In the fourth year of my elementary school days, there happened an event that was hoped not to ever happen in the history of my family as wished never to cross the river. From that day, everything changed. Kind father, brave mother, and puppy-like happy siblings were all changed. Since then, mom and I had confronted each other with a sharply arousing mood always on the brink of an explosion.
One day, with her innate cheerfulness, ‘Ah! During the age of the Japanese civil wars, Japanese women tended to marry, divorce, and then marry again. It was an inevitable situation since it was a political arrangement, though people might regard it promiscuous.’ told she. There was only me except her. My sister and brother who had been friendly towards her were not there. I who’d always made wars with her was there but she never minded and continued her talk.
At that time, she was reading the novel titled ‘The Great Ambition’. It is a novel about Tokukawa Iyeyasu’s unification of Japan at the time of the civil war era. What she talked about was the story of Odai, the mother of Tokugawa Iyeyasu. Listening to her talk with indifference, I came to think ‘What? A woman comes to marry again with another man after getting divorced from the firstly married man. Non-sense.’ It was rather my subconscious recounting of the then unquestioned customs than the thought of myself who was merely twelve years old; the girl who hadn’t experienced a relationship, let alone marriage.
Then, mom who was far younger than my current age, in her late thirties, continued her talk about Odai’s stories in the novel, in amusing shock with her life, to me who did not empathize with this communication. ‘The Great Ambition’ is an epic novel, written about the Japanese age of civil wars. It covers the ages from the time dominated by Oda Nobunaga to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, to Tokugawa Iyeyasu. Numerous Daimyos and Shoguns appear in that story but what held mom’s attention was Odai.
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