Whether she had heard correctly or not, Miya suddenly shrank into herself and gave a small groan. A ripple of what could have been either physical pain or sorrow passed across her face. She herself did not know whether Yoshihiko was Michimasa’s son or Yukitomo’s. Her desperate attempt to make Yukitomo believe he was his own child had been a ruse to attach his love more closely to herself than to Suga. Even now, she still did not realize that she was to die. But in her body now that it lay near death, drained of all material and sexual desires, the spirit had unconsciously and unaccountably begun to make itself felt. That she had passed off Yoshihiko on Yukitomo as his own child was a thorn nagging at her flesh. She would have liked to tell him; but now that they were alone together she knew that by its very nature the thing could not be confessed. The anguish that shrouded her face came from the pain of having to lock away the secret within herself for all eternity.

At the hospital around dusk on the fifth day following this meeting, Miya breathed her last. Her body was transferred to the main house at Gotenyama, where the whole establishment was given over to an ostentatious wake that lasted two nights and was followed by an imposing funeral at a temple in Azabu.

‘It’s not as though a wife or an heir had died. It’s too impressive for a mere daughter-in-law. I’d wager that Mr. Shirakawa intended it as a rehearsal for his own funeral,’ said the close acquaintances and tradespeople who came to the house.

Michimasa showed little sign of missing the wife who had borne him seven children in rapid succession, and continued as ever to amuse himself at the theater, the cinema, and other such places.

‘Miya had too much to say for herself; next time I want a well-behaved woman, the kind that will bow and scrape a little,’ he would say whenever the question of a successor arose.

Even with nurses and maids, it would be impossible for a widower to direct the upbringing of so many children unaided. Miya had been dead for barely half a year before Tomo was obliged to concern herself with finding a third wife for Michimasa. On one occasion before Michimasa’s first marriage, as she was consulting a fortuneteller concerning compatibility and such matters, she had been told that her son’s horoscope foretold trouble with women, and had thought to herself wryly that Michimasa scarcely had enough spirit to suffer in that particular way, but it occurred to her now that to be preceded to the grave by two wives was undoubtedly ‘trouble with women’ of a kind.