The Flower Mat by Shugoro Yamamoto

Author:Shugoro Yamamoto
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Footnote

* In old japan, only samurai families and a few merchants and farmers who had performed distinctive service for their lords were permitted to have family names. Most farmers were known only by their given names. If someone once had had a family name, it was therefore an indication that he came from a distinguished family.

Part Three

10

ICHI DID not begin going to Minojin House in Shimada village until February of the following year, although she had conceived the idea during the preceding fall.

One day, after Nobu's birth, she had seen wagons piled high with something that looked like grass. They passed the house at frequent intervals, and Ichi asked Gen what the grass was and where it was going. Gen's explanation was that it was toshin, or wick grass. Most grass, she continued, was made up into the straw mats called tatami, but toshin was used by the workers at Minojin House to make flower mats, straw mats into which designs were woven with dyed rushes. The work required a special weaving machine, technique, and materials, and it was not easy to do. A flower mat was regarded as an unusual and expensive object.

Ichi herself had seen such a mat once, at the home of the roshoku Iki Toda. It had been about the size of two tatami, with a border of interwoven swastika patterns and a center motif of leaves and a peony-like flower. She remembered that its lines were generally crude and inaccurate, and she had not regarded it as beautiful.

"We could earn some money if we wove this kind of thing," Gen said. "But it's a job which requires patience, and some people are good at it while others aren't. Some people from this village are hired to work at Minojin House, but they never stay long."

Gen spoke as if to herself, but Ichi took the words as a hint. For some time she had been thinking of earning her living at a suitable job. She could not entertain the hope that her husband was still alive, and even if the family was allowed to return to the Kugata home, Kyunosuke or Tatsuya would be the head of the household. Things would have been different if her child had been a boy, but since it was a girl the question of succession was practically cut and dried. Moreover, since her hope of returning to the clan was uncertain, the best thing would be to plan on earning her own living and to forget completely about other possibilities for the time being.

The difficult point was the question of whether Ichi, who had been brought up in a life of ease, would be able to support the family. But Ichi did not think it would be that difficult. Her father had often said that if a person sticks for ten years to a single thing he is determined to achieve, he usually succeeds at it. An example of this was the story of a samurai, Sawada, who was a vassal of the Okumura family.

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