Yukitomo Shirakawa had left government service shortly after the promulgation of the new Constitution. The sudden stroke that at the early age of fifty or so had taken the life of Superintendent-General Kawashima, whose friendship he had enjoyed for so many years, had been the direct cause of his retirement. There was in fact no one else among his superiors before whom the stubborn Yukitomo was prepared to bend his own will, nor had he, having succeeded during his years in office in accumulating more than ample wealth to take care of his old age, any mind to serve a second master. More than this, though, having himself been reared on the Confucian learning and martial skills considered appropriate in a lower-ranking samurai of the Hosokawa clan, he felt it beyond his ability to compete with the slowly mounting interest shown by the younger bureaucrats of the Meiji government in new knowledge brought back from the West, or with their insidious tendency to dabble in English and seek to implement Western-style legal theories.

It was unbearable to his old-fashioned pride that his subordinates should patronize him; and to stay in his present office without the backing of Kawashima might expose him to still direr ignominy. Worse still, if a national assembly were established and government by elected representatives came into force, it would follow that, sooner or later, political go-getters such as the Hanashima whom he had met at the Rokumeikan would come to the fore as representatives of the new regime. To avoid these perils that he saw ahead, Yukitomo had voluntarily withdrawn from official service. His purchase of a large house, once the residence of a foreigner, near Gotenyama in Shinagawa, was likewise aimed to give him a stronghold where he could live out his remaining years as he pleased with no one to impose on him. The mansion on its high eminence was his castle; it was also the burial mound of the ambitions that had been shattered in their prime.

Within his home, Shirakawa reigned as a despot, like the clan lords of the feudal age just past; neither his wife Tomo nor his concubines Suga and Yumi could have enjoyed a day’s peace of mind in this house had they not adapted themselves to his ostentatious, irascible temperament. Etsuko had been married the year before, to a bachelor of laws newly returned from studying in the West.

The only person in the household who could not fit in with Yukitomo was his son Michimasa.