sea-wind, rising, blew destruction into further streets; and the
conflagration spread from street to street, and from district
into district, till nearly the whole of the city was consumed.
And this calamity, which occurred upon the eighteenth day of the
first month of the first year of Meireki (1655), is still
remembered in Tokyo as the Furisode-Kwaji,--the Great Fire of the
Long-sleeved Robe.


According to a story-book called Kibun-Daijin, the name of the girl
who caused the robe to be made was O-Same; and she was the daughter
of Hikoyemon, a wine-merchant of Hyakusho-machi, in the district of
Azabu. Because of her beauty she was also called Azabu-Komachi, or
the Komachi of Azabu.(1) The same book says that the temple of the
tradition was a Nichiren temple called Hon-myoji, in the district of
Hongo; and that the crest upon the robe was a kikyo-flower. But
there are many different versions of the story; and I distrust the
Kibun-Daijin because it asserts that the beautiful samurai was not
really a man, but a transformed dragon, or water-serpent, that used
to inhabit the lake at Uyeno,--Shinobazu-no-Ike.

1 After more than a thousand years, the name of Komachi, or Ono-no-
Komachi, is still celebrated in Japan. She was the most beautiful
woman of her time, and so great a poet that she could move heaven by
her verses, and cause rain to fall in time of drought. Many men
loved her in vain; and many are said to have died for love of her.
But misfortunes visited her when her youth had passed; and, after
having been reduced to the uttermost want, she became a beggar, and
died at last upon the public highway, near Kyoto. As it was thought
shameful to bury her in the foul rags found upon her, some poor