She had been saddened during the past few years to see Takao, whom she had held in her arms as a baby and on whom as he grew up she had lavished all her love, growing visibly more distant. It might be that the care with which Tomo had married off Ruriko to a bank employee in the Kansai area not long after she left women’s college had, by depriving him of what promised to be his first love, inflicted on him a wound of which he could not speak. Although he knew that such a love for his half-sister could come to nothing, the unnecessary haste with which his grandmother had got Ruriko married had, indeed, taken him aback with the sharpness of her insight into his hidden feelings, and the shock of having been caught off his guard had gradually stripped his attitude to her of its easy confidence. A vague sense of revulsion towards Tomo’s acuity took root in him. While he ceased trying to have his own way with her, he also grew visibly impatient with the playful digs at his weaknesses that were her way of showing love, and thrust her away from him.

Tomo realized that in exchange for her success in putting Ruriko, willy-nilly, beyond the reach of Takao’s affections she had lost the old frankness with which he had always bared his feelings to her. It was sad, but it could not be helped. However much she loved Takao it was obvious that Ruriko was one thing he could not have. She had seen too much immorality and license in Yukitomo’s life to tolerate the idea of its affecting her beloved grandson, however wary he might become of her.

Yet why, she asked herself, should she be obliged to spend all her life entangled with such distasteful affairs? Why should things that she wished no part in happen, or threaten to happen, among those she was closest to and loved the most. It was a problem that admitted of no solution under any theories that her mind could conceive. Some power, outside herself, had given life to her and determined the course that she should take. Finally, of late, Tomo had begun to suspect that it was indeed a matter of inexorable destiny, to sense as a reality the existence of something stronger and more binding still than the code of human conduct she had guarded so stubbornly.

‘Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu …’ Effortlessly the muttered invocation of the Buddha found its way to Tomo’s lips; sometimes it went on and on unconsciously with an intensity that made them burn.

By the time she alighted from the streetcar at the stop nearest to home the confining membrane of gray sky had broken and a fine snow like cotton fluff had begun to sift down.

‘So it is going to snow,’ Tomo muttered to herself as she crossed the streetcar tracks on legs so heavy that her clogs seemed to cling to the road at each step and her breath escaped from her body in heavy gasps.