nd life in general. It is as if she were faced with emotional and sexual vertigo, drawn inexplicably to the edge of the cliff of love and lust, but sensing that yielding to that longing will destroy her, will subsume her in a sea of emotion and lust in which she will psychologically drown:
For Etsuko---born and brought up in Tokyo---Osaka held inexplicable terrors. . . . [Yet] it was not really this that Etsuko feared. Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life---this limitless, complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens (3-4).
Etsuko suffers from inexplicable fevers which symbolize the power life and longing for love has over her: "Her cheeks were very warm. That was a common occurrence with her. There wasn't any rea
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