Till The Morning Comes

The song describes a man who is in a relationship that's dying, yet both are afraid to walk away from it. He struggles with ambivalent feelings, however, still longs to hold on to the love they have shared.

Till the Morning Comes

The next morning, my dad found Nicholas and me sleeping back to front again, on the floor, and kept his boots on and laid down beside us, held us both so tight, nodding something to himself I think, wiping his face maybe, and at some point the phone started ringing.

Mrs Sekiya is a Japanese Sengyo-shuffi, a full-time 'housewife'. When I was giving her daughters tuition in English in the evenings I seldom saw her husband. He works for a leading company and usually comes home after midnight, leaves for work early in the morning, goes out to work on Saturdays and sleeps 'till afternoon on Sundays. He does little house-work and spends little time with his family.

But if at first sight the role of Kengyo-shufu seems relatively liberating, in practice it is not. Like my aunt Keiko, such women have often finished taking care of their young children. But they are still expected to be in charge of household duties. From the point of view of employers they compensate for the shortage of manual labour by working for low wages with few benefits and little job security. The Kengyo-shufu neatly combines capitalist interests with patriarchal expectations about household duties.

My experience as a teacher at a public junior high school in a rural area was far from free of gender prejudice, though equality is theoretically guaranteed to public servants. One instance comes to mind vividly. The vice-principal asked all the female faculty at the beginning of a school year to 'take turns to make tea for teachers before school starts'. We were appalled and simply ignored his request.

The red-haired man went his way, and the boy travelled on. Before evening a great shower came, and he ran for shelter to a large oak-tree. When he got near the tree his foot slipped, the ground opened, and down he went through the earth till he came to another country. When he was in the other country he put on the cloak of darkness and went ahead like a blast of wind, and never stopped till he saw a castle in the distance; and soon he was there. But he found nine gates closed before him, and no way to go through. It was written inside the cloak of darkness that his eldest sister lived in that castle.

They parted. The boy put on his cloak of darkness, and away he went, more swiftly than any wind. He never stopped till he was hungry and thirsty. Then he sat down, took off his cloak of darkness, spread the cloth of plenty, and ate his fill; when he had eaten, he went on again till near sundown, when he saw the castle where his third sister lived. All three castles were near the sea. Neither sister knew what place she was in, and neither knew where the other two were living.

Next day the giant and the boy began in the middle of the forenoon, and fought till the middle of the afternoon. The giant was covered with wounds, and he had not given one blow to the boy, and could not see him, for he was always in his cloak of darkness. So the giant had to ask for rest till next morning.

They spent nine days in the castle of the eagle with the third sister. Then the boy gave back the feather, and the two went on till they came to the castle of the salmon, where they spent nine more days with the second sister; and he gave back the fin. 041b061a72