Every day, every night, she came face to face in the same house with the woman who might dislodge her from her position as wife, talking to her as though it were the most normal thing in the world. How could she believe that such a life was decent and correct? How could she respect or love the husband who in his conceit and self-indulgence saw nothing more in the self-sacrifice and burning passion of over a dozen years than the loyalty of a faithful servant? Such a husband was no object for her love, such a life no more than an ugly mockery. She stood on in desperation in this sterile wasteland, firmly clasping Etsuko’s tiny body to her, while she was mercilessly robbed of the husband she was to have served and the household whose mainstay she was to have been. She knew that to fall would mean never to rise again. The three-layered kimono with its family crests, the smooth servility of others, no longer helped her to live. She might have preferred, if she could, to shut her eyes to the present and return to the self that had trusted in Shirakawa’s love, undismayed in the face of countless betrayals; but a force that flowed unceasingly like a raging stream carried her on despite everything, allowing her only to gaze back with many a deep sigh to the land left far upstream.

To her household Tomo presented a more energetic front than ever; constantly she was on her guard never to show so much as a hair out of place. Far from fading into the background because of Shirakawa’s infatuation for Suga, she seemed to counter Suga’s growing beauty with such a sense of authority in her back and shoulders as she sat motionless in her room that even the maids and menservants who knew her so well would sometimes note it with a sense of surprise. Something forbidding emanated from her as she sat there without speaking, something that spurned all lies and deception and inspired more fear than did Shirakawa himself.

A letter in an untrained hand came for Tomo from her mother in the country. Though Tomo had told her nothing, a relative who had been staying at the home of someone who worked in the prefectural office and was connected with Shirakawa had spread the seeds of rumor on his return to Kyushu. Anguished at the thought of how Tomo must feel in the same house with a young concubine, her mother had laboriously spelled out the letter in her clumsy hand.