Page:Eminent Authors of Contemporary Japan, volume 2.pdf/91



Nobu-ko was a very beautiful and talented young woman. She had received an excellent schooling, and at quite an early age had entered a woman’s university. Even before her graduation she had completed over a two-hundred-page autobiographical novel, which was much talked about and praised by her friends and admirers. Everyone therefore predicted a very brilliant future for her as a successful authoress and novelist.

But when Nobu-ko graduated from her university, she found that her family affairs did not give her the freedom she would have liked to follow and develop her talents in this direction, for her poor mother who was a widow with small means, was the only supporter of her and her younger sister.

The younger girl, Teru-ko, was still attending a girl’s high school. It was therefore necessary for Nobu-ko to decide upon the question of marriage before she began novel writing.

She had a cousin named Shunkichi, who was then a student of some literary college, and his future hopes also lay in becoming a writer. Being related, they had known each other since they were children, and as they happened both to be interested in the same subject, and were able to discuss literature together, naturally their intimacy had much increased after they had grown up. But their tastes differed. Nobu-ko rather admired the new school of literature, but the young man showed