Natural speed please. Thanks!
When the blossoms have scattered and the cherry trees are full of leaves like this (the elderly woman began), I always remember that time. It was thirty-five years ago, Father was still alive, and our family – if you can call it that, for there were only three of us, Father and my younger sister and I, Mother having passed away some seven years earlier, when I was thirteen – our family was living on the outskirts of a castle town in Shimane Prefecture, a place near the Japan Sea with a population of twenty-some thousand. Father had accepted a post as headmaster of a middle school there when I was eighteen and my sister was sixteen, but since no suitable lodgings were available in town, we rented two rooms in a detached house on the grounds of a temple near the foot of the mountains, a house we were to live in for six years, until Father was transferred to a middle school in Matsue. I didn't marry until after we moved to Matsue, in the autumn of my twenty-fourth year, which in those days was quite late for a girl. With Mother having died when I was so young and Father being so absorbed in scholarly work and so thoroughly out of touch with worldly matters, I l knew our household would fall apart entirely if I were to leave, and though I’d had any number of offers I had no desire to become anyone’s bride if it meant abandoning my family.
Had my sister been healthy, I would have felt somewhat more free to do as I pleased, but though she, quite unlike myself, was a beautiful and very intelligent child with long lovely hair, she was physically infirm, and in the spring of the second year after Father took that job in the castle town, when she was eighteen and I was twenty, she died.
This is the story of something that happened shortly before her death.
