ABSTRACT
I turned sixty-four this year. I married into the Tsujimoto family at twenty and worked on the farm. When my husband died they had me marry his younger brother, so my present husband is two years younger than I am. After we married, we went to the States to make money, and I worked as a chambermaid at a hotel in Seattle. When we had saved some money, we put out a stall in a market, sold vegetables for about ten years, and with the little money we had made we went back to Hiroshima when I was thirty-seven and opened a grocery store near Tsurumi Bridge. Since we had no children, we adopted an older brother's daughter. We ran the store in the same place for seventeen years. We acquired a fair amount of property. We owned a large house that measured over 130 square meters. We put our daughter through the City Girls' School, had her learn traditional dance and shamisen, and when she was nineteen, we took in a husband for her.* Since he was a maker of airplane parts, we had him build a factory on the adjacent lot and subcontract jobs from Mitsubishi and so forth, which brought him a fairly good income. In August of the year when I was fifty-seven, my huband was fifty-five, our daughter twenty-one, and her husband twentyeight, pika, the flash, came.
