‘But on the other hand I shall miss not having to worry about money. You were only fifteen when you became part of the family here, so you know even less about the world than I do, but when I think of the hard times our family had at the worst period, I sometimes feel scared to leave. I’m … well, I suppose I’m used to accepting things, and I’m strong even though I’m not heavily built, so I can manage somehow, but you never could. The master always says you’re like something fragile and breakable. He’s right – you’re all right wrapped up in your cocoon here, but one breath of the breeze outside and you’d be done for.’

‘I wouldn’t mind so much, if only I could feel I wanted to leave here.’

‘You can’t expect to. Not unless, say, there was someone you’d put up with any hardship for.’

‘But you’re leaving even so, aren’t you?’

‘I’m different. I’m being got rid of, rather than leaving … Look at the Mr. Iwamoto I’m marrying – he’s supposed to have a good head, but otherwise it’s hardly a match anybody need envy, is it?’

‘I envy you … I could die of envy.’

As she spoke, Suga put her arms round the lacquered body of the wooden pillow and pressed her face down on it. The violence of the movement startled Yumi all the more in that it came from one who was normally so frustratingly indirect in her speech and unforthcoming in her manner.

Suga could find no way to express the feelings seething within her. If she put them into words they threatened to run wild in curses of an ugliness startling even to herself, or in rambling, ill-formulated complaints. It was something that Yumi could never be made to understand. She felt it as a predestined fate looming heavily over her whole life.

Why, long ago, had her parents not sold her to be a geisha instead of selling her to this family? As a geisha she would no doubt have been more exposed to the buffetings of the outside world, but at least she would have become more resilient as a person than she was now, and even though she might have had a patron she would have walked a little more freely in the sun, beneath the clear blue sky, have been a little more free to get angry and to weep.