“This is your mother.”

Asako felt influences floating around her.  Her mind was in pain, straining to remember something which seemed to be not wholly forgotten.

Just at this moment Mrs. Fujinami arrived, carrying an old photograph album and a roll of silk.  Her appearance was so opportune that any one less innocent than Asako might have suspected that the scene had been rehearsed.  In the hush and charm of that little chamber of the spirits, the face of the elder woman looked soft and sweet.  She opened the volume at the middle, and pushed it in front of Asako.

She saw the photograph of a Japanese girl seated in a chair with a man standing at her side, with one hand resting on the chair back.  Her father’s photograph she recognised at once, the broad forehead, the deep eyes, the aquiline nose, the high cheek bones, and the thin, angry sarcastic lips; not a typically Japanese face, but a type recurrent throughout our over-educated world, cultured, desperate and stricken.  Asako had very little in common with her father; for his character had been moulded or warped by two powerful agencies, his intellect and his disease; and it was well for his daughter that she had escaped this dire inheritance.  But never before had she seen her mother’s face.  Sometimes she had wondered who and what her mother had been; what she had thought of as her baby grew within her; and with what regrets she had exchanged her life for her child’s.  More often she had considered herself as a being without a mother, a fairy’s child, brought into this world on a sunbeam or born from a flower.

Now she saw the face which had reflected pain and death for her.  It was impassive, doll-like and very young, pure oval in outline, but lacking in expression.  The smallness of the mouth was the most characteristic feature, but it was not alive with smiles like her daughter’s.  It was pinched and constrained, with the lower lips drawn in.

The photograph was clearly a wedding souvenir.  She wore the black kimono of a bride, and the multiple skirts.  A kind of little pocket-book with silver charms dangling from it, an ancient marriage symbol, was thrust into the opening at her breast.  Her head was covered with a curious white cap like the “luggage” of Christmas crackers.  She was seated rigidly at the edge of her uncomfortable chair; and her personality seemed to be overpowered by the solemnity of the occasion.

“Did she love him,” her daughter wondered, “as I love Geoffrey?”

Through Sadako’s interpretation Mrs. Fujinami explained that Asako’s mother’s name had been Yamagata Haruko (Spring child).  Her father had been a samurai in the old two-sworded days.  The photograph was not very like her.  It was too serious.

“Like you,” said the elder woman, “she was always laughing and happy.  My husband’s father used to call her the Semi (the cicada), because she was always singing her little song.  She was chosen for your father because he was so sad and wrathful.  They thought that she would make him more gentle.  But she died; and then he became more sad than before.”