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 this sum before the end of the year. He had been cudgelling his brains about how he could extract the money from his father. The trouble was that Wasao had deliberately entrusted the responsibility for all such matters to his wife. Sōichi found it extremely difficult to approach his stepmother. Despite her good heart she had a very sharp tongue, and any request for money was bound to be met with shouts of “You stupid fool!” or “You good-for-nothing trash!” Sōichi did not relish the prospect.

As she sat sewing her socks, Kanako remembered what her husband had intimated a few days before. “If I don’t pay back that money,” he had said, “I can’t possibly go on living.” He was a rather weak-kneed fellow, to be sure, but Kanako could not help worrying lest in a moment of desperation he might have decided to take his life. Perhaps at that very moment he was lying on some railway line waiting for the train to run over him. Since his attack of appendicitis this autumn, he had become more uncontrolled than ever. “I shan’t live long anyhow,” he had blurted out, “so I might as well enjoy the short time that’s left and do just what I feel like.”

Kanako was half awake all night, listening for his footsteps at the door. Finally dawn broke and she heard the sound of shutters being opened in the nearby houses and of people going out to empty their buckets. Next to her house was a large yard where a construction company stored stones and rocks, and behind this a small house shared by an umbrella mender and an industrious Korean scrap pedlar with a Japanese wife. Directly on the other side of the wall was a widower with two children. Until recently he had been a traffic policeman and he had made a good reputation for himself. Now he was confined to bed with tuberculosis and had been obliged to leave the force.

Kanako noticed that the Korean scrap pedlar used to change into a neat cotton kimono every evening as soon as he came home from work and that he would then take his children out to the public bath. It looked like a happy family. People say a