“I’m pulling out hair, pulling out this woman’s hair, because I’m going to make wigs.”
The servant was disappointed at the unexpected ordinariness of her answer. And at the same time, the hatred he had felt before, mingled with a cold disdain, crept back into his heart again. And its manifestations probably transmitted themselves to the hag. For still holding in one hand the long hair she had pulled from the corpse’s head, she mumbled her case in the croaking voice of a toad.
To be sure, it might be wicked to pull hair from dead bodies, for all she knew. But these dead were mostly people who could well be treated in such a way. For instance, this woman from whose head she had just been pulling hair had cut snakes up into four-inch lengths and sold them for dried fish in the military camps. Had she not fallen prey to the epidemic and died, she might have been selling them yet. What was more, the samurai had found her dried fish tasty and bought them all up to eat with their rice. The hag did not find the woman’s conduct blameworthy. Since she must otherwise have