Forgetting even to bow my head in reply, I gazed speechlessly out at the garden for some time. My eyes felt hot. I told myself I’d make this woman a devoted and dutiful son-in-law.

When I left, the young lady accompanied me to the bus stop. As we walked along, I said, “Well, what do you think? Shall we continue the relationship a while longer?” Sheer affectation.

“No,” she said, laughing, “I’ve had enough.”

“Aren’t there any questions you want to ask me?” I said. A confirmed fool.

“Yes.”

I was resolved to answer with the plain truth any question she might choose to ask.

“Has snow fallen on Mount Fuji yet?”

That threw me.

“Yes, it has. On the summit . . .” My words trailed off as I glanced up and spotted Fuji before us. It gave me an odd feeling. “What the hell? You can see Fuji from Kōfu. You trying to make a fool of me?” I was suddenly speaking like a hoodlum. “That was a stupid question. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

She looked down at the ground and giggled. “But you’re staying at Misaka Pass, so I thought it wouldn’t do not to ask about Fuji.”

Strange girl, I thought.

When I got back from Kōfu, I found that my shoulders were so stiff I could hardly breathe.

“You know, you’re lucky, Missus. Misaka Pass is a pretty good place after all. It’s like coming back home.”

After dinner, the proprietress and her little sister took turns pounding on my shoulders. The woman’s fists were hard and penetrating, but the girl’s were soft and had little effect. Harder, harder, I kept saying, until at last she got a stick of firewood and whacked on my shoulders with that. That’s what it took to relieve the tension, so keyed up and intent on my purpose had I been in Kōfu.

For two or three days after that I was distracted and had little will to work; I sat at my desk and scribbled aimlessly, smoked seven or eight packs of Golden Bat cigarettes, lay around doing nothing, sang “Even a Diamond, Unpolished” to myself over and over, and didn’t write so much as a page of the novel I’d been working on.

“You haven’t been doing so well since you went to Kōfu, have you, sir?” One morning as I sat at the desk with my chin propped up on my hand, my eyes closed, turning all sorts of things over in my mind, the fifteen-year-old sister, who was wiping the floor in the alcove behind me, said these words with a tone of sincere regret, and a touch of bitterness.

Without turning to look at her, I said, “Is that so? I haven’t been doing so well, eh?”

“No, you haven’t,” she said, still wiping the floor. “The last two or three days you haven’t gotten any work done at all, have you? Every morning, you know, I gather up all the pages you’ve written and left lying around, and put them in order. I really enjoy doing that, and I’m glad when you’ve written a lot. I came up here last night to peek in and see how you were doing—did you know that? You were lying on your futon with the quilt pulled up over your head.”