At this point it occurred to Tomo that she should talk to Shirakawa about the enormous sum of money with which he had entrusted her to pay for the search. She had used five hundred yen to pay Suga’s family and buy her new clothes; before finding Suga she had also spent money engaging apprentice geishas and in interviewing via intermediaries several girls of non-professional or semi-professional standing; but even after this more than one half of the money her husband had given her still remained in her keeping. She had intended to return it to Shirakawa immediately she arrived at the inn. Once more now she tried to turn to the subject yet for some reason the words seemed suddenly to stick in her throat and nothing came to her lips. She flushed in a kind of panic, but Shirakawa, who seemed to notice nothing, clapped his hands to summon Ōno.

‘Ōno – let’s finish the game we started. We’ll be up early tomorrow morning, so Tomo had better go to bed early downstairs.’

Tomo got up to go, with a sidelong view as she did so of Ōno’s short frame straining over the go board that he was carrying out to the center of the room. She was thirty, and the fact that her husband, whose eyes tonight had an intensity that gave him a new appeal, should make no move towards her tormented her spiritually and physically all the more after a separation of three months. Whether the torment that seethed within her was love or hatred she could not tell, but a calm determination not to leave the crucible of doubt gave her features the tranquillity of a Nō mask in her unhurried progress along the corridor.

To Suga’s eyes, reared as she was in Tokyo, the streets of Fukushima were half deserted; even the shelves of the shops on the main streets looked half empty and uninviting. Shirakawa’s official residence was at a place called Yanagi Koji some six hundred yards from the prefectural office. It was a former samurai’s residence with a long, roofed gateway, and its verandas, high like those of a temple, skirted large rooms each ten or twelve tatami mats in size. In the back garden, beyond the ever-open sliding doors of the back rooms, an orchard of persimmon, apple, and pear trees and grapevines grew in a profusion of green next to a field of vegetables.

The first shock awaiting Tomo on her return to their residence was a new wing to the house, three rooms emitting a fragrance of new cedarwood and entirely surrounded by a veranda, that stood in a sunny location facing south just in front of the vines in the orchard. The rooms were connected to the main building of the house by a covered passageway.