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Show 85 from its sisters, on a placid bay too shallow for ships; consequently it had but one function: a resort. Mot a major one - it could not rival Amanohashidate - but like the pretty sister of a beautiful woman it had its devotees, who managed to bruit about their own more modest encomia. Since Japanese tourism was dead and Americans chosa the fashionable resorts, the inns at Nishi lay empty, a circumstance that couldn't have pleased Koontz more. Nobody would find them. One afternoon he visited the smallest and quietest, the Ssikoro, and after an exchange of chat and yen, one of the back rooms passed into his control. It was a small but charming chamber, whose sliding-doors looked out on a tree of such individual shape as if the Japanese had gnarled it themselves, a stone lantern, and a momiji from whose base issued the delicate tinkling of a tiny stream. At that point Kimiko grew deceptive too. It seamed that ths Army, an institution of such sinister power to her mother that anything claimed would be believsd, had put her on an erratic schedule: eight to twelvs; eight to two a.m.; occasionally - especially on weekends -- all night. And while tha NCO club (why confuse Oka"-san with another job?) was distantly visible from Naka Honriori, Mother was old-fashioned, and seldom traveled abroad. As for Michio, his character was a wartime commodity, its mettle weaksned by that violent alloy: nothing better in his eyas than his sister's military alliance. |