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To say the least Tokio's lonely life was changed by the presence of Yoshiko. His present wife had once been his former sweetheart. She had certainly once been his sweetheart, but now Tokio's feelings towards her had changed. For the past four or five years, with the sudden rise in women's education and the establishment of women's colleges, girl students had begun to wear fashionable low pompadour hair styles and long skirts of reddish-brown color, and no girls were bashful when they walked side by side with their boy friends. For Tokio, to be living meekly in this era with a wife who wore the old-fashioned married women's hairdo, who walked like a duck, and knew nothing but obedience and virtue was the most wretched thing of all. Walking on the street, he would meet a man strolling happily in the company of his beautiful and stylish wife; when he visited his friends, he saw their wives joining in with their husbands and enlivening things with an easy flow of conversation; but when Tokio compared these women with his wife, who did not even care to read his novels that were written with a great deal of effort, and was utterly unconcerned about her husband's worries, and felt she had only to raise their children satisfactorily; his soul could not help but scream with loneliness. As was the case with Johannes in Einsame Menschen he began to realize that having a "housewife" was pointless. His loneliness--this lonely situation was broken by Yoshiko. Who could not fail to be moved by such a beautiful and stylish pupil who honored him by calling him "Sensei" "Sensei!"[1] as if he were the greatest person in the world.
- ↑ An honorary title for a teacher.
