Aldred Leith

Aldred Leith is the character around which the story is centered; he is thirty-two years old at the time the novel takes place. Aldred is a Major in the Allied occupation forces and had served as a soldier during the Second World War after having grown up as a child of the First World War.. Because war had been the constant background to his youth and early adulthood, he questions whether he had even had a childhood. Aldred also caries memories of his famous, but self-indulgent father, and along with his memories of war, this makes him cynical. Aldred does not expect to fall in love; he doesn't even realize he has the capacity for it, and when he travels to Japan, he believes that his sole purpose is to continue his work on a book he is writing. However, upon meeting Helen and Benedict Driscoll, not...