Finding herself, a newcomer, providing no service but treated instead as a guest, Suga was less pleased than perplexed that clothes should be made for her in this way. But at such times the gleam in Shirakawa’s eyes that was like a light moving on dark waters would grow stronger. ‘Suga,’ he would say, a pink flush suffusing his thin cheeks as it did when he was angry, his eyes gleaming with an unnaturally bright light, ‘put this purple over your shoulder and stand there with the spotted sash against it to see how they match.’

She would slip the half-finished kimono over her shoulders timidly, half uncomfortably yet with the practiced air of a tradesman’s daughter who was used to wearing dancing costume, then she would hold the spotted sash round it at the front and stand there, as vivid and attractive as a woman in one of Kobayashi Kiyochika’s brightly colored portraits. The maids and the man from Marui’s who sat watching would give an involuntary exclamation of admiration. Most delighted of them all, Etsuko would go over to stand by Suga and exclaim, ‘Oh, it’s so pretty!’ Fair-skinned and slender as a young crane, Etsuko looked more refined than ever when she stood by the unopened peony that was Suga. It was yet another source of satisfaction to Shirakawa.

‘A pattern of vetch on a white ground will be best for Etsuko,’ he would say, turning round to Tomo, ‘with a satin sash to go with it.’

Shirakawa’s unaccustomed animation and Suga’s complete lack of bashfulness towards him despite her timidity told Tomo that so far he had made no physical advances towards her. In order to possess himself of a girl more than twenty years his junior even Shirakawa, it seemed, was obliged to employ a technique completely different from when he made advances to geishas or maids. To clothe a girl from a poor family in the most luxurious garments possible was in itself almost certainly a means of winning Suga’s heart. Watching him from the corner of her eye, Tomo remembered the husband who had once so carefully selected hair ornaments, neckbands and the like and sent them home to the young wife whom he had left behind in the country.

Shirakawa’s promise to take Suga to the theater had not been empty, and almost every night the faces of the Shirakawa family – Shirakawa himself with Tomo, Etsuko, Suga and two or three maids – were to be seen in the best seats at Fukushima’s one and only theater, the Chitose-za.