“No Chinese army can take us on,” threw in one of the officers while his back was energetically scrubbed by his orderly. “The civil war has ruined China. One day, we’ll annex the entire territory, another Korea.

Their comments confirm various rumors, already rife in Japan, in the heart of our infantry. Despite our government’s reticence, the conquest of China becomes more inevitable every day.

That evening I go to sleep relaxed, and happy to be clean.

I am roused by a rustling of clothes: I am sleeping in my own room, and Father is sitting in the next room, wrapped in his dark-blue cotton yukata. Mother is walking up and down, the bottom of her lavender-gray kimono opening and closing over a pale-pink under-kimono. She has the face of a young woman; there is not a single wrinkle round her almond-shaped eyes. A smell of springtime wafts around her-it’s the perfume Father had sent from Paris!

I suddenly remember that she has not touched that bottle of perfume since Father died.

5

Cousin Lu is becoming more and more stooped. He tries to seem nonchalant, indifferent, but those dark unsettling eyes peer out of his emaciated face, watching my every move. When I look into his eyes and ask him, “What’s the matter, Cousin Lu?” he says nothing.

I challenge him to a game of go. He turns pale and fidgets on his chair; his every move betrays his volatile mood. The territory he is trying to defend on the board is either too cramped or too sprawling, and his genius is reduced to a few strange and ineffectual moves. I can tell that he has again been reading ancient tracts on go; he gets them from his neighbor, an antique dealer, and a forger of the first order. I even wonder whether, after reading so many of these manuscripts, which are said to have sacred origins and are filled with Taoist mysteries and tragic anecdotes, my cousin is going to end up succumbing to madness, as players used to in the past.