as looks were concerned she was not going to cause him any anxiety. ‘Could we not have a little more light?’ he said, turning again to Ukon. ‘It is so irritating….’ Ukon lit a candle and came towards them holding it aloft in her hand. ‘It is rather heavy work to get started!’ he whispered, smiling. ‘Things will go better presently.’ Even the way she hung her head, as though frightened of meeting his eyes, reminded him so vividly of Yūgao that it was impossible for him to treat her as a stranger; instinctively indeed he began to speak to her in a tone of complete familiarity as though they had shared the same house all their lives: ‘I have been hunting high and low for you ever since you were a baby,’ he said, ‘ and now that I have found you, and see you sitting there with a look that I know so well, it is more than I can bear. I wanted so much to talk to you, but now…’ and he paused to wipe the tears from his eyes, whilst there rushed to his mind a thousand tender recollections of Yūgao and her incomparable ways. ‘I doubt,’ he said at last, reckoning up the years since her death, ‘whether true parent has ever reclaimed a child after so long a search as I have made for you. Indeed so long a time has passed that you are already a woman of judgment and experience, and can tell me a far more interesting story of all that has befallen you on that island of yours than could be told by a mere child. I have that compensation at least for having met you so late….’
What would she tell him? For a long while she hung her head in silence. At last she said shyly: ‘Pray remember that like the leech-child,[1] at three years old I was set adrift
- ↑ The Royal Gods Izanagi and Izanami bore a leech-child; as at the age of three it could not stand, they cast it adrift in a boat. It made a song which said: ‘I should have thought my daddy and mammy would have been sorry for me, seeing that at three years old I could not stand.’ See vol. ii, p. 185.
