ly upstairs to the
interest and amusement of the chorus of _boy sans_, who had just been
discussing why _danna san_ had left _okusan_ for so many hours that
afternoon, and who and what was the Japanese gentleman who had been
talking to _okusan_ in the hall.

CHAPTER X

THE YOSHIWARA WOMEN

_Kyushu dai-ichi no ume
Kon-ya kimi ga tame ni hiraku.
Hana no shingi wo shiran
to hosseba,
San-ko tsuki wo funde kitare_.

The finest plum-blossom of Kyushu
This night is opening for thee.
If thou wishes to know the true character of this flower,
Come at the third hour singing in the moonlight.

_Yoshiwara Popular Song_.

As the result of an affecting scene with his wife, Geoffrey's
opposition to the Yoshiwara project collapsed. If everybody went to
see the place, then it could not be such very Bad Form to do so.

Asako rang up Reggie; and on the next afternoon the young diplomat
called for the Barringtons in a motor-car, where Miss Yae Smith was
already installed. They drove through Tokyo. It was like crossing
London for the space of distance covered; an immense city--yet is it a
city, or merely a village preposterously overgrown?

There is no dignity in the Japanese capital, nothing secular or
permanent, except that mysterious forest-land in the midst of the
moats and the grey walls, where dwell the Emperor and the Spirit of
the Race. It is a mongrel city, a vast congeries of native wooden
huts, hastily equipped with a few modern conveniences. Drunken poles
stagger down the streets, waving their cobwebs of electric wires.
Rickety trams jolt past, crowded to overflowing, so crowded that
humanity clings to the steps and platforms in clots, like flies
clinging to some sweet surface. Thousands of little shops glitter,
wink or frown at the passer-by. Many of them have western plate-glass
windows and stucco fronts, hiding their savagery, like a native woman
tricked out in ridiculous pomp. Some, still grimly conservative,
receive the customer in their cavernous interior, and cheat his eyes
in their perpetual twilight. Many of these little shops are so small
that their stock-in-trade flows over on to the pavement. The toy
shops, the china shops, the cake shops, the shops for women's ribbons
and hairpins seem to be trying to turn themselves inside out. Others
are so reticent that nothing appears save a stretch of clean straw
mats, where sulky clerks sit smoking round the _hibachi_ (fireboxes).
Then,