To Konno, too, the sight gradually elucidated the peculiar nuance with which the maids and tradespeople referred to her as ‘Miss Suga.’ Born the third in a family of nine and sent to work for a while in an ordinary pharmacy in Chiba after he left middle school, Konno had conceived the ambition of obtaining a pharmacologist’s license and had come to Tokyo, where he had already foisted himself on two or three different families. In his admittedly shallow way he was swift to detect where the authority lay in a household, which strings when pulled would move which limbs, and he knew well how to worm his way into the subtle gaps offered by a complex set of domestic relationships. As he began to make himself at home he soon divined that Yukitomo was the absolute authority in the Shirakawa household, that Tomo was in the position of a manager with few close ties with her husband, and that Suga and the grandson Takao were the true objects of Yukitomo’s affection.

Takao could do no wrong in either Yukitomo’s or Tomo’s eyes. Suga too, in compliance with Yukitomo’s wishes, looked after him almost as a nurse, so one sure tactic was to play up to ‘Master Takao.’ More important still, though, a young man such as Konno with no relations at hand must look to the maids every time his clothes even needed mending, and here the quickest method was to get Tomo or Suga to speak to them for him.

Tomo with her quiet, ever watchful manner had an inscrutability that kept Konno at a distance no matter how long he knew her, but behind Suga’s slowness of speech and the lethargy of her movements he glimpsed a great, gray shadow that spoke eloquently of aspirations unfulfilled in this household.

‘I wonder why Miss Suga doesn’t leave here and get him to set her up in her own house?’ he said one day to Maki, Takao’s nurse. ‘If she did that, she might still be a concubine, but at least she’d be mistress in her own home to do as she pleased.’ But Maki shook her head and said:

‘She doesn’t have it in her. Not for all her inward, sulky … After all, she came into service here when she was fifteen, and she’s been in this house for nearly twenty years. How could you expect her to know how to get round the master? Besides, the master’s always been a man who liked his own way, and he’d be sure to object to letting a woman go once she was his own property. All the more so nowadays, now that he’s getting on in years. Poor Miss Suga, I feel sorry for her when I think of the future, her with no children or anything.’