Suga would feel a familiar, wry amusement at the clearly renewed sexual ardor of Yukitomo’s gaze during the periods between the first morning sickness that sent Miya to her bed and her recovery following the birth of the child.

Try as she might to convince herself that all men were alike, the same frustrating sense of groping through some endless darkness stayed with her forever, shriveling her heart with a dull pain. So it was that the inner mechanism that should automatically have rebuffed Konno, for whom she had no particular fancy, failed to work with its full efficiency.

‘Oh …!’ Standing there in the green sunlight Suga suddenly hunched her shoulders and wriggled her neck to and fro.

‘What is it?’ said Konno coming up, startled by her cry.

‘I’m not sure. I think it’s something down my back. Oh! It’s moving! Mr. Konno – have a look for me, will you?’

‘What is it? Have you got an insect or something down there?’

‘Oh! It’s horrid! It tickles!’

‘Here, excuse me a moment.’

As he spoke he put his hand down between Suga’s kimono and her plump white back.

‘Let’s see. Where – here?’

‘No – the other way. It’s stinging me! Yes – about there.’

‘Well! – it’s only a caterpillar!’

‘How horrid!’

Hardly knowing what she was doing, Suga wriggled free of Konno’s hand and gave a shudder. Konno laughed as he squashed with his wooden clog the small damson-tree caterpillar that he had thrown at their feet.

‘You’ve gone quite pale. Coward! All because of a caterpillar!’

‘But they’re horrid. Don’t you know the saying, “to detest someone like a caterpillar”?’

Suga put both hands up to her neck and busily brushed up the loose hairs from her bushy chignon as though afraid she still had a caterpillar crawling on her neck. More than the unhealthy beauty of her face, with the eyes in which specks were to be seen around the rim, it was the cool clamminess of the fair skin his hand had just touched that made Konno’s whole being shudder with an unnatural sensuous excitement.

‘It still prickles. I wonder if it stung me?’

‘Let’s have a look.’

He made to approach her back again but Suga straightened her clothes. ‘It’s all right, I’ll go and get Yoshi to have a look and put some medicine on,’ she said, and set off at a brisk pace.

Seated together with some forty or fifty others in the hall of the annex to the Nishi Honganji temple in Tsukiji, Tomo was listening avidly to each word of the lecture being delivered from the dais. The speaker, a scholar-priest sent from the headquarters of the sect in Kyoto, had a close-cropped head, a grim expression, and thick-lensed spectacles before his short-sighted eyes, and he wore a narrow surplice over his summer jacket of black silk gauze.