So much for prudent measures. Even as I envied those who’d long since evacuated their families to the distant countryside, I, for lack of means and out of sheer indolence, remained forever dillydallying in Mitaka, until at last we were visited by a bomb and I lost all desire to stick it out any longer and moved the family to Kōfu. Now, sleeping without my air raid gear for the first time in nearly a hundred days, I was able to breathe a small sigh of relief, reflecting that, though further hardships undoubtedly lay ahead, for the time being at least there’d be no need to bundle up the children in the middle of a cold night and scramble into the bomb shelter.

We were now, however, a family who’d lost their own home, and this put us in an awkward position. I felt as though I’d been through my share of tribulations in life, but moving into someone else’s house with two small children in tow allowed me a taste of various distinctive new ones. My wife’s mother and father had both passed away, her elder sisters had married and left, and though the youngest of the siblings, a boy, was officially the head of the household, he had entered the navy right after graduating from university two or three years before, leaving the youngest sister, a girl of twenty-six or twenty-seven, alone in the house in Kōfu. She corresponded regularly with her brother, apparently consulting with him in minute detail about all the household affairs. I, of course, was the elder brother-in-law of these two, but, elder or not, I obviously had no voice in managing those affairs. Far from being in a position of authority, in fact, I’d been nothing but a burden to this family ever since my wife and I had married. I was not, in other words, a man to be relied upon. It was only natural, therefore, that I be excluded from consultation, and since I, for my part, had not the slightest interest in the family “assets” or whatever, this was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. But, being older than both the navy boy and his twenty-six or twenty-seven-year-old sister (twenty-eight, maybe—I never really checked), I was worried that we might unintentionally trample on their pride, or that they might be leery of my trying to outsmart them and get my hands on those assets—though surely no one would be that distrustful—and the truth is that I felt constantly on guard, as if I were moving through a lush, moss-covered garden, hopping gingerly from one stepping-stone to the next. I even thought how much easier it would be on all of us if only there were a still older man in the house, one who’d accumulated more experience in the real world.