‘Tonight, too … the young mistress said she had a cold and went to the separate wing alone …’

Again Suga broke off. Yukitomo had excused himself a while ago; he had doubtless gone surreptitiously to join her there.

Tomo had a mental image of Michimasa’s eyes staring vacant and motionless from his smooth, pallid face as he played go upstairs with one of the guests, and a shudder raised goose pimples on her skin. Who could tell what dreadful things might occur should Michimasa get wind of what was happening? She was appalled at her own naïveté in assuming, despite her countless bitter experiences on account of Yukitomo’s lechery, that within himself he still maintained the same moral code as herself. Without so much as a second thought he had trampled into the forbidden territory of his own son’s marriage. For Yukitomo, no woman was anything more than a female of the species; and in that sense, of course, Miya must be a far more attractive female than either Suga or even Yumi … Nonetheless it was with a seething indignation quite different from the jealousy she had experienced when Yukitomo had first turned his affections to Suga and Yumi that Tomo now listened to Suga’s complaint. The feeling was equally remote from both marital love and marital hatred, a fierce wrath that stood up to Yukitomo, the ungovernable male, and took beneath its protective wing Suga, Yumi, and even the offending Miya herself.

‘Here it comes, here it comes …!’

‘There it is – look, the moon of the twenty-sixth night!’

A confused clamor of voices, a trampling of feet on the veranda upstairs. Tomo too looked out over the sea, where even from this downstairs room the slender crescent of the moon was visible like an upturned eyebrow emerging in a faint glow from the surface of the water. With a sense of wonder, Tomo recalled how she had been told as a child that the forms of Amida and his two divine attendants were visible to the faithful, borne upon that thin golden semicircle. Was it really nonsense, that the shining forms of the Trinity, riding on the rays of moonlight, should manifest themselves to men’s eyes? No – just occasionally, Tomo felt, it must be true, for the present world was too ugly, too full of sorrow. Yet as she gazed at the moon it was no Buddha-figure that emerged from its light, but two white butterflies fluttering close about each other in the pale-shining haze.

Purple Ribbon

The tradesmen and others who came to the house all said that the family Buddhist shrine was pitifully small for such a large establishment.