Things, however, didn’t go without incident. Her mother extended the ten days in Germany to nearly a month and a half, with hardly a word back to Tokyo, and when she finally did return to Japan she stayed with another sister of hers in Osaka. She never did come back home.

Neither she—the daughter—nor her father could understand what was going on. Until then, when there’d been marital difficulties, her mother had always been the patient one—so ploddingly patient, in fact, that she sometimes wondered if the woman had no imagination; family always came first, and the mother was selflessly devoted to her daughter. So when the mother didn’t come around, didn’t even make the effort to call, it was beyond their comprehension. They made phone calls to the aunt’s house in Osaka, repeatedly, but they could hardly get her to come to the phone, much less admit what her intentions were.

In mid-September, two months after returning to Japan, her mother made her intentions known. One day, out of the blue, she called home and told her husband, “You will be receiving the necessary papers for divorce. Please sign, seal, and send back to me.” Would she care to explain, her husband asked, what was the reason? “I’ve lost all love for you—in any way, shape, or form.” Oh? said her husband. Was there no room for discussion? “Sorry, none, absolutely none.”

Telephone negotiations dragged on for the next two or three months, but her mother did not back down an inch, and finally her father consented to the divorce. He was in no position to force the issue, his own track record being what it was, and anyway, he always tended to give in.

“All this came as a big shock,” she tells me. “But it wasn’t just the divorce. I’d imagined my parents splitting up many times, so I was already prepared for it psychologically. If the two of them had just plain divorced without all that funny business, I wouldn’t have gotten so upset. The problem wasn’t Mother dumping Father; Mother was dumping me, too. That’s what hurt.”

I nod.

“Up to that point, I’d always taken Mother’s side, and Mother would always stand by me. And yet here was Mother throwing me out with Father, like so much garbage, and not a word of explanation. It hit me so hard, I wasn’t able to forgive Mother for the longest time. I wrote her who knows how many letters asking her to set things straight, but she never answered my questions, never even said she wanted to see me.”