‘I wonder how it can get so dusty when I clean the place every day,’ said Kin, smoothing out her kimono sleeves that had been tied up for housework and fastidiously dusting off the black satin collar of her kimono with her hand. She did not mention it to her daughter, but she was secretly proud of having removed every speck of dust from the room, of having mounted a pair of steps even, so as to wipe the last traces of dust from the openwork panel over the lintel between the rooms and from the groove above the lintel itself.

‘I wonder what Mrs. Shirakawa’s coming up to Tokyo for,’ said Toshi, who was apparently less interested in the cleaning than her mother and was rubbing her eyes, which were tired from sewing, with her fingertips.

‘What, exactly, are you hinting at?’ Kin frowned suspiciously at her daughter. The mother was still youthful in outlook and the daughter had been prevented by sickness from marrying until it was too late, so that by now they were used to talking to each other more as sisters than as parent and child. Occasionally, even, Toshi seemed more elderly in her ideas than her mother.

‘She said in her letter, didn’t she, she was coming to Tokyo to do some sightseeing?’

‘Even so, I wonder.’ Toshi tilted her head portentously to one side. ‘I wonder whether a young married woman like her really has time to come up to Tokyo just to do the sights. Mr. Shirakawa’s a chief secretary or something at the prefectural office, isn’t he? Only just below the governor himself …’

‘That’s right. They say he’s a very influential man,’ said Kin, tapping her pipe on the edge of the brazier. ‘Yes, he’s certainly got on in the world. I never thought he’d do as well as that when he was working at the Tokyo City Hall and they lived next door to us. Not that he didn’t have all his wits about him even then.’

‘That’s just what I mean, Mother,’ said Toshi, as though urging her mother on. ‘It’s all too casual, somehow, for her to leave a husband who’s as busy as that and come up for a month or two of sightseeing, bringing her daughter and a maid and all. It isn’t as though her own family lived here.’

‘You’re right – she comes from Kumamoto, the same as Mr. Shirakawa himself. Even so, though …’ Kin looked hard into her daughter’s face as though the problem was beyond the grasp of her own imagination. ‘Surely they couldn’t be thinking of a divorce? There was no hint of such a thing in Mr. Shirakawa’s letter.’