, was he not?”
Slowly the officer raised his head. Not a quiver broke the stony impassivity of his face. His eyes met the Tojin’s blankly:
“He was—my son!” he said.