О бедном Хиторо замолвите слово

[gleb]

These marriages are overtly commercial transactions, such as the case of one Osaka-based Japanese customer, Hitoro, who selected his wife from photo albums and paid $20,000. When he arrived in Shanghai, the potential bride demanded an extra $5,000, which Hitoro refused to pay. The brokers, anxious to seal the deal, scrambled and, within a day, found another woman willing to marry a stranger with whom she could not even converse. Although Hitoro had hoped they might use English as a lingua franca, the new bride, a retired prostitute, claimed that she knew only two English phrases: "I love you" and "I am a virgin."