‘I don’t suppose there was,’ said Toshi. Her elbow rested on the covered end of the brazier, with her chin propped on her hand, and her eyes had a dreamy look as though gazing into the future. Even though Toshi was her own daughter, there were times when Kin was disturbed by the odd way that the crippled girl’s presentiments had of coming true. For a while she gazed at Toshi’s face with the air of one awaiting the utterance of a medium, but before long Toshi took her elbow off the brazier.

‘There’s no telling,’ she said.

It was an hour or so later that Tomo Shirakawa, accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter Etsuko and a maid, alighted from her rickshaw before the Kusumi’s house.

First they went to the hot bath that was waiting and removed the grime of their journey, then Tomo came back down to the sitting room to give them their presents: dried persimmons and Aizu lacquer ware, which she said were local products of Fukushima, as well as lengths of cloth in suitable patterns for both Kin and Toshi.

Sitting there in her striped kimono, with the dignified loose jacket of black silk crepe decorated with the family crests, her sloping shoulders on which the clothes sat so well held slightly back, Tomo had the typical air of an important official’s wife, an air acquired during the four or five years that Kin had not seen her. The breadth of her forehead and the generous spacing of her eyes and mouth about the well-shaped, somewhat fleshy nose saved her face from any suggestion of oversensitivity, but the eyes, narrow beneath the full, drooping eyelids, had an almost frustrated look, as though the lids were being used to screen off a whole variety of emotions that might have found expression there. It was this same heaviness of gaze, together with a certain formality of speech and manner, that had always made Kin, for one, sense a certain remoteness in Tomo, despite the cordiality that had developed during the two years or so that the Shirakawas had lived next door to them in Tokyo. There was no snobbishness, no unpleasantness, nothing one might censor; Kin, a typical Tokyo woman, would have expressed it by saying that Tomo ‘kept herself to herself.’ Yet now that her husband’s position was more important than in his younger days, this same unbending quality in Tomo gave her an undeniable air of distinction.

Etsuko, whose hair was still too short to be done up properly and was fastened in a child’s flat bun, was fascinated by the unfamiliar view of the river and could not keep her gaze off the barred window.

‘She’s getting to be a really beautiful girl,’ said Kin quite sincerely, so fair was Etsuko’s complexion and so fine her features with the well-shaped, aquiline nose.