Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/53

 screamed out his nickname, ‘Chōsan’. There was a stir among the onlookers and they broke into loud applause. Even Chōjirō, accustomed though he was to over-enthusiastic fans, was taken aback by this and he looked at the girl in blank amazement.

When Kanako heard the story, it gave her a strange feeling. She realized that such giddy behaviour was fairly frequent among the younger generation, yet it seemed odd that she should be living in the same house with so uncontrolled a girl. Every time that Kanako looked at Yoshiko’s freakish features, which she had obviously inherited from her mother, she felt amused and at the same time deeply sorry for her.

In order to show her friendliness, Yoshiko said that she would make a light dress for Kanako to wear in the early spring. From then on she began pestering Kanako about the exact sort of material and pattern that she wanted. It was all the more annoying in that Kanako did not have the remotest intention of wearing the dress. She would gladly have had an extra kimono to add to her wardrobe, but Western-style clothes were utterly out of character.

Kanako’s main occupations were washing and sewing. As a rule she would spend the greater part of the day working in her room on the second storey without saying a word to anyone. The cooking was the responsibility of the mother and her daughters. Kanako would have liked occasionally to prepare a meal with a variety of dishes that she could enjoy with her husband. But the household stuck strictly to the rule of having only one kind of food with the rice each day. If there were potatoes, there would be nothing but potatoes for all three meals; if they had cod, there would be nothing but slices of cod. There was never the slightest effort to combine different dishes and Kanako could not help feeling depressed as she sat down with the family to their monotonous meals. To make things even more trying, they never had vegetable pickles. Whatever else she might have missed during her life, Kanako had always had plenty of pickles, and rice without