It happened when I was sixteen years old. One day, I was playing hide-and-seek during recess with my temple sewing friends. I was trying to hide myself in a crawl space with my friend A-san. There we saw something. Way back deep in the dim light of that narrow space under the floor, we saw something lying on its side. The two of us came flying out from under the deck, screaming our heads off.

A young temple acolyte, his curiousity piqued by our cries, came bursting upon the scene. That is to say, whether he had come to it by intuition or by a playful imagination, he began to broadcast that a pair of lovers must have been enjoying a “nooner” under that temple. This caused a lot of unbearable troubles. To make matters worse, this was perfect grist for the hungry village rumor mill. Middle aged men and women in the village became very suspicious. “Could it be that my own wif… with other me…?”

That’s how it was every day. Starting early in the morning, adult men came barging into my house and pumping me for what I knew. As many as ten people would come on a busy day. Why, even though I had been screaming along with A-san, was I the only one targeted? A-san was the daughter of landowners and lived with her parents. They probably took a pay-off to keep their mouths shut. So villagers would barge into my house, the home of a tenant-farming mother and her fatherless daughter. Although I told it the way it happened, these people didn’t believe me.