As a provincial girl, the author longed so intensely for complete copies of The Tale of Genji that she prayed for them, and when an aunt gave her the full set she read day and night, valuing the fictional romance above any real prospect. She later judged this devotion to fantasy as having distracted her from religious practice and realistic expectations of life.
Immersing oneself in romantic tales can form an inner template through which one measures actual life, leaving the reader expecting an elegance and destiny that ordinary circumstances never deliver. The author attributes her later disappointments partly to having lived inside borrowed stories rather than attending to her real conditions.
Recurring dreams are treated not as random images but as messages assessing the state of one's soul and foretelling consequences; a dream urging devotion that was ignored becomes, in retrospect, evidence of a path not taken. Interpreting a life through its remembered dreams reframes ordinary choices as responses to warnings one failed to heed.
A life can be narrated backward as a sequence of devotions misplaced and pilgrimages postponed, so that the organizing thread is not achievement but what was neglected until too late. The looking-back voice converts scattered events into a single lament about attention given to the wrong things.