Page:Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan, volume 2.pdf/104

84 the ashes in the brazier with the small tongs. Suddenly looking up she said, “How funny to think that I shall have a brother-in-law!”

“It isn’t funny at all. It’s quite natural as you have a sister, “,” [sic]said her husband. She watched him rather curiously as he spoke.

At last the long-talked-of wedding took place in the middle of December. On that day, just before noon it began snowing quite hard in Osaka. After finishing her lunch all by hereselfherself [sic] as usual, she began to feel desperately lonely. The fish she had eaten seemed to have left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.

“I wonder if it is snowing in Tokyo, too?” thought she. She remained thinking for some considerable time, leaning her arms on the edge of the kitchen brazier.

Outside the snow began to fall more heavily, and she gazed at it absently. She still had the taste of fish in her mouth.

Time passed by. One day, during the following autumn Nobu-ko and her husband went up to Tokyo. She had not been there since her marriage. He had been sent there on some business connected with firm, and so the first few days after arriving in that city he was so busy with his work that, with the exception of one visit paid to his wife’s mother, he had no chance of going out anywhere with his wife.

When Nobu-ko went out alone to visit her sister’s new home in one of the suburbs she book a rickshaw which made its way along a rough road made through