Smiling at each other happily the two girls plucked the grapes and conveyed them to their coral lips. Seen like this Suga, so big and grown-up when she was on her best behavior indoors, was still no more than an innocent playmate for Etsuko. Yet even as Tomo’s eyes watched the girl’s innocent, childlike features, smiling as though with a sense of release, and the relaxed movements of the limbs, the image of the yellow silk bedding in the closet just behind her bore down oppressively on her mind and refused to go away.

It was wicked. They were giving a girl still of an age to be playing with dolls to a man a full two dozen years her senior, an elderly roué who had already tasted all the world’s pleasures. The girl’s parents were a party to the whole proceedings. Even if they had not given her to be his mistress, they could never have got enough money to keep the family going without handing over her fresh young body in exchange. Her physical beauty was so dazzling that her unspoiled charms would have been destined to be ravished, sooner or later, if not here then somewhere else; even so, much as the throat rebels at the idea of swallowing in cold blood the flesh of a bird killed before one’s eyes, Tomo felt a vague sense of guilt, shared with her husband, for having gone to buy Suga. Why must she contribute to this cruelty that was little better than slave-trading?

As she watched Suga, with the cool skin that harbored an inner light like newly fallen snow and the dewy eyes that were always wide open yet had a misleadingly troubled look, Tomo would experience two unbidden and conflicting emotions: boundless pity as for a charming animal that was about to be led to the slaughter, and fixed hatred at the thought that eventually this innocent girl might turn into a devil that would devour her husband and sweep unchecked through the whole house.

The day following their return to Fukushima a man from Marui’s, the family drapers, began to appear in the living room almost every day, bringing with him great bundles of cloth. He usually came after Shirakawa was back from the prefectural office, so that the master could glance through the cloths of many colors spread about the spacious room and make the choice himself. He bought clothes for Tomo and Etsuko as well, but the real purpose of course was to buy a complete outfit for Suga.

As though buying a trousseau for a bride, he bought every kind of garment she was likely to need, from formal black kimonos with the family crest and a colored pattern around the bottom of the skirt only, to sashes of figured satin, fine gauze-like silks, linen, striped crepe, and even the long red undergarments.