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house. The father gave them the second storey, one six-mat room and one three-mat room.^[1] For himself, his wife and their two daughters he reserved the six-mat room and the four-mat room on the ground floor. Despite this arrangement, Kanako soon found that the crowded house prevented her from enjoying the happiness of married life to which she had so eagerly looked forward.

The younger of the two sisters, who had just turned sixteen, had suffered from an attack of pleurisy and since her recovery had been hanging about the house doing nothing. Yoshiko, the other sister, was eighteen. She had recently started to learn sewing. After the marriage she announced that it was too crowded for her to work downstairs and she installed her sewing-machine in the three-mat room on the second storey. Kanako soon became accustomed to the whirring of the machine, but when Yoshiko took to spreading her bedding next to the room where she and Sōichi slept, she really found it intolerable. She felt that strange eyes were peeping into the happy world which they shared at night, and soon she became extremely reserved with her husband.

Yoshiko, on the other hand, felt as if Kanako were an elder sister who had been added to the family and for a time she tried to make friends. It soon became clear, however, that they had little in common. Kanako, thanks to her mother’s training, had an eminently practical approach, whereas Yoshiko thought of nothing but films and revues. The young girl was a great fan of Chōjirō, the film actor. Not long before, Chōjirō had made a personal appearance at the nearby Kinshi Hall. Yoshiko had pushed her way through the throng of girls and young wives who flocked from the neighbourhood to admire him. When she saw that the actor was going to step into his car, she leapt out in front of the crowd and tried to approach him as he stood there in his formal crested kimono. With a frenzied look in her eyes she seized his hand and