Indifferent to the scorn of these girls – unable indeed to tell even their faces apart – Takao at his grandfather’s home went on reading his books, sunk in a somber silence. But he was no bookworm infatuated with study for its own sake. Having a clear brain, he had only to take notes on his lectures and commit them roughly to memory to be able to face his examinations without any last-minute panic. Despite the studious label that he bore, most of the time he was in fact reading novels and plays, philosophical works and religious works, anything and everything as the fancy took him.

Even now the book that rested face down on his chest as he lay in the rattan chair was an English translation of a Greek tragedy, a small book with gold lettering embossed on its spine. He had just finished reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and was turning the story over in his mind. The boy of whom it was predicted while he was still in his mother’s womb that, as a man, he would kill his father and commit incest with his mother – the boy whose life was to have ended immediately at birth – miraculously survived, became king of an enemy state, attacked and defeated his father’s kingdom, slew his father, and took his mother as consort, only to discover too late the obscene fate that had been lying in wait for him. Revolted by the shameful sin so unwittingly committed, he put out his own eyes and, blind, wandered forth on a journey of expiation … In its exposition of the inevitability of fate and the unconscious karma that the individual piles up for himself, the tragedy was in the same vein as the Buddhist tale of Prince Ajase or the medieval legends of Christianity.

If a son nowadays should actually sleep with his mother, Takao reflected, the act would undoubtedly seem shameful even after one had stripped away the exaggerations of religion and accepted morality. Nonetheless, he felt a strange, desolate kind of loneliness at never even having known a mother of his own flesh and blood who might have been the object of such illicit desires.

Miya, the young and beautiful woman whom he had been taught to call Mother as soon as he could talk had soon moved to another house, and nothing in his upbringing had given him any love or respect whatsoever for his father Michimasa; so that although there existed persons whom he might call Father and Mother, in practice they were no more to him than a remotely related uncle and his wife. The coldness of his grandparents’ attitude to his father and the naked resentment that Michimasa showed for the love Yukitomo and Tomo lavished on him had combined with Michimasa’s own complete lack of any fatherly warmth to harden Takao’s heart abnormally in his boyhood.