‘Suga – what’s happened to your eyelids?’

Etsuko spoke with no special significance but Suga blushed and pressed a hand to her eyes as though dazzled by the light. She felt as if Etsuko had peered in on the unforeseen events of the previous night. She harbored no resentment towards Shirakawa; in fact, lately she had begun to sense in him an indulgence, an inexhaustible dependability, for which she had hungered ever since leaving her father and mother. But her astonishment and shame remained; Suga had no feeling of any physical or mental flowering, only a kind of inner wilting with a sorrowful sense of something damaged, something destroyed. She hated even her parents, who had surely meant this when they told her never to go against her master’s wishes. Something indefinable in her appearance began to betray the painful awareness that her body had been sold for money.

As Suga looked up with eyes full of melancholy, Etsuko’s pale, oval face, so like Shirakawa’s, seemed so fresh and fair that it might almost have soared away into the sky at any moment; she felt a vague enmity, too, but it was too ill-defined for Suga herself to distinguish it as such. At Etsuko’s insistence she made all kinds of figures for her by folding the varicolored papers, all the while remembering with sadness, as though from a distant past, the innocent girl who only yesterday had been content to engage with Etsuko in artless pastimes such as these.

Once he had truly taken possession of her, Shirakawa’s infatuation for Suga began to assume the proportions of an obsession. There was little he did not know concerning the other sex, whether geishas or ordinary women, but the fatherly affection that he felt for this unspoiled girl so far removed in age from himself rejuvenated him as though he had married again, and bathed his days in a glow of contentment. On a holiday, he went with Suga to the hot springs at Iizaka, taking with him his immediate subordinates and the proprietress of a restaurant he frequented. Here, Suga found herself addressed as ‘the mistress’ and free to express herself to Shirakawa without constraint, so that each time she returned from a visit to the hot springs her beauty, like a great peony unfolding its many petals, seemed to grow a little more full-blown and voluptuous until finally she was no longer recognizable as the maid of earlier days, remarkable for the charming timidity.

As his infatuation for Suga developed, Shirakawa no longer even set foot in Tomo’s room, nor finally could Tomo herself bear any more the uncertainty of putting out her husband’s quilts and waiting unheeded and alone.