(1) A shower swept toward me from

the foot of the mountain, touching

the cedar forests white, as the road
began to wind up into the pass. I
was nineteen and traveling alone
through the Izu Peninsula.My
clothes were of the sort students
wear, dark kimono, high wooden
sandals, a school cap, a book of sack
over my shoulder.
(5) She was perhaps sixteen. Her hair was swept
up in mounds after an old style I hardly know
what to call. Her solemn, oval face was dwarfed
under it, and yet the face and the hair went well
together, rather as in the pictures one sees of
ancient beauties with their exagerated rolls of
hair. Two other young women were with here, a
man of twenty four or twenty-five. A stern-
looking woman aboutt forty presided over the
group.
(40) We went together for a bath. He
was twenty-three, he told me, and his
wife had two miscarriages. He seemed
not unintelligent. I had assumed that
he had come along for the walk-
perhaps like me to be near the dancer.
(53) One small figure ran out into the sunlight
and stood for a moment at the edge of the
platform calling something to us, arms raised as
though for a plunge into the river. It was the
little dancer. I looked at her, at the young legs, at
the sculptured white body, and suddenly a
draught of fresh water seemed to wash over my
heart. I laughed happily. She was a child, a mere
child, a child who could run out naked into the
sun and stand there in her tiptoes in her delight
at seeing a friends. I laughed on and on. It was
because she was dresses like a girl of fifteen or
sixteen. I had made an extraordinary mistake.