After a time, when I was three years old, my mother began to leave me at home, going out alone on her sales calls to cover more ground. She would leave once she had made sure that my neighborhood friends could watch me from a distance. She would come home to take care of me for lunch, before going back out again to peddle her goods.

Time flew by in this manner, to see me become five years old. And so it happened that I was able to spend all day playing with my friends in the neighborhood without weighing on my mother’s mind. My mother would often become absorbed in her business and lose track of the time. However, upon realizing this, she always hurried home, thinking, “Oh, no! My dear daughter is waiting for me! All alone!”

We children, in those days, had as our playground the shaded forest around the shrine in summer and the sunshine of the temple in winter. Children were called back to their homes by the ring of the evening bell. Drawn also by the smell of the rice and vegetable porridge — customary to a farming village of the day — from the houses surrounding us, the children ran to their homes. However, waiting for me at my home was only darkness. The faint scent of the evening meals from around the neighborhood would get my stomach rumbling. That scent still lingers in my memory. That lonely memory has left such a strong impression that even now, at nearly eighty years old, I can remember it clearly.