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the same time she could not leave off doubting.
    While true forgetfulness had not yet come, something covered Tomoko's sorrow as a thin coating of ice covers a lake.
    Occasionally it would break, but overnight it would form again.
    Forgetfulness began to show its real strength when they were not watching it. It filtered in. It found the tiniest opening, and filtered in. It attacked the organism like an invisible germ, it worked slowly but steadily. Tomoko was going through unconscious motions as when one resists a dream. She was most uneasy, resisting forgetfulness.
    She told herself that forgetfulness came through the strength of the child inside her. But it was only helped by the child. The outlines of the incident were slowly giving way, dimming, blurring, weathering, disintegrating,
    32

    There had appeared in the summer sky a fearsome marble image, white and stark. It had dissolved into a cloud - the arms had dropped off, the head was gone, the long sword in the hand had fallen. The expression on the stone face had been enough to raise the hair, but slowly it had blurred and softened.
    One day she switched off a radio drama about a mother who had lost a child. She was a little astonished at the promptness with which she thus disposed of the burden of memory. A mother awaiting her fourth child, she felt, had a moral obligation to resist the almost dissolute pleasure of losing herself in grief. Tomoko had changed in these last few months.
    For the sake of the child, she must hold off dark waves of emotion. She must keep her inward balance. She was far more pleased with the dictates of mental hygiene than she could be with insidious forgetfulness. Above all, she felt free. With all the injunctions, she felt free. Forgetfulness was of course demonstrating its power. Tomoko was astonished at how easily managed her heart was.
    She lost the habit of remembering, and it no longer seemed strange that the tears failed to come at memorial services or visits to the cemetery. She believed that she had become mag-nanimous, that she could forgive anything. When for instance spring came and she took Katsuo walking in a near-by park, she was no longer able to feel, even if she tried, the spite that would have swept over her immediately after the tragedy had she come upon children playing in the sand. Because she had forgiven them, all these children were living in peace. So it seemed to her.
    While forgetfulness came to Masaru sooner than to his wife, that was no sign of coldness on his part. It was rather Masaru who had wallowed in sentimental grief. A man even in his fickleness is generally more sentimental than a woman. Unable to stretch out the emotion, and conscious of the fact that grief was not particularly stubborn in following him about, Masaru suddenly felt alone, and he allowed himself a trifling infidelity.
    He quickly tired of it. Tomoko became pregnant. He hurried back to her like a child hurrying to its mother.
    The tragedy left them as a castaway leaves a sinking ship.
    T-DOHI 33

    Soon they were able to view it as it must have seemed to people Who noticed it in a corner of the newspapers that day. Tomoko and Masaru even wondered if they had had a part in it. Had they not been but the spectators who happened to be nearest?
    All who had actually participated in the incident had died, and would participate for ever. For us to have a part in a historical incident, our very existence must somehow be at stake. And what had Masaru and his wife had at stake? In the first place, had they had time to put anything at stake?
    The incident shone far away, a lighthouse on a distant headland. It flashed on and off, like the revolving light on Cape Tsiimeki, south of A. Beach. Rather than an injury it became a moral lesson, and it changed from a concrete fact to a meta-phor. It was no longer the property of the Ikuta family, it was public. As the lighthouse shines on beach wastes, and on waves baring their white fangs at lonely rocks all