The Samurai's Daughter by Lesley Downer

school.’
    Next day Taka was up well before dawn. The sky was streaked with pink and the air was fresh when she came out of the house and saw Nobu standing beside the rickshaw, holding her books and lacquered lunch box. Washed and shaved and with his hair oiled into a topknot, wearing the striped robe and narrow sash her mother had given him, he looked really distinguished. All the girls at school had footmen to carry their books but theirs were stunted, bandy-legged Edo lads, like Gonsuké, the rickshaw boy. None was handsome like Nobu. As Taka climbed in and they set off, rattling and bouncing along, she looked back at Nobu running behind in the dust. It seemed terrible that he would never have the chance to go to school himself.
    The school Taka went to was in a building that had been a Buddhist temple, with dark corridors running alongside musty rooms where girls sat on their knees at low desks, studying in the faint light that glimmered through the paper shoji screens.
    Most girls, as Taka’s mother regularly reminded her, were just taught the basic alphabet and a few
kanji
characters and had to learn by heart books such as
The Greater Learning for Women, The Classic of Filial Piety
and
One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets
before being sent off to needlework school at the age of thirteen to learn to make clothes. The theory was that girls were simple-minded creatures, weak of body and weak of mind, who didn’t need to be able to read or write much more than the slip to tell the dyer how to colour the yarn. But Taka’s was a school for the daughters of the elite. They had to learn seven to eight thousand
kanji
characters so that they would be fully literate. They studied poetry-writing, arithmetic and the use of the abacus, memorized the Confucian and other classics and even learned English, all subjects usually restricted to boys.
    Taka knew how privileged she was to be going to such a special school. But as the rickshaw boy lowered the shafts she felt a rising sense of panic, as she did every day. She went in, turned her wooden nameplate face up, helped unstack the desks and took her place with her writing box in front of her, but she still had a gnawing sense of foreboding.
    Most of the girls were of samurai stock, the daughters of her father’s colleagues. While Taka had spent her early years learning to be a geisha, they had been studying reading and writing and samurai arts like horse-riding and sparring with the halberd, the women’s weapon. Taka had soon discovered that singing and dancing were skills practised by vulgar townswomen or, worse still, geishas, who were so low class they didn’t even feature in the class system. Such skills were certainly not practised by well-brought-up samurai girls, who wouldn’t have dreamed of behaving like performing monkeys, which was what they considered entertainers to be. Taka had done all she could to lose her Kyoto accent and geisha ways, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew perfectly well that her mother was a geisha.
    While her father, the famous General Kitaoka, had been in town, no one had said a word, added to which Haru was so cool and dignified that no one would have dared question her samurai credentials. But now everything had changed. Taka had thought that, with Haru gone, she might make friends at school, but she was too different from the others.
    The day began with morning recitation, in which the girls all read aloud at the tops of their voices. They all read different passages, whatever they were working on, so there was quite a noise. Then came writing practice. The teacher brushed a character for Taka and she wrote it again and again till she’d mastered it, then moved on to the next. Her hands were soon covered in ink.
    That day they started on a classic text. The others all read confidently but when it came to Taka’s turn she was stumbling.
    Later, as they collected their books to go home and ran up and down, sweeping the classroom, the