Page:Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan.pdf/107

Rh Sode-ko’s mother had died from profuse bleeding after childbirth. As she was dying, a red tide of blood ebbed from her poor tired body, and so she died.

The tide that had so rapidly ebbed from the mother’s body flowed again—after fifteen years—in the doll-like frame of the daughter, in exchange for her death. A tide that moves in and out to the waxing and waning of the moon in the sky, a miracle, yet not a miracle—this was far too great a problem for Sode-ko to comprehend. That it ebbed and flowed regularly, as everybody said, she could not believe. An unfounded anxiety constantly troubled her and destroyed her happiness, and Sode-ko, in this uneasiness of her heart, often trembled and panted on the wayside which leads from the world of children to the kinddomkingdom [sic] of grown-ups.