Whenever Takao took over the purely Japanese-style room with its fine timbers and its elegant bamboo blinds hanging from the eaves, it would suddenly acquire a bleak, uncared-for air, with books in Japanese and English lying in untidy piles on the floor where they had overflowed from the bookshelves, and inkstains on the surface of the mahogany desk, yet even this was a source of no small joy to Tomo, who saw in it a sign of her eldest grandson’s love of learning. Having herself had barely enough education to enable her to read Chinese characters with the difficult pronounciations printed alongside, she bought Takao whatever books he wanted, unstintingly, from her own purse, without even bothering to consult his grandfather Yukitomo. When the books were carried to his room and she watched his face as he contentedly turned the new pages, she felt the same satisfaction as a mother watching her young daughters gazing happily at fine new clothes.

A woman who hated to admit defeat, she could never reconcile herself to the mortifying fact that Takao’s father Michimasa was a useless figure, apparently resembling neither her husband nor herself and living out his life in a kind of premature retirement. Yet his son Takao had shown a keen intelligence since early childhood and had taken in his stride the difficult hurdles of the entrance examinations that had finally got him to the best high school in the land, thereby restoring hope to Tomo and his grandfather, who had all but despaired of their descendants in direct line. For Yukitomo and Tomo it was a source of still greater joy that after the death of Michimasa’s first wife in childbirth Takao had left his father’s home and come to be raised under the wing of his grandfather and grandmother.

Brought up knowing no mother, in the home of a grandfather who wielded the absolute authority of a feudal lord, rocked in the arms of grandmother, grandfather’s mistress, nurse, and other women in turn, Takao today cast about him a gloomy air of unsociability that was emphasized by his face with its hollow cheeks and its thick-lensed spectacles, a face entirely lacking in the freshness natural to youth.

‘The young master’s a lot fonder of books than he is of people, isn’t he?’ the young maids who came from the livelier low-class areas of Tokyo would say. ‘I wonder what he sees in it, doing nothing but read books all day long, Japanese books, foreign books – like an old man, I call it …’