By the time they arrived home from Enoshima, Miya had completely recovered her spirits. Her face beamed with its accustomed charm and she was at her most amusing as she told them how skillfully a fisherman at Chigo-ga-fuchi had dived into the sea to bring up abalones and turbos for them, or how at a souvenir shop Takao had coveted the biggest conch shell of all and had had it put to his tiny mouth to blow.

She even came to Tomo’s room and bowed meekly to the floor.

‘I’m sorry I lost my temper the other day,’ she said. ‘But I shan’t be causing you any more worry from now on …’

Yukitomo came as Tomo was bouncing Takao on her knee and himself broached the subject:

‘It seems Miya’s going to stay put. And I told her that we’d keep a firm hand on Michimasa for her.’

When Michimasa himself came home about ten days later, even he seemed to treat Miya with more amiability than before, and many times laughter was to be heard from their room when they were alone together. Yukitomo seemed to be pleased that the young couple were on such good terms.

Yet although the storm seemed more or less to have subsided, in Tomo’s mind there always remained, silly and ugly, a picture of Miya’s agitated face with its narrowed eyes as she had attacked her that day, a picture all the more vivid for the image of the charming, seemingly warmhearted girl that she had cherished until then.

On the night of the twenty-sixth day of the seventh month, according to an old tradition, good fortune would favor the first person to catch sight of the slender first-quarter moon rising in the late-night eastern sky, and it was the custom for large numbers of people to gather to await the moon on high places whence its rising was visible. As it rose, it was believed, three Buddhist deities – Amida, with his attendants Kannon and Seishi – were to be seen riding in its boat-shaped, luminous crescent.

The Shirakawas’ house looking out eastward over the sea was an ideal spot for awaiting the moon, and Yukitomo, with his love of gaiety and his fondness for using such occasions to hold lively drinking parties for relatives and friends or to organize games of chance for their amusement, had invited a dozen or more men and women to join him that night in two second-floor rooms thrown open for the purpose at the front of the house. Some were playing ‘flower cards,’ some played go, some as they gossiped were helping themselves liberally to the snacks provided with the saké; all of them were pleasurably excited at being able to participate without the slightest sense of guilt, on the pretext of awaiting the moonrise, in this kind of late-night frivolity.

Occasionally a guest would peer out at the dark sky as though suddenly remembering their ostensible aim, only to turn again to where the cards were being slapped in rapid succession on the tatami.