Now his stepmother Miya lay at death’s door in the hospital with her eighth child in her womb, stricken by a worsening of her laryngeal tuberculosis. His grandfather and grandmother had told him the news yesterday when he arrived home from the hostel, but it had not, honestly speaking, been enough to upset him.

Miya of the fair-skinned, meltingly soft body, of the cheerful, slightly nasal manner of speaking, of the gay laughter and the merry jokes, had never made him feel the cheerless ill will usually associated with the word ‘stepmother,’ yet neither did it seem likely that her sudden departure from the face of the earth would bring about any change in his own life. If Miya’s death inspired any slight stirring of response in his heart, it was not caused by her decease as such but by the thought of how his stepsister Ruriko would grieve.

‘Could I be in love with Ruriko, or is it purely brotherly love?’ From King Oedipus’s incest with his mother, his mind strayed to thoughts of Ruriko, and he had a sudden sense of impasse as though a barrier had reared up directly before his face.

How could someone who had never lived with his father and stepmother or known the force of love himself feel the true love of an elder brother for the younger sister and brothers borne by that mother and raised in a different house? In fact, he behaved toward Kazuya, the next youngest brother now studying at Keiō, and towards Tomoya and Yoshihiko who came after him, with almost the same distant politeness as to his cousins at his aunt Etsuko’s; only to Ruriko, now in the fifth year at Toranomon Women’s College did he for some reason feel a natural impulse – though the impulse itself was perhaps suspicious – to draw closer. He knew that the girl’s striking beauty was an attraction for him. What he could not decide, however, was whether his beautiful stepsister attracted him in the same way as a beautiful flower or beautiful music or whether, as a female human being, she had sown in his lonely soul the seeds of first love.

Seized with an indefinable irritation, Takao shifted the book from his chest to the arm of the rattan chair with a gesture of unconscious force. As though fixing something unseen with his eyes he gazed up into the blue sky where the blazing rays of the sun had begun to yield to evening, then glanced casually at the lawn on the higher ground where the main building stood, and saw something that made him rise with a slight exclamation from his chair.

‘Ruriko, here?’ It was totally unexpected; Ruriko, whom he had assumed was at the hospital, was there, standing on the lawn in the garden.