On the stage, seated before a faded yellowish-green mosquito net, Oiwa was nursing her baby, her face wasted in childbirth yet beautiful still. Bitterly she lamented her fate – her damaged health and the husband who had suddenly turned against her following the birth of the baby; in vain she longed while still alive to see her younger sister and give her the comb that her mother had left them. The husband, Iemon, who had been lured away by the girl next door, wished to get rid of Oiwa. Telling her that it would help her recover from the effects of childbirth, the girl’s family had given her a poison intended to ruin her looks and thereby ensure that Iemon did not have regrets at leaving her, and the unsuspecting Oiwa, not realizing the deception, had taken the medicine repeatedly with every sign of gratitude.

Tomo watched the scene with a choking sense of pain; time and again she shut her eyes tightly in an effort to overcome the emotions that welled up irresistibly within her. Oiwa’s fate, her uncomplicated trust in others, and her utter betrayal were all too familiar. Almost overinsistently, it seemed to Tomo, the play dwelt on the inevitable process whereby the love of a man and woman reached a peak of intensity only to cool off steadily into a kind of frozen hell. It was all too easy and too convincing to draw a parallel between Oume, who stole Iemon away, and Suga; between the cold but attractive Iemon and Shirakawa; between Oiwa, whose resentment at her cruel betrayal finally transformed her into a monstrous spirit of revenge, and herself. She watched as though spellbound those grotesque scenes in which the ghost of Oiwa took its powerful and protracted revenge. Etsuko, who at first had cried in terror and put her small hands half-jokingly over her face, had finally gone to sleep with her head pressed into Suga’s lap, and was still limp and heavy as Tomo lifted her into the rickshaw that came to take them home.

The cool breeze of a summer evening blew in through the flap of the rickshaw. Tomo’s eyes seemed to bore into Etsuko’s face with its small, regular, doll-like features as the girl slept innocently with her tiny bun of hair pressed against Tomo’s lap. Etsuko’s older brother Michimasa, who was living at the home of Tomo’s parents in the country, also came vividly to her mind. She must not become like Oiwa. Even though a madness many times the strength of Oiwa’s sought to possess her, she would hug Etsuko to her all the more fiercely as though the act were a prayer. For if she were to became mad, what would happen to the children?