eculiar coincidence, so was Kuniko. When we 
encountered one, Kuniko made sure I carried it outside in my fingers before poor Taro should 
burst into tears. 

I was delighted at the prospect of having Kuniko for a sister. In fact, the majestic trees and 
the pine smell-even Mr. Tanaka-all began to seem almost insignificant to me in comparison. 
The difference between life here at the Tanakas' house and life in Yoroido was as great as 
the difference between the odor of something cooking and a mouthful of delicious food. 

As it grew dark, we washed our hands and feet at the well, and went inside to take our seats 
on the floor around a square table. I was amazed to see steam from the meal we were about 
to eat rising up into the rafters of a ceiling high above me, with electric lights hanging down 
over our heads. The brightness of the room was startling; I'd never seen such a thing before. 
Soon the servants brought our dinner-grilled salted sea bass, pickles, soup, and steamed 
rice-but the moment we began to eat, the lights went out. Mr. Tanaka laughed; this happened 
quite often, apparently. The servants went around lighting lanterns that hung on wooden 
tripods. 

No one spoke very much as we ate. I'd expected Mrs. Tanaka to be glamorous, but she 
looked like an older version of Satsu, except that she smiled a good deal. After dinner she 
and Satsu began playing a game of go, and Mr. Tanaka stood and called a maid to bring his 
kimono jacket. In a moment Mr. Tanaka was gone, and after a short delay, Kuniko gestured 
to me to follow her out the door. She put on straw zori and lent me an extra pair. I asked her 
where we were going. 

"Quietly!" she said. "We're following my daddy. I do it every time he goes out. It's a secret." 

We headed up the lane and turned on the main street toward the town of Senzuru, following 
some distance behind Mr. Tanaka. In a few minutes we were walking among the houses of 
the town, and then Kuniko took my arm and pulled me down a side street. At the end of a 
stone walkway between two houses, we came to a window covered with paper screens that 
shone with the light inside. Kuniko put her eye to a hole torn just at eye level in one of the 
screens. While she peered in, I heard the sounds of laughter and talking, and someone 
singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen. At length she stepped aside so I could put my 
own eye to the hole. Half the room inside was blocked from my view by a folding screen, but 
I could see Mr. Tanaka seated on the mats with a group of three or four men. An old man 
beside him was telling a story about holding a ladder for a young woman and peering up her 
robe; everyone was laughing except Mr. Tanaka, who gazed straight ahead toward the part 
of the room blocked from my view. An older woman in kimono came with a glass for him, 
which he held while she poured beer. Mr. Tanaka struck me as an island in the midst of the 
sea, because although everyone else was enjoying the story-even the elderly woman 
pouring the beer-Mr. Tanaka just went on staring at the other end of the table. I took my eye 
from the hole to ask Kuniko what sort of place this was. 


"It's a teahouse," she told me, "where geisha entertain. My daddy comes here almost every 
night. I don't know why he likes it so. The women pour drinks, and the men tell stories-except 
when they sing songs. Everybody ends up drunk." 

I put my eye back to the hole in time to see a shadow crossing the wall, and then a woman 
came into view. Her hair was ornamented with the dangling green bloom of a willow, and she 
wore a soft pink kimono with white flowers like cutouts all over it. The broad obi tied around 
her middle was orange and yellow. I'd never seen such elegant clothing. None of the women 
in Yoroido owned anything more sophisticated than a cotton robe, or perhaps linen, with a 
simple pattern in indigo. But unlike her clothing, the woman herself wasn't lovely at all. Her 
teeth protruded so badly that her lips didn't quite cover them, and the narrowness of her head 
made me wonder if she'd been pressed between two boards as a baby. You may think me 
cruel to describe her so harshly; but it struck me as odd that even though no one could have 
called her a beauty, Mr. Tanaka's eyes were fixed on her like a rag on a hook. He went on 
watching her while everyone else laughed, and when she knelt beside him to pour a few 
more drops of beer into his glass, she looked up at him in a way that suggested they knew 
each other very well. 

Kuniko took another turn peeking through the hole; and then we went back to her house and 
sat together in the bath at the edge of the pine forest. The sky was extravagant with stars, 
except for the half blocked by limbs above me. I could have sat much longer trying to 
understand all I'd seen that day and the changes confronting me . . . but Kuniko had grown 
so sleepy in the hot water that the servants soon came to help us out. 

Satsu was snoring already when Kuniko and I lay down on our futons beside her, with our 
bodies pressed together and our arms intertwined. A warm feeling of gladness began to 
swell inside me, and I whispered to Kuniko, "Did you know I'm going to come and live with 
you?" I thought the news would shock her into opening her eyes, or maybe even sitting up. 
But it didn't rouse her from her slumber. She let out a groan, and then a moment later her 
breath was warm and moist, with the rattle of sleep in it. 

Chapter three 

Back at home my mother seemed to have grown sicker in the day I'd been away. Or perhaps 
it was just that I'd managed to forget how ill she really was. Mr. Tanaka's house had smelled 
of smoke and pine, but ours smelled of her illness in a way I can't even bear to describe. 
Satsu was working in the village during the afternoon, so Mrs. Sugi came to help me bathe 
my mother. When we carried her out of the house, her rib cage was broader than her 
shoulders, and even the whites of her eyes were -cloudy. I could only endure seeing her this 
way by remembering how I'd once felt stepping out of the bath with her while she was strong 
and healthy, when the steam had risen from our pale skin as if we were two pieces of boiled 
radish. I found it hard to imagine that this woman, whose back I'd so often scraped with a 
stone, and whose flesh had always seemed firmer and smoother to me than Satsu's, might 
be dead before even the end of summer. 

That night while lying on my futon, I tried to picture the whole confusing situation from every 
angle to persuade myself that things would somehow be all right. To begin with, I wondered, 
how could we go on living without my mother? Even if we did survive and Mr. Tanaka 
adopted us, would my own family cease to exist? Finally I decided Mr. Tanaka wouldn't adopt 
just my sister and me, but my father as well. He couldn't expect my father to live alone, after 
all. Usually I couldn't fall asleep until I'd managed to convince myself this was true, with the 
result that I didn't sleep much during those weeks, and mornings were a blur. 


On one of these mornings during the heat of the summer, I was on my way back from 
fetching a packet of tea in the village when I heard a crunching noise behind me. It turned out 
to be Mr. Sugi-Mr. Tanaka's assistant-running up the path. When he reached me, he took a 
long while to catch his breath, huffing and holding his side as if he'd just run all the way from 
Senzuru. He was red and shiny like a snapper, though the day hadn't grown hot yet. Finally 
he said: 

"Mr. Tanaka wants you and your sister ... to come down to the village ... as soon as you can." 

I'd thought it odd that my father hadn't gone out fishing that morning. Now I knew why: Today 
was the day. 

"And my father?" I asked. "Did Mr. Tanaka say anything about him?" 

"Just get along, Chiyo-chan," he told me. "Go and fetch your sister." 

I didn't like this, but I ran up to the house and found my father sitting at the table, digging 
grime out of a rut in the wood with one of his fingernails. Satsu was putting slivers of charcoal 
into the stove. It seemed as though the two of them were waiting for something horrible to 
happen. 

I said, "Father, Mr. Tanaka wants Satsu-san and me to go down to the village." 

Satsu took off her apron, hung it on a peg, and walked out the door. My father didn't answer, 
but blinked a few times, staring at the point where Satsu had been. Then he turned his eyes 
heavily toward the floor and gave a nod. I heard my mother cry out in her sleep from the back 
room. 

Satsu was almost to the village before I caught up with her. I'd imagined this day for weeks 
already, but I'd never expected to feel as frightened as I did. Satsu didn't seem to realize this 
trip to the village was any different from one she might have made the day before. She hadn't 
even bothered to clean the charcoal off her hands; while wiping her hair away she ended up 
with a smudge on her face. I didn't want her to meet Mr. Tanaka in this condition, so I 
reached up to rub off the mark as our mother might have done. Satsu knocked my hand 
away. 

Outside the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, I bowed and said good morning to Mr. 
Tanaka, expecting he would be happy to see us. Instead he was strangely cold. I suppose 
this should have been my first clue that things weren't going to happen just the way I'd 
imagined. When he led us to his horse-drawn wagon, I decided he probably wanted to drive 
us to his house so that his wife and daughter would be in the room when he told us about our 
adoption. 

"Mr. Sugi will be riding in the front with me," he said, "so you and Shizu-san had better get 
into the back." That's just what he said: "Shizu-san." I thought it very rude of him to get my 
sister's name wrong that way, but she didn't seem to notice. S