I must be very tired, she thought. She normally disliked going by rickshaw but with her legs as they were today it was obviously impossible for her to climb the long, gentle slope that led home. She set off walking towards the point, at the corner where the slope joined the road with the streetcar tracks, at which rickshaws were usually to be found waiting for fares. But the snow must have found them customers already, for no rickshaws were to be seen, nor the rickshaw men with blankets round their shoulders, warming themselves by their fire.

However irritating it might be, there was no one to complain to. Resigning herself to the inevitable, Tomo slowly began to drag her reluctant legs up the gentle incline. There had been no rain for some days, and already the fine snow had begun to smudge the roadway with white and to powder the branches of the trees above the stone embankment bordering one side of the slope and the gray roof tiles of the small rows of shops that lined the other. The lamps that were just being lit shone orange on the snow and a smell of fish cooking for the evening meal mingled with the smoke that here and there drifted out from beneath the eaves.

The hand that held the umbrella was numbed by the snow, and the climb, lifting one foot laboriously after the other, was so wearying that many times she halted and took a deep breath. The small houses she saw before her each time she halted were an undistinguished collection of secondhand shops, grocers, general stores and the like, yet the orange light from their electric lamps had an infinite brightness, and the odors of cooking appealed to the senses with an ineffable richness and warmth that shook Tomo’s heart to the core. Happiness – a small-scale, endearing, harmonious happiness – surely dwelt here beneath the low-powered lamps in the tiny rooms of these houses. A small-scale happiness and a modest harmony: let a man cry out, let him rage, let him howl with grief with all the power of which he was capable, what more than these could he ever hope to gain in this life?

Tomo felt a sudden, futile despair at herself as she stood there in the road alone in the snow, loath to go on, with her gray shawl drawn up close about her neck and an open umbrella held in the hand that was frozen like ice. Everything that she had suffered for, worked for, and won within the restricted sphere of a life whose key she had for decades past entrusted to her wayward husband Yukitomo lay within the confines of that unfeeling, hard, and unassailable fortress summed up by the one word ‘family.’ No doubt, she had held her own in that small world. In a sense, all the strength of her life had gone into doing just that; but now in the light of the lamps of these small houses that so cheerlessly lined one side of the street she had suddenly seen the futility of that somehow artificial life on which she had lavished so much energy and wisdom.