Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/93

as if to escape its terrifying fascination, she turned her back to the scroll and threw herself on the straw matting. There she lay with lips trembling and her whole body shuddering. “Master, I will confess to you…. As you have guessed, I have in me the nature of that woman. Take pity on me and hide the picture.”

“Do not talk like a coward! On the contrary, you should study the painting more carefully and then you will soon stop being frightened of it.”

The girl could not bring herself to raise her head, which remained hidden in the sleeve of her kimono. She lay prostrate on the floor saying over and over, “Master, let me go home. I am frightened to be with you.”

“You shall stay for a while,” said Seikichi imperiously. “I alone have the power to make of you a beautiful woman….”

From among the bottles and needles on his shelf Seikichi selected a vial containing a powerful narcotic.

The sun shone brightly on the river. Its reflected rays threw a pattern like golden waves on the sliding doors and on the face of the young sleeping woman. Seikichi closed the doors and sat down beside her. Now for the first time he was able to relish her strange beauty fully, and he thought that he could have spent years sitting there gazing at that perfect, immobile face.

But the urge to accomplish his design overcame him before many moments. Having fetched his tattooing instruments from the shelf, Seikichi uncovered the girl’s body and began to apply to her back the point of his pen, held between the thumb, ring-finger and little-finger of his left hand. With the needle, held in his right hand, he pricked along the lines as they were drawn. As the people of Memphis once embellished with sphinxes and pyramids the fine land of Egypt, so Seikichi now adorned the pure skin of this young girl. It was as if the tattooer’s very spirit entered into the design, and each injected drop of vermilion was like a drop of his own blood penetrating the girl’s body.