She seemed consequently old for her years. Though not a beauty, she was good-looking enough and more attentive than most women to her appearance, so that there was nothing particularly elderly about her, yet the innate strictness of disposition that made her take her responsibilities so seriously deprived her utterly of the ripe sensuality common in women of early middle age, and Shirakawa was astonished at times to find that a wife who in theory was ten years his junior should seem more like an elder sister. He was familiar of course with the fierce sensuality that burned with a low yet intense flame beneath the thick outer shell, and there were times when he himself felt a surge of warmth at the repressed passion he sensed within her, the passion that evoked so vividly the summer sun beating down mercilessly on the district of central Kyushu where she had been born and bred. One summer night, during the time when he was still working in Yamagata, a small snake had somehow got inside the mosquito net where he and his wife were sleeping. Wakening suddenly, he had felt something cold and wet at the front of his cotton night kimono. When he put his hand there, puzzled, the cold thing had started to slither away.

As he leapt to his feet with a cry, Tomo, startled, sat up sharply in bed. Drawing the lamp by the bed toward her and turning the light in his direction, she saw something like a slimy, shining black cord on her husband’s shoulder.

Shirakawa’s cry of ‘A snake!’ and the movement of her hand as it stretched out automatically and grasped the living cord came simultaneously.

Half falling over Shirakawa, she went out to the veranda and threw the snake through the open shutters into the garden. She was trembling, yet in the breast that thrust through the gaping front of her kimono and in her bared arm he had sensed a robust directness that was normally shut away out of sight.

‘Why did you throw it out? You should have let me kill it,’ he had complained, hating to give her the advantage. Even as he sensed the passionate nature within, he was beginning to find it difficult to see her as an object of desire. The strength that was a fraction greater than his own made him feel ill at ease in her presence.