The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

ancient matters having to do with family and the like
they competed in precision as if reading from a
golden record. And often they would become aware
of the fact that, neither of them listening to the other,
they had been lost in concurrent soliloquies.
“Sugi’s father—he was the founder of Sugi
Chemical. It’s since become Nihon Chemical. His first
wife was from an old family in his home town, name of
Honji. It didn’t work and she took back her maiden
name. Then she remarried, a second cousin. She
was a nasty one, and she bought a house right beside
his in Kagomachi. Then some diviner everyone was
talking about—what was his name—anyway he told
her the well was in a bad direction. So she did exactly
what he told her and put up a shrine looking out from
the garden. People came to pray at it in swarms and
hordes. It only lasted until the air raids, but—” That
was the sort of soliloquy in which Honda came to
indulge himself.
And this is the sort of thing Keiko would say: “She
was the daughter of a mistress, and that made her a
half sister of Viscount Matsudaira. She fell in love with
an Italian opera singer and got disinherited and
chased him off to Naples and he ran out on her. She
tried to commit suicide. It was in all the papers. A
cousin of Baron Shishido’s wife, Baron Shishido