Hanashima went off roaring with laughter, leaving Shirakawa almost speechless for a while. This state of deflation was totally unlike his usual self. The small groups of people about him did not matter: they might well have taken them for close friends, so hearty had Hanashima’s manner been. But what had happened to the Hanashima who as they took him under guard through the snow had cried out that he could not breathe because the ropes were too tight? In the ballroom, he could see the couples in their fine clothes, hands linked, like a stream of gay flowers as they glided to the strains of Western music over the parquet floor beneath the sparkling light of the gasoliers. Hanashima who had left him just now was already dancing happily, his arms about a beauty in an evening dress of purple satin that revealed her naked shoulders. The effect was to make Shirakawa feel oddly forlorn and isolated.

It was only four or five days previously that Superintendent-General Kawashima, a man not easily daunted, had said, his large heavy-lidded eyes creasing in a grim frown:

‘If we don’t get complete control within the next year or two, it’s all up with us. Personally, I don’t want to live to see that day come.’

Could it be that the demon superintendent, the man who had devoted all his energies to suppressing the popular campaign for civil rights, had come to realize that the new age rolling towards them like the sea at full tide was something against which no resistance was possible? Shirakawa could not avoid a sense of disheartenment at the crack he saw appearing in the disposition of this obdurate man who had once so blithely seized people’s homes in what amounted to daylight robbery, and pulled them down in order to make way for a prefectural road – the man who had happily tolerated the poisoning by mineral wastes of a whole area along the banks of the Watarase river so that the copper mine at Ashio might prosper – all this done in the name of loyalty to the state.

Today he had caught sight of Taisuke Itagaki, president of the Liberal Party, which probably meant that Hanashima had come in his party. At the thought of a national assembly being convened and of Unno and Hanashima winning seats in it, whence to carry on their championship of civil rights, Shirakawa, like it or not, could not avoid a sense that the days when he and other bureaucrats had reigned unchallenged were slipping into the past. Little by little, he felt himself menaced by an end similar to that which had overtaken any number of trusted followers of powerful figures in the not so distant past.