“Raised voices destroy the bliss. He is yelling. She is whimpering. There they are. She is on the ground and he has just kicked her. It’s quite obvious.” What do you do, asks columnist HUGH SELBY, writing from Tokyo.

It’s pleasant to walk along the beach under a light blue sky, not hot, other people, too, strolling and chatting, the soft, wet sand pushing up between their and our toes.

Raised voices destroy the bliss. He is yelling. She is whimpering. There they are. She is on the ground and he has just kicked her. It’s quite obvious.

What do you do? Avert your eyes, leave them be, and walk on? Be a knight in shining armour and add your violence to theirs, to make it a threesome? Keep your distance, but yell to her to get up and leave, and to him to stop it? Whip out your mobile and call for police attendance?

That last option isn’t available. That’s more than a century in the future, when what you witnessed is immortalised in a large bronze statue beside the sand.

Where once there were small fishing boats, single-storey timber and plaster dwellings, and people carrying goods on both ends of a pole across their shoulders, now there are towering hotels, scurrying people with mobiles to their ears, school-bound kids on pushbikes, and a few thoughtful strollers on the sand.

This is Atami, a spa city not far south from Tokyo. On the hills behind the city there is an amazing art gallery called the MOA. That doesn’t stand for Museum of Art, but the initials of the founder.

From its courtyard there’s a breathtaking view of the city, the port with the sandy beach, the coast and the ocean. The gallery is reached by a succession of escalators deep inside the mountain. Arriving at the top, still underground, there is a permanent, muti-colour light show playing on to the broad, dome ceiling.

Emerging into the sun one is met not only by the view, but by the stone facings and glass of a very large exhibition space, all set within exquisite Japanese gardens. That’s tranquility.

So why is that bronze commemoration of an incident of domestic violence down at the shoreside, close by the sand?

Just as 19th century English newspaper readers were treated to the work of Charles Dickens in serial form, so Japanese readers at that time looked forward to the next instalment of the latest novel from a favourite writer.

Koyo Ozaki was very popular. Among his stories was this one, set in Atami, about a young couple for whom marriage seemed only episodes away when she, O-Miya, chose the diamond offered by another, rather richer suitor.

Diamonds, as everyone knows, are forever and so tangible. Love, on the other hand, can be here today and gone tomorrow.

Did this fair maiden choose wisely, or selfishly, or both wisely and selfishly?

Some might say that she was lucky. If he, Kan’ichi, was prepared to kick her over such a sensible choice, what kind of brutality lay ahead for her if she stayed with him?

There’s another perspective. He was besotted and thought that she was too. Indeed, she may have been. But she’d moved on and he was left behind. He was beside himself, not just with anger, but with feelings of betrayal and jealousy.

Strange as that might seem, humans have always lashed out when they are in that space.

Some contain their actions. Instead of inflicting pain upon the cause they go to the beach and kick the sand, or they run and run and run, or they spend big time – the ultimate in shopping therapy.

Others turn to the bottle or illicit substances.

Some, for whom the latent kinks in the relationship show up down the track, end up in the courts paying lawyers to get revenge of sorts. It won’t be sweet.

Close by the statue are boards in Japanese and English that outline the story that was serialised for some years.

Right under the statue, in recent years, the city managers have added a note inscribed into the stone, again in both Japanese and English. It ends with, “… in no way does (the statue) condone or promote acts of violence. We would be very pleased if you would read though the novel and consider the pair’s emotion…(and) the social conditions of the time”.

It’s a strange world these days. Turn on the TV and acts of violence are everywhere in the films, streaming series and sports.

The perpetrators are both the villains and the heroes. Equality has meant that attractive female killers are more than welcome between the ad breaks.

On none of those do we see a public conscience warning, clarifying that all this violence is just cathartic release, that violence is unacceptable.

Is that because we, and the good citizens of today’s Atami, have double standards? If Ozaki’s Kan’ichi is to be condemned, what about Netanyahu, Putin and Trump?