ABSTRACT
THE terrace on the high hill with its ancient trees and its stone embankments and its deep well are not for me, the foreign guest within the Empire of Japan. The owner, who is a descendant of one of the most noble of Japan's families and whose wife has in her veins the blood of Emperors, intends to build there a home for his crippled sister, she who carries in her twisted body the curse that was pronounced by dying lips on the great family and on its unborn descendants more than three centuries ago.
