Mr Hiroki's building lay at the end of a road just outside the town. The glade of pine trees enveloping it scented as richly as the ocean back on the sea cliffs at our house; and when I imagined the ocean and how I would be bartering one scent for another, I felt a horrible nothingness I had to yank myself away from, just as you might step back from a cliff after glancing over it.
The building was grander than anything in Yoroido, with tremendous eaves like our village shrine. And when Mr Hiroki stepped up into his entrance, he left his shoes right where he left them, because a maid came and kept them on a rack for him.
Yukiko and I had no shoes to put away, but just as I was about to walk into the house, I felt something hit me softly on my backside, and a pine cone fell onto the wood floor between my feet.
I looked to see a young girl about my age, with a very brief strand, running to lurk behind a tree. She gave out to smile at me with a triangle of a bare opening between her front teeth and then scampered away, glancing back over her shoulder so I would be specific to track her.
It may sound unique, but I had never had the knowledge of actually meeting another small girl.
Of course, I remembered the girls in my village, but we had grown up together and had never done anything that likely is called "meeting."
But Kuniko—for that was the title of Mr Hiroki's little daughter—was so peaceful from the initial instant I saw her, I believed it might be simple for me to move from one world into another.
Kuniko's apparel was much more civil than mine, and she wore zori; but being the village girl I was, I hunted her out into the woods barefoot until I trapped her at a kind of playhouse made from the sawed-off limbs of a dead tree.
She had laid out rocks and pine cones to make cabins. In one she feigned to fill my tea out of a split cup; in another, we took turns nursing her baby doll, a small boy named Taro who was nothing more than a canvas bag packed with dirt.
Taro loved foreigners, said Kuniko, but he was very scared of earthworms; and by a most unusual chance, so was Kuniko. When we met one, Kuniko made sure I took it outside in my fingers before poor Taro should flare into tears.
I was excited at the possibility of having Kuniko as a sister. The magnificent trees and the pine scent—even Mr Hiroki—all started to appear almost irrelevant to me in comparison.
The discrepancy between life here at the Hirokis' house and life in Yoroido was as considerable as the difference between the scent of something cooking and a mouthful of savoury food.
As it grew dark, we scrubbed our hands and feet at the well and went inside to take our chairs on the floor around a square table.
I was surprised to see vapour from the meal we were about to devour rising into the planks of a ceiling high above me, with electric lamps hanging down over our heads.
The illumination of the room was stunning; I had never noticed such a thing before. Soon the maids brought our dinner— grilled salted sea bass, pickles, soup, and steamed rice—but the moment we started to eat, the lamps went out. Mr Hiroki chuckled; this transpired quite often.
The servants went around lighting lanterns that hung on rigid tripods.
No one uttered very much as we ate. I had anticipated Mrs Hiroki to be fascinating, but she looked like an aged version of Yukiko, except that she grinned a good deal.
After the meal, she and Yukiko started playing a game of go, and Mr Hiroki sat and called a maid to fetch his kimono jacket.
In a minute Mr Hiroki was gone, and after a brief hesitation, Kuniko signalled to me to follow her out the door. She put on straw zori and gave me an extra pair. I inquired her where we were going.
"Quietly!" she said.
"We are going after my daddy. I do it every time he goes out. It is a secret."
We headed up the alley and turned on the major street toward the town of Senzuru, following some distance behind Mr Hiroki.
In a few seconds we were strolling among the buildings of the town, and then Kuniko took my arm and grabbed me down a side street.
At the end of a pebble walkway between two houses, we came to a window covered with paper meshes that shone with the light inside. Kuniko put her eye to a gap torn just at eye degree in one of the walls.
While she peeked in, I heard the sounds of chuckling and talking, and somebody singing to the supplement of a shamisen. At length, she paced aside so I could put my eye to the gap.
Half the cabin inside was obstructed from my perception by a folding partition, but I could see Mr Hiroko seated on the mats with a committee of three or four men.
An aged man beside him was explaining a story about clutching a ladder for a young woman and peeking up her robe; everyone was giggling except Mr Hiroki, who glared straight ahead toward the part of the cabin obstructed from my view.
An aged woman in kimono appeared with a tumbler for him, which he clasped while she gushed beer. Mr Hiroki knocked me as an island in the centre of the sea, because although everyone else was relishing the story—even the aged woman gushing the beer—Mr. Hiroki just went on staring at the other end of the table.
I took my eye out the hole to ask Kuniko what kind of place this was.
"It is a teahouse," she told me.
" Where Geigi entertain. My father comes here virtually every night. I don't know why he loves it so much. The women gush drinks, and the men tell stories—except when they sing songs. Everyone ends up drunk."
I put my eye back to the gap in time to detect a shape crossing the wall, and then a woman came into view.
Her hair was adorned with the dangling green blossom of a willow, and she wore a fluffy pink kimono with white flowers like cutouts all over it.
The vast obi wrapped around her inner was orange and yellow. I had never seen such luxurious clothing. None of the women in Yoroido held anything more elegant than a cotton robe, or perhaps linen, with a modest diagram in indigo.
But unlike her apparel, the woman herself was not beautiful at all. Her teeth bulged so badly that her lips did not quite enclose them, and the narrowness of her head made me wonder if she had been squeezed between two panels as a baby.
You may guess am cruel to define her so harshly; but it whacked me as unusual that even though no one could have named her a refinement, Mr Hiroki's gazes were fixed on her like a rag on a bolt.
He went on staring at her while everyone else chuckled, and when she leaned beside him to gush a few more drops of beer into his glass, she perked up at him in a way that implied they knew each other very well.
Kuniko took another shift peeking through the gap, and then we went back to her cabin and sat together in the bath at the rim of the pine forest. The sky was outrageous with stars, except for the half obstructed by limbs above me. I could have sat much lengthy trying to comprehend all I had seen that day and the modifications defying me . . . but Kuniko had risen so sleepily in the heated water that the maids soon came to help us out.
Yukiko was wheezing already when Kuniko and I lay down on our futons beside her, with our bodies clasped together and our arms entangled.
A calm impression of happiness began to bulge inside me, and I mumbled to Kuniko, "Did you know I am going to come and live with you?"
I thought the message would surprise her into opening her eyes or maybe even sitting up.
But it did not wake her from her sleep. She let out a moan, and then a moment later her puff was warm and moist, with the noise of sleep in it.