Those who know something about Ayako Ishigaki (or who have cheated and read the afterword to "Restless Wave" before the text proper) will find the first section of Ishigaki's memoir fraught with anticipation. Watching her proceed through a comfortable girlhood and young womanhood, we find scarcely a hint of the feminist and communist rebel she would become.
This anticipation, though, is probably a symptom of the pop-Freudianism that would have us believe that the only reason one would take exception to the manner in which society is arranged is that, as a child, one suffered a deep personal hurt. Although there was sadness in Ishigaki's childhood -- her mother and stepmother both died -- she seems largely to have enjoyed life with her indulgent father, her beloved, if conventional, sister, and even her rather dim brother.
She notes, for example, that on Girls' Day (March 3) the traditional display of dolls owned by most families is arranged according to a strict feudal hierarchy, and takes no exception to it. Rather, she tells us of the pleasure she found in the "beautifully colored bonbori lanterns" that cast "pink-cherry-blossom color on the faces of the dolls" and in the "sweet wine and candy" the little girls believed they shared with the dolls.