inquire after Yoshibei's health and to attend to his needs, had the surname Takabe. She was five years Yoshibei's junior, but with her erect frame and her height noticeably tall for a woman, she seemed much younger. She had a dark complexion, and her upper and lower teeth were missing, but her coloring was healthy. In the beauty and brightness of her large eyes with their long dark lashes and their gently arching length of brow, the charm of her early years could still be seen, unmistakable traces in her of the Yorozuya-type attractiveness. Her dark hair with its sprinkling of gray was artlessly done up in foreign style, and she had on a Japanese cooking apron over her black kimono, indications of her indifference to personal appearance. Once she began, she did not mince words as she spoke openly and frankly, and no matter what I asked, she came through with a response. While she talked, an indescribable light spread over her beautiful eyes, and I felt an easy familiarity growing between us. This generous freedom of behavior and refreshing lack of caution with strangers were common characteristics of all members of the Ito family.
It seemed to me that even Yoshibei, who hardly seemed able to talk, was attending to our conversation, and with an expression that indicated he did not dislike listening, he occasionally smiled as if faintly recalling something.
Beyond was a veranda, a garden which had been tended with great care, and the blue expanse of sea above the wooden wall at the back of the garden. As I was sitting in this room, I could hear the ceaseless sound of waves. The sound I heard was much stronger than when I had stood on the beach, and I felt as if the dull thud of wave after wave was reverberating through my entire body.
"Since my elder sister was only two years older than me, the two of us, the only sister each of us had, confided everything to one another from the time we were children, and certainly we kept no secrets. Yes, yes, throughout my life I've been put to trouble by Noe. Because from the time she was a child she didn't care about others. Well, she did like studying, and she did quite well at school. From the time she was little, she hated to play with children her age, and she was always doing something by herself. Often at supper time we couldn't find her even after we lit the lamps, so all of us at home were quite worried, but on those occasions when I opened one of the closets, I would almost always find her there. Having brought in a candle, she'd be absorbed in reading every single line in the old newspapers pasted on the walls inside the closet and behind its sliding partition. You see, our family was already poor in those days, so there were no books or magazines in the house, and for that reason I guess she even did things like that. At any rate, reading was what she liked to do more than anything else. Even at that time she was a child who wouldn't do a single thing she disliked, and she thought only of herself. Just studying by herself made her indifferent to everything else, even if it caused our mother trouble or forced the rest of us to cry. Thanks to her, I always had to take the losing part. When we were old enough to know what was happening around us, we realized our father stayed away from home. Yes, certainly from the time our father was young, he had been fond of music, singing, and dancing, and because he was by nature a clever man, he was generally good at fishing, flower arranging, tea ceremony, and cooking. His strong point was in singing to the accompaniment of the samisen, and he was so good on the samisen and at singing ballads he could put even a professional to shame. He was even skillful at dancing. I guess he deserved to be called a profligate because of these things. There were times when he stayed away from home for quite a few years, and my mother had to work hard to provide for her children. My elder sister was our father's favorite child, and she was trained early to play the samisen and to dance. Whenever a troupe of players or anything of the sort came to town, my father dropped whatever he was doing to go, taking my elder sister with him, and he often made her appear on the stage. I couldn't look on with indifference as I saw my mother working alone in the fields around our neighborhood or doing piecework in order to raise her children, so from the time I was little I tried to help her, but my elder sister was totally indifferent as to whether our mother or I was troubled. On top of that, even after Noe became an adult, she continued to mercilessly inconvenience our mother, and she never did any of the duties a child is supposed to do for a parent. Certainly my elder sister was blessed with a lucky and easygoing temperament. The only reason she went to my aunt's home in Nagasaki was to study, and that was because my aunt's place offered a more convenient environment for study than our house did. Noe's writing us that my uncle and aunt treated her harshly was complete nonsense. Even at my aunt's home she was allowed to do as she wished, just as much as Chiyoko was.
"Because my aunt's family went up to Tokyo, Noe came back home and graduated from Shusenji Higher Elementary School about two and a half miles away. She was immediately employed at the local post office for a while, but she was quite disgusted at living in a town of this kind and thought only of going up to Tokyo.
"From the very start she had no interest in working at a post office in a country town, and she took an examination to enter the Kumamoto Communications Bureau. Though she came out first on the written test, her fingers were clumsy, not skillful enough in striking those telegraph keys, and she failed. Well, Apparently she was a person unskilled in the use of her fingers. At least she could sew a kimono. When she was a young girl, she didn't take the slightest interest in love or anything like that. She never had the least bit to do with any of the young men around here. Of course, she was bright at school and pretty and attractive, and there were some men who liked her in a friendly way. Generally speaking, though, she studied hard when she was young and had no interest at all in young men.
"She was strong-willed, and though I'm rather talkative now, I was quite reserved in my younger days, since my sister would speak rapidly about whatever she felt like saying to anybody. When she grew up, though, it was just the opposite and she became quiet.
"You want to know about her first marriage? Well, she wrote that our parents and her uncle Dai and his wife had mercilessly decided everything according to what they wished and that she was the victim, but it wasn't that way at all.
"Of course, I'm not denying the marriage was arranged by our parents when my elder sister was at that girls' high school, but marriages of girls in those days were arranged in this way all over Japan, weren't they? The other party was well acquainted with all the members of our family, and even I had often gone to his home on festival days and other occasions. She wrote she had never seen the fellow's face or even known his name, but that wasn't the way it was. Not only that, for although she said she had no intention whatever of marrying him and that our parents heartlessly and forcibly made her, she did once definitely consent. Yes, of course, she never took a fancy to him even once from the very first, but she was fascinated by the prospect of going to America, and she told me that if she did get there, she'd definitely run away from him. So when they celebrated the wedding during the summer vacation when she was in the fifth grade in her high school, she certainly had consented. Even now I remember her hair in the shimada style with the bridal hood over it and her short-sleeved crested coat of gauze crepe, and I can remember she was talked about as one of the prettiest brides ever seen in our vicinity. It may sound strange for me to say this, but when she was very young, she didn't spruce up at all and didn't care in the least about her hair and clothing, but she was really pretty then.
"But when she was getting ready for the wedding ceremony, she flared up in anger, saying she didn't like him after all and, as if she were a man, deliberately walked along recklessly kicking up the skirt of her bridal outfit. She so worked off her bad temper on everyone around her she made all of us quite uneasy.
"The day after she married, she came running back home and promptly hurried off to her school in Tokyo. It seems she hadn't allowed the groom to make the slightest move toward her.
"'I wouldn't let even one of his fingers touch me!' she boasted, but we talked it over among ourselves and decided that we had never heard of the existence of such a submissive husband. Well, actually, he was a most unattractive man. All he had to him was that submissiveness, and even I found him distasteful. But as soon as my sister came home, she said quite calmly to me, 'Tsuta, it's better if you marry him instead.' That was her way of talking. And she really thought so. But even I found this kind of man disgusting.
"Though
