‘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.

It may have been a relic from the unsettled days of their younger years, when Shirakawa was a government official obliged to move about the provinces from assignment to assignment and they had had to carry about with them the urn containing the ashes of his mother, who had died in the snow country where he was working at the time. Whatever the case, the sliding doors next to the cupboard containing the small shrine concealed a black lacquer safe emblazoned with the family crest in gold, and it was Tomo’s custom to carry out all business and calculations relating to rents on houses and land in this Buddhist retreat tucked away at the back of the house. They had an acre or so each of land in Shiba, Nihonbashi, and Shitaya, of which some seventy percent was built on. The land rents and other dues came to quite a large figure, but defaulters were correspondingly common, and sometimes it was necessary to have recourse to the courts in order to reach a settlement. Supervision was no easy task. Each estate had its agent, but to leave everything to them invariably meant oversights, so once a month without fail Tomo would herself go to hear from the agents a detailed account of the state of the leased land and houses.

The man who now sat facing Tomo across the writing table in front of the safe was not an agent but Tomeji Iwamoto, who functioned as a kind of secretary for her. The son of Tomo’s elder sister by a different mother, he had come to Tokyo from Kumamoto a few years earlier, counting on Shirakawa to find him a job.