The Dragon Painter

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Kano groaned again. "Oh, this foreign influence! It is the curse of modern Japan! Love of money is starting a dry rot in the land of the gods. Success, material power, money,--a...

For a long interval the two men sat in silence. Kano leaned forward from time to time, filling the small cup which Tatsu--half in revery it seemed--had once more drained. The ol...

She looked slowly about upon that which should have been commonplace and found the outlines alone to be unaltered. There were the hillock, the house, the thick hedge-lines squar...

The next messenger was an insect peddler, Katsuo Takanaka by name. It was the part of this youth to search daily among the bamboo stems and hillside grasses of Meguro for the mu...

Mata knew her idol and nursling better. Hints of character and of deep-sea passion had risen now and again to the surface of the girl's placid life. There were currents undernea...

The old servant had, of course, heard everything. Feigning now, for her own purposes, a soothing air of ignorance, she glided into the room, lifted the tiny tea-pot, shook it fr...

"I care not for your love, old Baba, old fiend, nor for your knife. Where did my Umè go? You grin like an old she-ape! Never, upon my mountains did I see so vicious a beast."

Tatsu was the first to move. The reaction of excitement was creeping upon him, drawing the sting from pain. He turned toward his visitor and began to study, with an impersonal c...

All methods were essayed,--the liquid, flowing line of the Chinese classics, Tosa's nervous, shattered lightning-strokes of painted motion, the soft, gray reveries of the great...

"A son!" Tatsu knew well what the old man meant. He lifted his eyes and stared out, mute, into the narrowing band of light. The old man drew his thin form very straight, moved a...