As she watched Suga’s mother telling Kin all this in her own presence and with such näive confidence in her, Tomo resolved in her own mind that she would never let harm come to Suga. She must be responsible for everything, even the future security of the woman who was presumably to deprive her of her husband’s love. Occasionally she would smile a lonely smile at the irony of her lot. At such times she could slip free of the bonds in which she was entangled and, however briefly, survey herself and her husband, Suga and Etsuko, with the same dispassionate gaze.

One morning two or three days after the Bon Festival, Tomo’s party with the addition of Suga left the Kusumi’s in four rickshaws.

Suga in her purple splash-patterned kimono of thin silk with its sash of heavy Hakata silk rode the first part of the way in the same rickshaw as Etsuko, who was reluctant to be separated from her.

‘The young lady’s taken a fancy to her, too,’ said Kin as she and her daughter went back to the living room after seeing off the rickshaw with its burden that was so like two colorful blossoms, one large and one small. ‘That’s something to be thankful for.’

She took off the apron she had been wearing and glanced at her daughter as she folded it up. Toshi walked over to the bow window, her bad leg dragging as she went.

‘That Mr. Shirakawa is a wicked man, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘I felt so sorry for all three of them – the mistress and the young lady, and Suga – that I cried …’

She dabbed at the corner of her eyes with her fingers as she tucked the stitching stand between her knees.

Green Grapes

At one time it had been the inn where visiting feudal lords always stayed. Even today the Kamisuya, where two guests sat facing each other across a go board by the balcony of a second-story room whose green bamboo blinds were rolled up to let in a cool breeze, was the best inn in Utsunomiya and the destination of all prominent visitors. In the better of the two seats sat Yukitomo Shirakawa, Chief Secretary at the prefectural office of the neighboring prefecture of Fukushima. His companion was a minor official called Ōno who had come in attendance on him. Shirakawa was the right-hand man of Michiaki Kawashima, one of the driving forces behind the government of the day and a man so feared in his own prefecture that mere mention of the ‘demon governor,’ it was said, was enough to silence a crying child. He was a leader too in the governor’s drive to wipe out the civil rights movement that had begun to rear its head so frequently of late.