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One September evening, soon after dusk, a small group of Komuso monks approached the enterance of the rice brokerage of Yamamoto and begged for alms.[image]
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| Money or goods given as charity to the poor. |
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| They wore the traditional basketlike hats from under which they played their flutes so plaintively that the gatekeeper, an emotional man, it is said later, could hardly keep from weeping.[image] |
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| When the clerks found the gatekeeper the next day trussed up like a chicken on a spit, he told how the basket priests, who seemed so gentle outside the door, had roughly overpowered him once they were within.[image] |
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| "He said there was something cynical about her expresion," Hanji explained.[image] |
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| Expressing jaded or scornful skepticism or negativity: cynical laughter. |
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She might even feel that he had repaid some of his terrible debt from being born and surviving, bleeding their sparse lives like a leech on a starving ox.[image]
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| He packed a few pieces of clothing and stealthily, made his way out the front of the shop.[image] |
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| The act of moving secretly. |
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| Even seventy years ago when Chikamatsu was alive, the rich merchants must have hounded the poor, goading them to theivery and death.[image] |
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| "I'm sorry," Jiro said contritely,"but I have an urgent business with Okada the chanter. I was told I could see him at his next period."[image] |
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| In a contrite manner; with humble sorrow; with penitence. |
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| The audience was applauding boiserously.[image] |
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| roughly; with noisy energy or activity. |
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| Beside him the samisen player stummed the ominous chords that hinted to the audience the doom toward the hero was inexorably moving[image]. |
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Definition
| without the possibility of stopping or prevention. |
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