Michimasa, who had been born to the Shirakawas while they were still at their home in the country following an early marriage, had been brought up in the home of an aunt and uncle at Kumamoto in Kyushu while Yukitomo had been moving from one official post to another in northeastern Honshu. By the time they had finally settled in Tokyo and fetched him to live with them again, he must have been already fifteen or sixteen. Yukitomo had tried to educate him: had put him in an English academy, had sent him to the newly founded Tokyo College; but though Michimasa had average powers of retention, his twisted disposition made it utterly impossible for him to strike up a close acquaintance with anybody. At academy and college alike, he was spurned by everyone with whom he might have made friends, so that in the end there was no alternative but to leave him to lead the life of a young recluse at home.

In the proud Yukitomo his warped offspring inspired not so much pity as an extreme antipathy. The contempt that such a lack of sympathetic qualities would have inspired in him even in a stranger became an unbearable sense of shame when its object was his own flesh and blood.

Even at home, he would not take his meals with Michimasa, who lived in the houseboy’s room with a nephew from the country who was staying with them until he got married.

‘A boy shouldn’t be treated as a man until he’s independent of his parents,’ Yukitomo said.

For Tomo, it was a double anguish. Suga and Yumi, half servant though they were, were living openly in the master’s room with him, while the son and heir Michimasa lived in the houseboy’s room with its tatami yellowed with age, where the sight of him sitting opposite their nephew Seizō, shoveling rice greedily into his mouth with chopsticks grasped clumsily in his fist, filled her with such despair that she wanted to cover her eyes. On the other hand, whenever Michimasa came into a room where Yukitomo was present, his father’s eyes would take on a hard glint and dwell as though with unbearable loathing on Michimasa’s clumsy, noisy movements and his face, which with its lumpish forehead and large nose was like one of the grotesque masks used in ancient court dances. Tomo, who at the best of times was forever on the lookout for any change in Yukitomo’s mood, would become still more nervous when Michimasa was there, on tenterhooks lest he should say something stupid that would anger his father yet again.