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considered Kiyoaki and Honda to be friends were not mistaken, for as it stood, their relationship gave to each of them exactly what he desired.

5
     
    O NE EVENING about ten days later, Marquis Matsugae happened to return home unusually early and so Kiyoaki had dinner with both his parents, something that happened very rarely. Since the Marquis was fond of Western food, dinner was served in the small dining room of the Western-style house, and he himself had gone down to the wine cellar to choose the wine. He had taken Kiyoaki with him and had gone to great lengths to expound on the characteristics of the various wines cradled in the shelves that filled the cellar. His father had gone on to explain what wine went with which foods, what wine should be served only on the occasion of the visit of a member of the Imperial Family, and so on, beaming all the while. The Marquis never seemed as happy as when dispensing useless knowledge of this kind.
    While they were sipping their aperitifs, his mother, who had been driven to Yokohama two days before by her young coachman, described the shopping expedition as if it were an event of great significance.
    “I was simply astounded at the way people stared at my Western clothes, and in Yokohama of all places! Some dirty little children actually ran after the carriage shouting, ‘Foreign lady! Foreign lady!’”
    His father ventured something to the effect that he was thinking of taking Kiyoaki with him to the launching of the warship Hie , but he spoke as though it were a foregone conclusion that his son would not be interested.
    At this point, both parents were at a loss for viable topics of conversation and began to flounder, their discomfiture evident even to Kiyoaki. Somehow, however, they finally happened upon the congenial subject of Kiyoaki’s Otachimachi, the divination ritual that had taken place three years before when he was fifteen.
    This ancient ceremony fell on the seventeenth of August according to the lunar calendar. A large wooden basin filled with water was placed in the garden to catch the reflection of the moon, and appropriate offerings were made. If the sky was overcast on this August night of his fifteenth year, bad fortune was expected to dog the boy who stood before the basin, for the rest of his life.
    As his parents talked, the scene came back to Kiyoaki vividly. Flanked by his parents and dressed in his hakama , a divided skirt, and kimono blazoned with the family crest, he had stood in the middle of the dew-drenched lawn, the new basin filled with water before him, and a chorus of chirping insects ringing in his ears.
    The trees that encircled the now-darkened garden, the tiled roofs of the mansion itself beyond, even the maple hill—the reflection of all this, and more, had been fixed in jagged outline, compressed into the circle of water that was defined by the rim of the basin. That rim of blond cyprus wood had become a frontier where this world ended and another began. Since this ceremony during his fifteenth year was to determine his lifetime fortune, Kiyoaki felt as though his very soul, naked, had been set there on the wet grass. The wooden sides of the basin expressed his outer self; the disk of water, which they in turn defined, expressed his inner.
    Everyone was silent, so the sounds of insects throughout the garden filled his ears as never before. He gazed earnestly into the basin. The water within was dark at first, shadowed by clouds as thick as clustered seaweed. A moment later the seaweed seemed to wave and he thought he had seen a faint glow suffuse the water, but then it faded. He could not remember how long he had waited after that. Then all of a sudden the black water in the basin, which had seemed impenetrably obscure, cleared, and there directly in its center shone a tiny image of the full moon.
    Everyone broke into exclamations of pleasure, and his mother, rigid all this time, was greatly relieved and began to wave her fan to drive