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Suddenly, something entered his mind. Tokio stood up and began to walk. Night had fallen. All-night lamps, placed here and there, in the compound, shed their light, and he could clearly read on the surface the three characters for "All night light" written on them. These characters "All night light" moved him indescribably. Hadn't he once been deeply agonized on seeing these three characters? When his wife was still wearing the maidenly momoware coiffure[1] and lived in the house just below the shrine, he used to climb the small hill to this Hachiman Shrine hoping to hear, however faintly, the delicate sound of her koto. With his ardent passion, if he had not married her he would rather travel around in the colonies of the South Seas, and thus he used to ponder gazing at the shrine gate, the long stone stairway, the main shrine building, the hanging lanterns on which the haiku poem was inscribed and these three words "All night light." Below the shrine compound, his wife's home was still there as in the past; its windows were brightly lit, even though occasional sounds of streetcars now broke the silence. What a faithless mind was his! Who knows how he has quite changed during a period of only eight years? He could not understand why their happy life had been changed to such a recent dreary life, nor how it came about that he began to desire a new love. Tokio realized the fearfulness of the power of time. Yet, incredibly the present realities in his heart remained unshaken.
"I can't help it if I'm inconsistent, unfaithful, so what! It's the reality, it's real!" he repeated in his mind.
- ↑ The hair style of girls sixteen to seventeen years of age.
