was whispered about by malicious tongues and darted with pointed fingers. Deep anger swelled within his hardened heart, and with the cruelty of his punishing words and the threat of his sword he learned of the affair. One of his wife’s servants, namely a foolish youth in his early years, had relations with his favorite concubine. After the discovery of their betrayal, the samurai became enraged and without the recourse to judgment in the Ten Courts of the Great Myoo, he fouled his sword with their blood. Then he nailed their mutilated bodies to a wooden plank, and threw them into the nearby river that coursed to the outland sea.
His continual fear of discovery to the murders gradually increased, and, in turn, caused him to have a deep hatred for his wife, Oiwa. “On the name of the great Dhyana, the great warrior god, it was her cursed servant that forced me to bloody the blade of my sword,” he reasoned the cause for his hatred. She suffered in his hands with cruel beatings, harsh words; and even being driven from the house on stormy days or cold nights, but Tsuki-Yomi, the God of the Moon, and Amateseru, the Goddess of the Sun, shielded her in their rays and protected her from the cold and wind.
But, the cruelest punishment suffered by Oiwa, was the love of Yotsu-ya turned from her to the granddaughter of his neighbor, who returned his love and wanted to become his wife. Oiwa had to endure the daily torture of the painful suffering of love’s betrayal, which she bore in the silence of her tongue. Finally the thin thread of hope broke and she became distraught which sickened her in despair.
As the days past, her illness increased in its misery of pain, weakening the very fabric of her thinning body. Soon she became bedridden and