None of the other husbands in their family, she said, had got on in the world as Shirakawa had done, and Tomo should be grateful for her good fortune. It often happened that a man of ability took a concubine; at such times the wife should keep an even closer watch on herself so as not to lose her husband’s love. His behavior was perhaps indiscreet in a man who had two young children, but she must not let jealousy upset her judgment to the point of bringing harm on herself, much less on her children. For all its illegibility and its uneven characters traced in an ink that now ran dry in mid-stroke, now blotted the paper, the letter betrayed the painstaking care of a mother attempting to convey to her child the emotion in her heart. Tomo, as she read, seemed almost to hear her old mother talking to her, coaxing her as when she was a child, and the tears flowed freely – self-indulgent tears of a kind long forgotten, tears that by their very unfamiliarity brought home to her afresh the grimness of her present life. If feeling were set aside, her mother’s injunctions were one and all no more than the tattered remnants of an outdated code that Tomo had already seen through and been forced to cast aside. The only part of her mother’s letter that had any new message for Tomo’s heart was contained in the last four or five lines:

For this fleeting world is a hell of evil, full of suffering, where man’s shallow knowledge avails him nought and unawares he heaps sin on sin. Trust only, therefore, in the vow of the Lord Amida, morning and night forget not to invoke His name, and leave all else to Him … I should like to see you and talk to you more about the faith before I die. I hope sometime, if Yukitomo will give his permission, that you will come home.