little creature. So only can it gain strength for its life work.”
Because I was having the training and studies of a boy was one of the reasons my family got in the habit of calling me Etsu-bo, the termination bo being used for a boy’s name, as ko is for a girl’s. But my lessons were not confined to those for a boy. I also learned all the domestic accomplishments taught my sisters—sewing, weaving, embroidery, cooking, flower-arranging, and the complicated etiquette of ceremonial tea.
Nevertheless my life was not all lessons. I spent many happy hours in play. With the conventional order of old Japan, we children had certain games for each season—the warm, damp days of early spring, the twilight evenings of summer, the crisp, fragrant harvest time, or the clear, cold, snow-shoe days of winter. And I believe I enjoyed every game we ever played—from the simple winter-evening pastime of throwing a threaded needle at a pile of rice-cakes, to see how many each of us could gather on her string, to the exciting memory contests with our various games of poem cards.
We had boisterous games, too, in which a group—all girls, of course—would gather in some large garden or on a quiet street where the houses were hemmed in behind hedges of bamboo and evergreen. Then we would race and whirl in “The Fox Woman from the Mountain” or “Hunting for Hidden Treasure”; we would shout and scream as we tottered around on stilts in the forbidden boy-game of “Riding the High-stepping Bamboo Horse” or the hopping game of “The One-legged Cripples.”
But no outdoor play of our short summers nor any indoor game of our long winters was so dear to me as were stories. The servants knew numberless priest tales and odd jingles that had come down by word of mouth from past generations, and Ishi, who had the best memory and
