Thank you Larry, we made the deadline!
I hope you'll enjoy the story even more if I tell you...
... it's based on a real incident which sparked quite a scandal some 100 years ago.
Nami is based on one Nobuko Oyama, and Takeo is based on Yataro Mishima. They were indeed happily married, but when Nobuko fell ill with tuberculosis just a few months into the marriage, Mishima's family sent her back to the Oyamas, and all her stuff with her, which indeed meant a divorce.
Yataro didn't like it at all, but couldn't really intervene, and Nobuko was just ill enough that nobody informed her of the divorce - apparently the servants even burnt all the letters between the former spouses.
The scandal part comes in because Nobuko was the daughter of
Oyama Iwao, an imperial general and founder of the imperial army who married his second wife
Sutematsu, who was the first Japanese woman to graduate from Vassar college. The book paints in particular Sutematsu in a not-so-bright light, and hence the scandal, which both tried hard to live down.
Source: Kuno, Akiko (1993).
Unexpected destinations: the poignant story of Japan's first Vassar graduate
Chapter 7 "Turning Inward".
What do you say?
