...

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I hadn't been planning to bring it up--I had forgotten all about it--but it wasn't one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either.

What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before two o'clock in the morning. We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty, and gone to sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger pangs.

Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.

I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design school. I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine--why can't I remember the exact year we married?--and she was two years and eight months younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds.

We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. On the other hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kitchen, ending up across the table from each other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs?

We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked inside, the contents never changed. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions in the butter, but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite.

"Would madame care for some French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?"

I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. "Let's get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant," I said. "There must be one on the highway."

She rejected that suggestion. "We can't. You're not supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was old-fashioned in that way.

I breathed once and said, "I guess not."

Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe that's what happens with newlyweds, I don't know. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.

A special kind of hunger. And what might that be?

I can present it here in the form of a cinematic image.

One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water, I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water's surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance.

This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my "I guess not." Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyze with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation. Which is why--the almost grotesque intensity of my hunger notwithstanding--I all but automatically agreed with her thesis (or declaration).

We did the only thing we could do: opened the beer. It was a lot better than eating those onions. She didn't like beer much, so we divided the cans, two for her, four for me. While I was drinking the first one, she searched the kitchen shelves like a squirrel in November. Eventually, she turned up a package that had four butter cookies in the bottom. They were leftovers, soft and soggy, but we each ate two, savoring every crumb.

It was no use. Upon this hunger of ours, as vast and boundless as the Sinai Peninsula, the butter cookies and beer left not a trace.

Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish's gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turned the pages of yesterday's paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs on the tabletop.

"I've never been this hungry in my whole life," she said. "I wonder if it has anything to do with being married."

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe not."

While she hunted for more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had opened somewhere behind my solar plexus--a hermetically sealed cavern that had neither entrance nor exit. Something about this weird sense of absence--this sense of the existential reality of nonexistence--resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the very top of a high steeple. This connection between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me.

Which is when it occurred to me that I had once before had this same kind of experience. My stomach had been just as empty then...When?...Oh, sure, that was--

"The time of the bakery attack," I heard myself saying.

"The bakery attack? What are you talking about?"

And so it started.

"I once attacked a bakery. Long time ago. Not a big bakery. Not famous. The bread was nothing special. Not bad, either. One of those ordinary little neighborhood bakeries right in the middle of a block of shops. Some old guy ran it who did everything himself. Baked in the morning, and when he sold out, he closed up for the day."

"If you were going to attack a bakery, why that one?"

"Well, there was no point in attacking a big bakery. All we wanted was bread, not money. We were attackers, not robbers."

"We? Who's we?"

"My best friend back then. Ten years ago. We were so broke we couldn't buy toothpaste. Never had enough food. We did some pretty awful things to get our hands on food. The bakery attack was one."

"I don't get it." She looked hard at me. Her eyes could have been searching for a faded star in the morning sky. "Why didn't you get a job? You could have worked after school. That would have been easier than attacking bakeries."

"We didn't want to work. We were absolutely clear on that."

"Well, you're working now, aren't you?"

I nodded and sucked some more beer. Then I rubbed my eyes. A kind of beery mud had oozed into my brain and was struggling with hunger pangs.

"Times change. People change," I said. "Let's go back to bed. We've got to get up early."

"I'm not sleepy. I want you to tell me about the bakery attack."

"There's nothing to tell. No action. No excitement."

"Was it a success?"

I gave up on sleep and ripped open another beer. Once she gets interested in a story, she has to hear it all the way through. That's just the way she is.

"Well, it was kind of a success. And kind of not. We got what we wanted. But as a holdup, it didn't work. The baker gave us the bread before we could take it from him."

"Free?"

"Not exactly, no. That's the hard part." I shook my head. "The baker was a classical-music freak, and when we got there, he was listening to an album of Wagner overtures. So he made us a deal. If we would listen to the record all the way through, we could take as much bread as we liked. I talked it over with my buddy and we figured, Okay. It wouldn't be work in the purest sense of the word, and it wouldn't hurt anybody. So we put our knives back in our bag, pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened to the overtures to Tannhauser and The Flying Dutchman."

"And after that, you got your bread?"

"Right. Most of what he had in the shop. Stuffed it in our bag and took it home. Kept us fed for maybe four or five days." I took another sip. Like soundless waves from an undersea earthquake, my sleepiness gave my boat a long, slow rocking.

"Of course, we accomplished our mission. We got the bread. But you couldn't say we had committed a crime. It was more of an exchange. We listened to Wagner with him, and in return, we got our bread. Legally speaking, it was more like a commercial transaction."

"But listening to Wagner is not work," she said.

"Oh, no, absolutely not. If the baker had insisted that we wash his dishes or clean his windows or something, we would have turned him down. But he didn't. All he wanted from us was to listen to his Wagner LP from beginning to end. Nobody could have anticipated that. I mean--Wagner? It was like the baker put a curse on us. Now that I think of it, we should have refused. We should have threatened him with our knives and taken the damn bread. Then there wouldn't have been any problem."

"You had a problem?"

I rubbed my eyes again.

"Sort of. Nothing you could put your finger on. But things started to change after that. It was kind of a turning point. Like, I went back to the university, and I graduated, and I started working for the firm and studying the bar exam, and I met you and got married. I never did anything like that again. No more bakery attacks."

"That's it?"

"Yup, that's all there was to it." I drank the last of the beer. Now all six cans were gone. Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.

Of course, it wasn't true that nothing had happened as a result of the bakery attack. There were plenty of things that you could have easily put your finger on, but I didn't want to talk about them with her.

"So, this friend of yours, what's he doing now?"

"I have no idea. Something happened, some nothing kind of thing, and we stopped hanging around together. I haven't seen him since. I don't know what he's doing."

For awhile, she didn't speak. She probably sensed that I wasn't telling her the whole story. But she wasn't ready to press me on it.

"Still," she said, "that's why you two broke up, isn't it? The bakery attack was the direct cause."

"Maybe so. I guess it was more intense than either of us realized. We talked about the relationship of bread to Wagner for days after that. We kept asking ourselves if we had made the right choice. We couldn't decide. Of course, if you look at it sensibly, we did make the right choice. Nobody got hurt. Everybody got what he wanted. The baker--I still can't figure out why he did what he did--but anyway, he succeeded with his Wagner propaganda. And we succeeded in stuffing our faces with bread.

"But even so, we had this feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. And somehow, this mistake has just stayed there, unresolved, casting a dark shadow on our lives. That's why I used the word 'curse.' It's true. It was like a curse."

"Do you think you still have it?"

I took the six pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of a bracelet.

"Who knows? I don't know. I bet the world is full of curses. It's hard to tell which curse makes any one thing go wrong."

"That's not true." She looked right at me. "You can tell, if you think about it. And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it'll stick with you like a toothache. It'll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too."

"You?"

"Well, I'm your best friend now, aren't I? Why do you think we're both so hungry? I never, ever, once in my life felt a hunger like this until I married you. Don't you think it's abnormal? Your curse is working on me, too."

I nodded. Then I broke up the ring of pull-tabs and put them back in the ashtray. I didn't know if she was right, but I did feel she was onto something.

The feeling of starvation was back, stronger than ever, and it was giving me a deep headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to the core of my head by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds of complicated machinery.

I took another look at my undersea volcano. The water was clearer than before--much clearer. Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely nothing to support it. I could see every little pebble on the bottom. All I had to do was reach out and touch them.

"We've only been living together for two weeks," she said, "but all this time I've been feeling some kind of weird presence." She looked directly into my eyes and brought her hands together on the tabletop, her fingers interlocking. "Of course, I didn't know it was a curse until now. This explains everything. You're under a curse."

"What kind of presence?"

"Like there's this heavy, dusty curtain that hasn't been washed for years, hanging down from the ceiling."

"Maybe it's not a curse. Maybe it's just me," I said, and smiled.

She did not smile.

"No, it's not you," she said.

"Okay, supposed you're right. Suppose it is a curse. What can I do about it?"

"Attack another bakery. Right away. Now. It's the only way."

"Now?"

"Yes. Now. While you're still hungry. You have to finish what you left unfinished."

"But it's the middle of the night. Would a bakery be open now?"

"We'll find one. Tokyo's a big city. There must be at least one all-night bakery."

We got into my old Corolla and started drifting around the streets of Tokyo at 2:30 a.m., looking for a bakery. There we were, me clutching the steering wheel, she in the navigator's seat, the two of us scanning the street like hungry eagles in search of prey. Stretched out on the backseat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the pocket of my wife's windbreaker. We had two black ski masks in the glove compartment. Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt.

Impeccably equipped, we were nevertheless unable to find an all-night bakery. I drove through the empty streets, from Yoyogi to Shinjuku, on to Yosuya and Akasaka, Aoyama, Hiroo, Roppongi, Daikanyama, and Shibuya. Late-night Tokyo had all kinds of people and shops, but no bakeries.

Twice we encountered patrol cars. One was huddled at the side of the road, trying to look inconspicuous. The other slowly overtook us and crept past, finally moving off into the distance. Both times I grew damp under the arms, but my wife's concentration never faltered. She was looking for that bakery. Every time she shifted the angle of her body, the shotgun shells in her pocket rustled like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow.

"Let's forget it," I said. "There aren't any bakeries open at this time of night. You've got to plan for this kind of thing or else--"

"Stop the car!"

I slammed on the brakes.

"This is the place," she said.

The shops along the street had their shutters rolled down, forming dark, silent walls on either side. A barbershop sign hung in the dark like a twisted, chilling glass eye. There was a bright McDonald's hamburger sign some two hundred yards ahead, but nothing else.

"I don't see any bakery," I said.

Without a word, she opened the glove compartment and pulled out a roll of cloth-backed tape. Holding this, she stepped out of the car. I got out on my side. Kneeling at the front end, she tore off a length of tape and covered the numbers on the license plate. Then she went around to the back and did the same. There was a practiced efficiency to her movements. I stood on the curb staring at her.

"We're going to take that McDonald's," she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what we would have for dinner.

"McDonald's is not a bakery," I pointed out to her.

"It's like a bakery," she said. "Sometimes you have to compromise. Let's go."

I drove to the McDonald's and parked in the lot. She handed me the blanket-wrapped shotgun.

"I've never fired a gun in my life," I protested.

"You don't have to fire it. Just hold it. Okay? Do as I say. We walk right in, and as soon as they say, 'Welcome to McDonald's,' we slip on our masks. Got that?"

"Sure, but--"

"Then you shove the gun in their faces and make all the workers and customers get together. Fast. I'll do the rest."

"But--"

"How many hamburgers do you think we'll need? Thirty?"

"I guess so." With a sigh, I took the shotgun and rolled back the blanket a little. The thing was as heavy as a sandbag and as black as a dark night.

"Do we really have to do this?" I asked, half to her and half to myself.

"Of course we do."

Wearing a McDonald's hat, the girl behind the counter flashed me a McDonald's smile and said, "Welcome to McDonald's." I hadn't thought that girls would work at McDonald's late at night, so the sight of her confused me for a second. But only for a second. I caught myself and pulled on the mask. Confronted with this suddenly masked duo, the girl gaped at us.

Obviously, the McDonald's hospitality manual said nothing about how do deal with a situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that comes after "Welcome to McDonald's," but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the words wouldn't come out. Even so, like a crescent moon in the dawn sky, the hint of a professional smile lingered at the edges of her lips.

As quickly as I could manage, I unwrapped the shotgun and aimed it in the direction of the tables, but the only customers there were a young couple--students, probably--and they were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned on the table like an avant-garde sculpture. They slept the sleep of the dead. They didn't look likely to obstruct our operation, so I swung my shotgun back toward the counter.

All together, there were three McDonald's workers. The girl at the counter, the manager--a guy with a pale, egg-shaped face, probably in his late twenties--and a student type in the kitchen--a thin shadow of a guy with nothing on his face that you could read as an expression. They stood together behind the register, staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an Incan well. No one screamed, and no one made a threatening move. The gun was so heavy I had to rest the barrel on top of the cash register, my finger on the trigger.

"I'll give you the money," said the manager, his voice hoarse. "They collected it at eleven, so we don't have too much, but you can have everything. We're insured."

"Lower the front shutter and turn off the sign," said my wife.

"Wait a minute," said the manager. "I can't do that. I'll be held responsible if I close up without permission."

My wife repeated her order, slowly. He seemed torn.

"You'd better do what she says," I warned him.

He looked at the muzzle of the gun atop the register, then at my wife, and then back at the gun. He finally resigned himself to the inevitable. He turned off the sign and hit a switch on an electrical panel that lowered the shutter. I kept my eye on him, worried that he might hit a burglar alarm, but apparently McDonald's don't have burglar alarms. Maybe it had never occurred to anybody to attack one.

The front shutter made a huge racket when it closed, like an empty bucket being smashed with a baseball bat, but the couple sleeping at their table was still out cold. Talk about a sound sleep: I hadn't seen anything like that in years.

"Thirty Big Macs. For takeout," said my wife.

"Let me just give you the money," pleaded the manager. "I'll give you more than you need. You can go buy food somewhere else. This is going to mess up my accounts and--"

"You'd better do what she says," I said again.

The three of them went into the kitchen area together and started making the thirty Big Macs. The student grilled the burgers, the manager put them in buns, and the girl wrapped them up. Nobody said a word.

I leaned against a big refrigerator, aiming the gun toward the griddle. The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest corners, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, clinging to its pink walls.

A pile of white-wrapped burgers was growing nearby. I wanted to grab and tear into them, but I could not be certain that such an act would be consistent with our objective. I had to wait. In the hot kitchen area, I started sweating under my ski mask.

The McDonald's people sneaked glances at the muzzle of the shotgun. I scratched my ears with the little finger of my left hand. My ears always get itchy when I'm nervous. Jabbing my finger into an ear through the wool, I was making the gun barrel wobble up and down, which seemed to bother them. It couldn't have gone off accidentally, because I had the safety on, but they didn't know that and I wasn't about to tell them.

My wife counted the finished hamburgers and put them into two small shopping bags, fifteen burgers to a bag.

"Why do you have to do this?" the girl asked me. "Why don't you just take the money and buy something you like? What's the good of eating thirty Big Macs?"

I shook my head.

My wife explained, "We're sorry, really. But there weren't any bakeries open. If there had been, we would have attacked a bakery."

That seemed to satisfy them. At least they didn't ask any more questions. Then my wife ordered two large Cokes from the girl and paid for them.

"We're stealing bread, nothing else," she said. The girl responded with a complicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt.

My wife then pulled a ball of twine from her pocket--she came equipped--and tied the three to a post as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord hurt, or if anyone wanted to go to the toilet, but no one said a word. I wrapped the gun in the blanket, she picked up the shopping bags, and out we went. The customers at the table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?

We drove for a half hour, found an empty parking lot by a building, and pulled in. There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Macs in the back seat. Our hunger--that hunger that had felt as if it could go on forever--vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building's filthy walls purple and made a giant SONY BETA ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed Forces radio was playing cowboy music. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.

"Still was it really necessary for us. to do this?" I asked.

"Of course it was!" With one deep sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft and as light as a kitten.

Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone. The water's calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves--like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze--lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else.

Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways. She never said a word. Sunk deep in the cushions of the sofa, her mouth clamped shut, she wouldn’t answer when Komura spoke to her. She wouldn’t shake her head or nod. Komura could not be sure that the sound of his voice was even getting through to her.

Komura’s wife came from way up north in Yamagata, and, as far as he knew, she had no friends or relatives who could have been hurt in Kobe. Yet she stayed planted in front of the television from morning to night. When he got up, Komura would make his own toast and coffee, and head off to work. When he came home in the evening, he’d fix himself a snack with whatever he found in the refrigerator and eat it by himself. She’d still be glaring at the late news when he dropped off to sleep. In his presence, at least, she ate nothing and drank nothing and never went to the toilet. A stone wall of silence surrounded her. Komura gave up trying to break through.

And when he came home from work on Sunday, the sixth day, his wife had disappeared.

Komura was a salesman at one of the oldest audio-equipment stores in Tokyo’s Akihabara “Electronics Town.” He handled high-end stuff and earned a sizable commission whenever he made a sale. Most of his clients were doctors, wealthy independent businessmen, and rich provincials. He had been doing this for eight years and had earned a decent income right from the start. The economy was healthy, real-estate prices were rising, and Japan was overflowing with money. Wallets were bursting with ten-thousand-yen bills, and everyone was dying to spend them. The most expensive items were often the first to sell out.

Komura was tall and slim and a stylish dresser. He was good with people. In his bachelor days, he had dated a lot of women. But after getting married, at twenty-six, he found that his desire for sexual adventures simply—and mysteriously—vanished. He hadn’t slept with any woman but his wife during the five years of their marriage. Not that the opportunity had never presented itself—but he had lost all interest in fleeting affairs and one-night stands. He much preferred to come home early, have a relaxed meal with his wife, talk with her awhile on the sofa, then go to bed and make love. This was everything he wanted.

Komura’s friends were puzzled by his marriage. Next to his clean, classic looks, his wife could not have seemed more ordinary. She was short, with thick arms, and she had a dull, even stolid, appearance. And it wasn’t just physical: there was nothing attractive about her personality, either. She rarely spoke, and her expression was often sullen.

Still, though he himself did not quite understand why, Komura always felt his tension dissipate when he and his wife were together under one roof; it was the only time he could truly relax. He slept well with her, undisturbed by the strange dreams that had troubled him in the past. His erections were hard; his sex life was warm. He no longer had to worry about death or venereal disease or the vastness of the universe.

His wife, on the other hand, disliked Tokyo’s crowded urban life style and longed for Yamagata. She missed her parents and her two older sisters, and she would go home to see them whenever she felt the need. Her parents operated a successful inn, which kept them financially comfortable. Her father was crazy about his youngest daughter and happily paid her round-trip fares. Several times, Komura had come home from work to find his wife gone and a note on the kitchen table telling him that she would be visiting her parents for a while. He never objected. He just waited for her to come back, and she always did, after a week or ten days, in a good mood.

But the letter his wife had left for him five days after the earthquake was different: “I am never coming back,” she had written, and gone on to explain simply but clearly why she no longer wanted to live with Komura. “The problem is that you never give me anything,” she wrote. “Or, to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me. You are good and kind and handsome, but living with you is like living with a chunk of air. It’s not your fault. There are lots of women who will fall in love with you. But please don’t call me. Just get rid of the stuff I’m leaving behind.”

Not that she had left much of anything behind. Her clothes, her shoes, her umbrella, her coffee mug, her hair dryer: all were gone. She must have packed them in boxes and shipped them out after he left for work that morning. The only things still in the house that could be called “her stuff” were the bicycle she used for shopping and a few books. The Beatles and Bill Evans CDs that Komura had been collecting since his bachelor days had also vanished.

The next day, he tried calling his wife’s parents’ house in Yamagata. His mother-in-law answered the phone and told him that his wife didn’t want to talk to him. She sounded somewhat apologetic. She also told him that his wife would be sending him the necessary divorce forms soon and that he should sign them and send them back right away.

Komura answered that he might not be able to send them back right away. This was an important matter, and he wanted time to think it over.

“You can think it over all you want, but I don’t think that’ll change anything,” his mother-in-law said.

She was probably right, Komura thought. No matter how long he waited, things would never be the same. He was sure of that.

Shortly after he sent the papers back, Komura asked for a week off from work. February was a slow month, and he had already told his boss what was going on in his life. He had no trouble getting permission.

A colleague of Komura’s named Sasaki came over to him at lunch and said, “I hear you’re taking time off. Are you planning to do something?”

“I don’t know,” Komura said. “What should I do?”

Sasaki was a bachelor, three years younger than Komura. He had a delicate build and short hair, and he wore round, gold-rimmed glasses. He talked too much and had a certain overconfident air about him, which a lot of people disliked, but he got along well enough with the easygoing Komura.

“What the hell—as long as you’re taking the time off, why not travel somewhere nice?”

“Not a bad idea,” Komura said.

Wiping his glasses with his handkerchief, Sasaki peered at Komura as if examining him for some kind of clue.

“Have you ever been to Hokkaido?” he asked.

“Never,” Komura said.

“Would you like to go?”

“Why do you ask?”

Sasaki narrowed his eyes and cleared his throat. “To tell the truth, I’ve got a small package I’d like to send to Kushiro, and I’m hoping you’ll take it there for me. You’d be doing me a big favor, and I’d be glad to pay for the ticket. I could cover your hotel in Kushiro, too.”

“A small package?”

“Like this,” Sasaki said, shaping a four-inch cube with his hands. “Nothing heavy.”

“Something to do with work?”

Sasaki shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “Strictly personal. I just don’t want it to get knocked around, which is why I can’t mail it. I’d like you to deliver it by hand, if possible. I really ought to do it myself, but I haven’t had the time to fly all the way to Hokkaido.”

“Is it something important?”

His closed lips curling slightly, Sasaki nodded. “It’s nothing fragile, and there are no ‘hazardous materials.’ There’s no need to worry about it. They’re not going to stop you when they X-ray it at the airport. I promise I’m not going to get you in trouble. The only reason I’m not mailing it is I just don’t feel like mailing it.”

Hokkaido in February would be freezing cold, Komura knew, but cold or hot it was all the same to him.

“So who do I give the package to?”

“My sister. My younger sister. She lives up there.”

Komura decided to accept Sasaki’s offer. Thinking it over would have been too much trouble. He had no reason to refuse, and nothing else to do. Sasaki called the airline immediately and reserved a ticket for two days later.

At work the next day, he handed Komura a box like the ones used for human ashes, only smaller, wrapped in manila paper. Judging from the feel, it was made of wood. It weighed almost nothing. Broad strips of transparent tape were wrapped around the package, over the paper. Komura held it in his hands and studied it for a few seconds. He gave it a little shake, but he couldn’t feel or hear anything moving inside.

“My sister will pick you up at the airport,” Sasaki said. “She’ll be arranging a room for you. All you have to do is meet her at the gate.”

Komura left home with the box in his suitcase, wrapped in a thick shirt. The plane was far more crowded than he had imagined it would be. Why were all these people going from Tokyo to Kushiro in the middle of winter? he wondered.

The morning paper was full of earthquake reports. He read it from beginning to end on the plane. The number of dead was rising. Many areas were still without water and electricity, and countless people had lost their homes. Each article contained some new tragedy, but to Komura those tragedies registered as oddly lacking in depth. The aftermath of the earthquake was like a distant monotonous echo to him. The only thing he could give any serious thought to was his wife’s drawing ever further away.

When he grew tired of thinking about his wife and of following the lines of type, he closed his eyes and napped. When he woke, he thought about his wife again. Why had she followed the earthquake reports with such intensity, from morning to night, without eating or sleeping? What had she seen that he didn’t see?

Two young women wearing overcoats of similar design and color approached Komura at the airport. One was fair-skinned and maybe five feet six, with short hair. The area from her nose to her full upper lip was oddly extended, in a way that made Komura think of short-haired hoofed animals. The other woman was closer to five feet one and would have been quite pretty if her nose hadn’t been so small. Her long hair fell straight to her shoulders. Her ears were exposed, and there were two moles on her right earlobe which were emphasized by the earrings she wore. Both women looked to be in their mid-twenties. They took Komura to a café in the airport.

“I’m Keiko Sasaki,” the taller woman said. “My brother told me how helpful you have been to him. This is my friend Shimao.”

“Nice to meet you,” Komura said.

“Hi,” Shimao said.

“My brother tells me that your wife recently passed away,” Keiko Sasaki said, with a respectful expression.

Komura waited a moment before answering, “No, she didn’t die.”

“I just talked to my brother the day before yesterday. I’m sure he said quite clearly that you had lost your wife.”

“I did. She left me. But, as far as I know, she’s alive and well.”

“That’s strange. I couldn’t possibly have misheard something so important.” She gave him an injured look. Komura put a small amount of sugar in his coffee and stirred it gently before taking a sip. The liquid was thin, with no taste to speak of. What the hell am I doing here? he wondered.

“Well, I guess I did mishear it. I can’t imagine how else to explain the mistake,” Keiko Sasaki said, apparently satisfied now. She drew in a deep breath and bit her lower lip. “Please forgive me. I was very rude.”

“Don’t worry about it. Either way, she’s gone.”

Shimao said nothing while Komura and Keiko spoke, but she smiled and kept her eyes on Komura. She seemed to like him. He could tell from her expression and her subtle body language. A short silence fell over the three of them.

“Anyway, let me give you the important package I brought,” Komura said. He unzipped his suitcase and pulled the box out of the folds of the thick shirt he had wrapped it in.

Keiko stretched her hands across the table, her expressionless eyes fixed on the package. After testing its weight, she did the same thing Komura had and gave it a few shakes by her ear. She flashed him a smile as if to signal that everything was fine, and slipped the box into her oversized shoulder bag.

“I have to make a call,” she said. “Do you mind if I excuse myself for a moment?”

“Not at all,” Komura said. “Feel free.”

Keiko slung the bag over her shoulder and walked off toward a distant phone booth. Komura studied the way she walked. The upper half of her body was still, while everything from the hips down made large, smooth, mechanical movements. He had the impression that he was witnessing some moment from the past, shoved with random suddenness into the present.

“Have you been to Hokkaido before?” Shimao asked.

Komura shook his head.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a long way to come.”

Komura nodded. Then he turned to survey his surroundings. “Strange, though,” he said, “sitting here like this, it doesn’t feel as if I’ve come all that far.”

“Because you flew. Those planes are too damn fast. Your mind can’t keep up with your body.”

“You may be right.”

“Did you want to make such a long trip?”

“I guess so,” Komura said.

“Because your wife left?”

Komura nodded.

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself,” Shimao said.

Komura was staring at the sugar bowl on the table as she spoke, but then he raised his eyes to hers.

“It’s true,” he said. “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere.”

Shimao looked hard at Komura. “I bet you loved her, didn’t you?”

Komura dodged the question. “You’re a friend of Keiko Sasaki’s?”

“Right. We do stuff together.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Instead of answering him, Shimao asked, “Are you hungry?”

“I don’t know,” Komura said. “I feel kind of hungry and kind of not.”

“Let’s go and have something warm, the three of us. Eating something warm will help you relax.”

Shimao drove a small four-wheel-drive Subaru. Keiko Sasaki sat next to Shimao, and Komura had the cramped rear seat to himself. There was nothing particularly wrong with Shimao’s driving, but the noise in the back was terrible, and the suspension was nearly shot. The car had to have more than a hundred thousand miles on it. The automatic transmission slammed into gear whenever it downshifted, and the heater blew hot and cold. Shutting his eyes, Komura imagined that he had been imprisoned in a washing machine.

No snow had been allowed to accumulate on the streets in Kushiro, but dirty, icy mounds stood at random intervals on both sides of the road. Dense clouds hung low, and, although it was not yet sunset, everything was dark and desolate. The wind tore through the city in sharp squeals. There were no people out walking. Even the traffic lights looked frozen.

“This is one part of Hokkaido that doesn’t get much snow,” Keiko explained in a loud voice, looking back at Komura. “We’re on the coast, and the wind is strong, so whatever piles up gets blown away. It’s cold, though, freezing cold. Sometimes it feels like it’s taking your ears off.”

“You hear about drunks who freeze to death sleeping on the street,” Shimao said.

“Do you get bears around here?” Komura asked.

Keiko giggled and turned to Shimao. “Bears!”

Shimao gave the same kind of giggle.

“I don’t know much about Hokkaido,” Komura said by way of excuse.

“I know a good story about bears,” Keiko said. “Right, Shimao?”

“A great story!” Shimao said.

But their talk broke off at that point, and neither of them told the bear story. Komura didn’t ask to hear it. Soon they reached their destination, a big noodle shop on the highway. They parked in the lot and went inside.

Komura had a beer and a hot bowl of ramen noodles. The place was dirty and empty, and the chairs and tables were rickety, but the ramen was terrific, and when he had finished eating Komura did, in fact, feel more relaxed.

“Tell me, Mr. Komura,” Keiko said, “do you have something you want to do in Hokkaido? My brother says you’re going to spend a week here.”

Komura thought about it for a moment but couldn’t come up with anything that he wanted to do.

“How about a hot spring? I know a little country place not far from here.”

“Not a bad idea,” Komura said.

“I’m sure you’d like it. It’s really nice. No bears or anything.”

The two women looked at each other and laughed again.

“Do you mind if I ask you about your wife?” Keiko asked.

“I don’t mind.”

“When did she leave?”

“Hmm . . . five days after the earthquake, so that’s more than two weeks ago now.”

“Did it have something to do with the earthquake?”

Komura shook his head. “Probably not. I don’t think so.”

“Still, I wonder if things like that aren’t connected somehow,” Shimao said with a tilt of her head.

“Yeah,” Keiko said. “It’s just that you can’t see how.”

“Right,” Shimao said. “Stuff like that happens all the time.”

“Stuff like what?” Komura asked.

“Like, say, what happened with somebody I know,” Keiko said.

“You mean Mr. Saeki?” Shimao asked.

“Exactly,” Keiko said. “There’s this guy—Saeki. He lives in Kushiro. He’s about forty years old. A hair stylist. His wife saw a U.F.O. last year. She was driving on the edge of town all by herself in the middle of the night and she saw a huge U.F.O. land in a field. Whoosh! Like in ‘Close Encounters.’ A week later, she left home. Just disappeared and never came back. They weren’t having any domestic problems or anything.”

“And it was because of the U.F.O.?” Komura asked.

“I don’t know why. She just up and left. No note or anything. She had two kids in elementary school, and she just walked out. Not a word from her since,” Keiko said. “The whole week before she left, all she’d do was tell people about the U.F.O. You couldn’t get her to stop. She’d just go on and on about how big and beautiful it was.”

She paused to let the story sink in.

“My wife left a note,” Komura said. “And we don’t have any kids.”

“So your situation’s a little better than Saeki’s,” Keiko said.

“Yeah. Kids make a big difference,” Shimao said, nodding.

“Shimao’s father left home when she was seven,” Keiko explained with a frown. “Ran off with his wife’s younger sister.”

A silence settled over the group.

“Maybe Mr. Saeki’s wife didn’t run away but was captured by an alien from the U.F.O.,” Komura said, to change the subject.

“It’s possible,” Shimao said with a sombre expression. “You hear stories like that all the time.”

“You mean like you’re-walking-along-the-street-and-a-bear-eats-you kind of thing?” Keiko asked. The two women laughed.

The three of them left the noodle shop and went to a nearby love hotel. It was on the edge of town, on a strange street where love hotels alternated with gravestone dealers. The hotel Shimao had chosen was an odd building, constructed to look like a European castle. A triangular red flag flew on its highest tower.

Keiko got the key at the front desk, and they took the elevator to the room. The windows were tiny, compared with the absurdly big bed. Komura hung his down jacket on a hanger and went into the toilet. During the few minutes that he was gone, the two women managed to run a bath, dim the lights, turn up the heat, turn on the television, examine the delivery menus from local restaurants, test the light switches at the head of the bed, and check the contents of the minibar.

“The owners are friends of mine,” Keiko said. “I had them get a big room ready. It’s a love hotel, but don’t let that bother you. You’re not bothered, are you?”

“Not at all,” Komura said.

“I thought this would make a lot more sense than sticking you in a cramped little room in some cut-rate business hotel by the station.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Komura said.

“Why don’t you take a bath? I filled the tub.”

Komura did as he was told. The tub was huge. Komura felt almost uneasy soaking in it alone. The couples who came to this hotel probably took baths together.

When he emerged from the bathroom, Komura was surprised to see that Keiko Sasaki had left. Shimao was still there, drinking beer and watching TV.

“Keiko went home,” Shimao said. “She wanted me to apologize and tell you that she’ll be back tomorrow morning. Do you mind if I stay here a little while and have a beer?”

“No,” Komura said.

“You’re sure it’s no problem? Like, you want to be alone, or you can’t relax if somebody else is around or something?”

Komura insisted that it was no problem. Drinking his beer and drying his hair with a towel, he watched TV with Shimao. It was a news special on the Kobe earthquake. The same images appeared again and again: tilted buildings, buckled streets, tearful old women, confusion, and aimless anger. When a commercial came on, Shimao used the remote to switch off the TV.

“Let’s talk,” she said, “as long as we’re here.”

“Fine,” Komura said.

“What should we talk about?”

“In the car, you and Keiko said something about a bear, remember? You said it was a great story.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, nodding. “The bear story.”

“You want to tell it to me?”

“Sure, why not?”

Shimao got a fresh beer from the refrigerator and filled both their glasses.

“It’s a little raunchy,” she said. “You don’t mind?”

Komura shook his head. “No, go ahead.”

“I mean, some men don’t like hearing a woman tell certain kinds of stories.”

“I’m not like that.”

“It’s something that actually happened to me, so it’s a little embarrassing.”

“I’d like to hear it if you’re O.K. with it.”

“I’m O.K.,” Shimao said, “if you’re O.K.”

“I’m O.K.,” Komura said.

“Three years ago—back around the time I started college—I was dating this guy. He was a year older than me, and he was the first guy I had sex with. One day, the two of us were out hiking—in the mountains way up north.” Shimao took a sip of beer. “It was fall, and the hills were full of bears. That’s the time of year when the bears are getting ready to hibernate, so they’re out looking for food and they’re really dangerous. Sometimes they attack people. They’d done an awful job on a hiker three days before we went out. So somebody gave us a bell to carry with us. We were supposed to shake it while we walked to warn the bears that there were people around. Bears don’t attack people on purpose. I mean, they’re pretty much vegetarians. They don’t have to attack people. What happens is they suddenly bump into people in their territory and they get surprised or angry and they attack out of reflex. If you walk along ringing your bell, they’ll avoid you. Get it?”

“I get it.”

“So that’s what we were doing, walking along and ringing the bell. We got to this place where there was nobody else around, and all of a sudden he said he wanted to . . . do it. I kind of liked the idea, too, so I said O.K., and we went into this bushy place off the trail where nobody could see us, and we spread out a piece of plastic. But I was afraid of the bears. I mean, think how awful it would be to have some bear attack you from behind and kill you while you’re having sex! I would never want to die that way. Would you?”

Komura agreed that he would not want to die that way.

“So there we were, shaking the bell with one hand and having sex. Kept it up from start to finish. Ding-a-ling! Ding-a-ling!”

“Which one of you shook the bell?”

“We took turns. We’d trade off when our hands got tired. It was so weird, shaking this bell the whole time we were doing it! I think about it sometimes even now, when I’m having sex, and I start laughing.”

Komura gave a little laugh, too.

Shimao clapped her hands. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. “You can laugh, after all!”

“Of course I can laugh,” Komura said, but, come to think of it, this was the first time he had laughed in quite a while. When was the last time?

“Do you mind if I take a bath, too?” Shimao asked.

“No,” Komura said.

While she was bathing, Komura watched a variety show m.c.’d by a comedian with a loud voice. He didn’t find it the least bit funny, but he couldn’t tell whether that was the show’s fault or his own. He drank a beer and opened a packet of nuts from the minibar. Shimao stayed in the bath for a very long time. Finally, she came out wearing nothing but a towel and sat on the edge of the bed. Dropping the towel, she slid between the sheets like a cat and lay there staring at Komura.

“When was the last time you did it with your wife?” she asked.

“At the end of December, I think.”

“And nothing since?”

“Nothing.”

“Not with anybody?”

Komura closed his eyes and nodded.

“You know what I think,” Shimao said. “You need to lighten up and learn to enjoy life a little more. I mean, think about it: tomorrow there could be an earthquake; you could be kidnapped by aliens; you could be eaten by a bear. Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” Komura echoed.

“Ding-a-ling,” Shimao said.

After several failed attempts to have sex with Shimao, Komura gave up. This had never happened to him before.

“You must have been thinking about your wife,” Shimao said.

“Yup,” Komura said, but in fact what he had been thinking about was the earthquake. Images of it had come to him one after another, as if in a slide show, flashing on the screen and fading away. Highways, flames, smoke, piles of rubble. He couldn’t break the chain of silent images.

Shimao pressed her ear against his naked chest.

“These things happen,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You shouldn’t let it bother you.”

“I’ll try not to,” Komura said.

“Men always let it bother them, though.”

Komura said nothing.

Shimao played with his nipple.

“You said your wife left a note, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“What did it say?”

“That living with me was like living with a chunk of air.”

“A chunk of air?” Shimao tilted her head back to look up at Komura. “What does that mean?”

“That there’s nothing inside me, I guess.”

“Is it true?”

“Could be,” Komura said. “I’m not sure, though. I may have nothing inside me, but what would something be?”

“Yeah, really, come to think of it. What would something be? My mother was crazy about salmon skin. She always used to wish that there were a kind of salmon that was made of nothing but skin. So there may be some cases when it’s better to have nothing inside. Don’t you think?”

Komura tried to imagine what a salmon made of nothing but skin would be like. But even supposing there were such a thing, wouldn’t the skin itself be the something inside? Komura took a deep breath, raising and then lowering Shimao’s head on his chest.

“I’ll tell you this, though,” Shimao said. “I don’t know whether you’ve got nothing or something inside you, but I think you’re terrific. I’ll bet the world is full of women who would understand you and fall in love with you.”

“It said that, too.”

“What? Your wife’s note?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No kidding,” Shimao said. Her earring rubbed against the skin of his chest.

“Come to think of it,” Komura said, “what’s the something inside that box I brought up here?”

“Is that bothering you?”

“It wasn’t bothering me before. But now, I don’t know, it’s starting to.”

“Since when?”

“Just now.”

“All of a sudden?”

“Yeah, once I started thinking about it, all of a sudden.”

“I wonder why it’s started to bother you now, all of a sudden.”

Komura stared at the ceiling for a minute. “I wonder.”

The two listened to the moaning of the wind. The wind came from someplace unknown to Komura, and it blew past, to another place unknown to him.

“I’ll tell you why,” Shimao said in a low voice. “It’s because that box contains the something that was inside you. You didn’t know that when you carried it here and gave it to Keiko with your own hands. Now you’ll never get it back.”

Komura lifted himself from the mattress and looked down at the woman. Tiny nose, moles on her earlobe. In the room’s silence, his heart beat with a loud, dry sound. His bones cracked as he leaned forward. For a split second, Komura felt as if he were on the verge of committing an act of incredible violence.

“Just kidding,” Shimao said, when she saw the look on his face. “I said the first thing that popped into my head. It was a lousy joke. I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Komura forced himself to calm down and sank his head into his pillow again. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The huge bed stretched out around him like a nocturnal sea. His heart was still pounding.

“Are you starting to feel a little as if you’ve come a long way?” Shimao asked.

“Hmm. Now I feel as if I’ve come a very long way,” Komura answered honestly.

Shimao traced a complicated design on Komura’s chest with her fingertip, as if casting a magic spell.

At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks as if it’s going to be a hot day. I could go to the seashore.” He raised his head and studied the platform guide.

At that point, he realized what he had been doing all along.

He tried shaking his head a few times, but the idea that had struck him would not go away. He had probably made up his mind unconsciously the moment he boarded the Chuo Line train in Koenji. He heaved a sigh, stood up from the bench, and asked a station employee for the fastest connection to Chikura. The man flipped through the pages of a thick volume of train schedules. He should take the 11:30 special express train to Tateyama, the man said, and transfer there to a local; he would arrive at Chikura shortly after two o’clock. Tengo bought a Tokyo-Chikura round-trip ticket. Then he went to a restaurant in the station and ordered rice and curry and a salad.

Going to see his father was a depressing prospect. He had never much liked the man, and his father had no special love for him, either. He had retired four years earlier and, soon afterward, entered a sanatorium in Chikura that specialized in patients with cognitive disorders. Tengo had visited him there no more than twice—the first time just after he had entered the facility, when a procedural problem required Tengo, as the only relative, to be there. The second visit had also involved an administrative matter. Two times: that was it.

The sanatorium stood on a large plot of land by the coast. It was an odd combination of elegant old wooden buildings and new three-story reinforced-concrete buildings. The air was fresh, however, and, aside from the roar of the surf, it was always quiet. An imposing pine grove formed a windbreak along the edge of the garden. And the medical facilities were excellent. With his health insurance, retirement bonus, savings, and pension, Tengo’s father could probably spend the rest of his life there quite comfortably. He might not leave behind any sizable inheritance, but at least he would be taken care of, for which Tengo was tremendously grateful. Tengo had no intention of taking anything from him or giving anything to him. They were two separate human beings who had come from—and were heading toward—entirely different places. By chance, they had spent some years of life together—that was all. It was a shame that it had come to that, but there was absolutely nothing that Tengo could do about it.

Tengo paid his check and went to the platform to wait for the Tateyama train. His only fellow-passengers were happy-looking families heading out for a few days at the beach.

Most people think of Sunday as a day of rest. Throughout his childhood, however, Tengo had never once viewed Sunday as a day to enjoy. For him, Sunday was like a misshapen moon that showed only its dark side. When the weekend came, his whole body began to feel sluggish and achy, and his appetite would disappear. He had even prayed for Sunday not to come, though his prayers were never answered.

When Tengo was a boy, his father was a collector of subscription fees for NHK—Japan’s quasi-governmental radio and television network—and, every Sunday, he would take Tengo with him as he went door to door soliciting payment. Tengo had started going on these rounds before he entered kindergarten and continued through fifth grade without a single weekend off. He had no idea whether other NHK fee collectors worked on Sundays, but, for as long as he could remember, his father always had. If anything, his father worked with even more enthusiasm than usual, because on Sundays he could catch the people who were usually out during the week.

Tengo’s father had several reasons for taking him along on his rounds. One reason was that he could not leave the boy at home alone. On weekdays and Saturdays, Tengo could go to school or to day care, but these institutions were closed on Sundays. Another reason, Tengo’s father said, was that it was important for a father to show his son what kind of work he did. A child should learn early on what activity was supporting him, and he should appreciate the importance of labor. Tengo’s father had been sent out to work in the fields on his father’s farm, on Sunday like any other day, from the time he was old enough to understand anything. He had even been kept out of school during the busiest seasons. To him, such a life was a given.

Tengo’s father’s third and final reason was a more calculating one, which was why it had left the deepest scars on his son’s heart. Tengo’s father was well aware that having a small child with him made his job easier. Even people who were determined not to pay often ended up forking over the money when a little boy was staring up at them, which was why Tengo’s father saved his most difficult routes for Sunday. Tengo sensed from the beginning that this was the role he was expected to play, and he absolutely hated it. But he also felt that he had to perform it as cleverly as he could in order to please his father. If he pleased his father, he would be treated kindly that day. He might as well have been a trained monkey.

Tengo’s one consolation was that his father’s beat was fairly far from home. They lived in a suburban residential district outside the city of Ichikawa, and his father’s rounds were in the center of the city. At least he was able to avoid doing collections at the homes of his classmates. Occasionally, though, while walking in the downtown shopping area, he would spot a classmate on the street. When this happened, he ducked behind his father to keep from being noticed.

On Monday mornings, his school friends would talk excitedly about where they had gone and what they had done the day before. They went to amusement parks and zoos and baseball games. In the summer, they went swimming, in the winter skiing. But Tengo had nothing to talk about. From morning to evening on Sundays, he and his father rang the doorbells of strangers’ houses, bowed their heads, and took money from whoever came to the door. If people didn’t want to pay, his father would threaten or cajole them. If they tried to talk their way out of paying, his father would raise his voice. Sometimes he would curse at them like stray dogs. Such experiences were not the sort of thing that Tengo could share with friends. He could not help feeling like a kind of alien in the society of middle-class children of white-collar workers. He lived a different kind of life in a different world. Luckily, his grades were outstanding, as was his athletic ability. So even though he was an alien he was never an outcast. In most circumstances, he was treated with respect. But whenever the other boys invited him to go somewhere or to visit their homes on a Sunday he had to turn them down. Soon, they stopped asking.

Born the third son of a farming family in the hardscrabble Tohoku region, Tengo’s father had left home as soon as he could, joining a homesteaders’ group and crossing over to Manchuria in the nineteen-thirties. He had not believed the government’s claims that Manchuria was a paradise where the land was vast and rich. He knew enough to realize that “paradise” was not to be found anywhere. He was simply poor and hungry. The best he could hope for if he stayed at home was a life on the brink of starvation. In Manchuria, he and the other homesteaders were given some farming implements and small arms, and together they started cultivating the land. The soil was poor and rocky, and in winter everything froze. Sometimes stray dogs were all they had to eat. Even so, with government support for the first few years they managed to get by. Their lives were finally becoming more stable when, in August, 1945, the Soviet Union launched a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. Tengo’s father had been expecting this to happen, having been secretly informed of the impending situation by a certain official, a man he had become friendly with. The minute he heard the news that the Soviets had violated the border, he mounted his horse, galloped to the local train station, and boarded the second-to-last train for Da-lien. He was the only one among his farming companions to make it back to Japan before the end of the year.

After the war, Tengo’s father went to Tokyo and tried to make a living as a black marketeer and as a carpenter’s apprentice, but he could barely keep himself alive. He was working as a liquor-store deliveryman in Asakusa when he bumped into his old friend the official he had known in Manchuria. When the man learned that Tengo’s father was having a hard time finding a decent job, he offered to recommend him to a friend in the subscription department of NHK, and Tengo’s father gladly accepted. He knew almost nothing about NHK, but he was willing to try anything that promised a steady income.

At NHK, Tengo’s father carried out his duties with great gusto. His foremost strength was his perseverance in the face of adversity. To someone who had barely eaten a filling meal since birth, collecting NHK fees was not excruciating work. The most hostile curses hurled at him were nothing. Moreover, he felt satisfaction at belonging to an important organization, even as one of its lowest-ranking members. His performance and attitude were so outstanding that, after a year as a commissioned collector, he was taken directly into the ranks of the full-fledged employees, an almost unheard-of achievement at NHK. Soon, he was able to move into a corporation-owned apartment and join the company’s health-care plan. It was the greatest stroke of good fortune he had ever had in his life.

Young Tengo’s father never sang him lullabies, never read books to him at bedtime. Instead, he told the boy stories of his actual experiences. He was a good storyteller. His accounts of his childhood and youth were not exactly pregnant with meaning, but the details were lively. There were funny stories, moving stories, and violent stories. If a life can be measured by the color and variety of its episodes, Tengo’s father’s life had been rich in its own way, perhaps. But when his stories touched on the period after he became an NHK employee they suddenly lost all vitality. He had met a woman, married her, and had a child—Tengo. A few months after Tengo was born, his mother had fallen ill and died. His father had raised him alone after that, while working hard for NHK. The End. How he happened to meet Tengo’s mother and marry her, what kind of woman she was, what had caused her death, whether her death had been an easy one or she had suffered greatly—Tengo’s father told him almost nothing about such matters. If he tried asking, his father just evaded the questions. Most of the time, such questions put him in a foul mood. Not a single photograph of Tengo’s mother had survived.

Tengo fundamentally disbelieved his father’s story. He knew that his mother hadn’t died a few months after he was born. In his only memory of her, he was a year and a half old and she was standing by his crib in the arms of a man other than his father. His mother took off her blouse, dropped the straps of her slip, and let the man who was not his father suck on her breasts. Tengo slept beside them, his breathing audible. But, at the same time, he was not asleep. He was watching his mother.

This was Tengo’s photograph of his mother. The ten-second scene was burned into his brain with perfect clarity. It was the only concrete information he had about her, the one tenuous connection his mind could make with her. He and she were linked by this hypothetical umbilical cord. His father, however, had no idea that this vivid scene existed in Tengo’s memory, or that, like a cow in a meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of it to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his own secrets.

As an adult, Tengo often wondered if the young man sucking on his mother’s breasts in his vision was his biological father. This was because Tengo in no way resembled his father, the stellar NHK collections agent. Tengo was a tall, strapping man with a broad forehead, a narrow nose, and tightly balled ears. His father was short and squat and utterly unimpressive. He had a small forehead, a flat nose, and pointed ears like a horse’s. Where Tengo had a relaxed and generous look, his father appeared nervous and tightfisted. Comparing the two of them, people often openly remarked on their dissimilarity.

Still, it was not their physical features that made it difficult for Tengo to identify with his father but their psychological makeup. His father showed no sign at all of what might be called intellectual curiosity. True, having been born in poverty he had not had a decent education. Tengo felt a degree of pity for his father’s circumstances. But a basic desire to obtain knowledge—which Tengo assumed to be a more or less natural urge in people—was lacking in the man. He had a certain practical wisdom that enabled him to survive, but Tengo could discern no hint of a willingness in his father to deepen himself, to view a wider, larger world. Tengo’s father never seemed to suffer discomfort from the stagnant air of his cramped little life. Tengo never once saw him pick up a book. He had no interest in music or movies, and he never took a trip. The only thing that seemed to interest him was his collection route. He would make a map of the area, mark it with colored pens, and examine it whenever he had a spare moment, the way a biologist might study chromosomes.

Tengo, by contrast, was curious about everything. He absorbed knowledge from a broad range of fields with the efficiency of a power shovel scooping earth. He had been regarded as a math prodigy from early childhood, and he could solve high-school math problems by the time he was in third grade. Math was, for young Tengo, an effective means of retreat from his life with his father. In the mathematical world, he would walk down a long corridor, opening one numbered door after another. Each time a new spectacle unfolded before him, the ugly traces of the real world would simply disappear. As long as he was actively exploring that realm of infinite consistency, he was free.

While math was like a magnificent imaginary building for Tengo, literature was a vast magical forest. Math stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, but stories spread out before him, their sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In this forest there were no maps, no doorways. As Tengo got older, the forest of story began to exert an even stronger pull on his heart than the world of math. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape—as soon as he closed the book, he had to come back to the real world. But at some point he noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of math. Why was that? After much thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.

The one possible solution that Tengo was able to decipher from his readings was this one: My real father must be somewhere else. Like an unfortunate child in a Dickens novel, Tengo had perhaps been led by strange circumstances to be raised by this impostor. Such a possibility was both a nightmare and a great hope. After reading “Oliver Twist,” Tengo plowed through every Dickens volume in the library. As he travelled through Dickens’s stories, he steeped himself in reimagined versions of his own life. These fantasies grew ever longer and more complex. They followed a single pattern, but with infinite variations. In all of them, Tengo would tell himself that his father’s home was not where he belonged. He had been mistakenly locked in this cage, and someday his real parents would find him and rescue him. Then he would have the most beautiful, peaceful, and free Sundays imaginable.

Tengo’s father prided himself on his son’s excellent grades, and boasted of them to people in the neighborhood. At the same time, however, he showed a certain displeasure with Tengo’s brightness and talent. Often when Tengo was at his desk, studying, his father would interrupt him, ordering the boy to do chores or nagging him about his supposedly offensive behavior. The content of his father’s nagging was always the same: here he was, running himself ragged every day, covering huge distances and enduring people’s curses, while Tengo did nothing but take it easy all the time, living in comfort. “They had me working my tail off when I was your age, and my father and older brothers would beat me black and blue for anything at all. They never gave me enough food. They treated me like an animal. I don’t want you thinking you’re so special just because you got a few good grades.”

This man is envious of me, Tengo began to think at a certain point. He’s jealous, either of me as a person or of the life I’m leading. But would a father really feel jealousy toward his son? Tengo did not judge his father, but he could not help sensing a pathetic kind of meanness emanating from his words and deeds. It was not that Tengo’s father hated him as a person but, rather, that he hated something inside Tengo, something that he could not forgive.

When the train left Tokyo Station, Tengo took out the paperback that he had brought along. It was an anthology of short stories on the theme of travel and it included a tale called “Town of Cats,” a fantastical piece by a German writer with whom Tengo was not familiar. According to the book’s foreword, the story had been written in the period between the two World Wars.

In the story, a young man is travelling alone with no particular destination in mind. He rides the train and gets off at any stop that arouses his interest. He takes a room, sees the sights, and stays for as long as he likes. When he has had enough, he boards another train. He spends every vacation this way.

One day, he sees a lovely river from the train window. Gentle green hills line the meandering stream, and below them lies a pretty little town with an old stone bridge. The train stops at the town’s station, and the young man steps down with his bag. No one else gets off, and, as soon as he alights, the train departs.

No workers man the station, which must see very little activity. The young man crosses the bridge and walks into the town. All the shops are shuttered, the town hall deserted. No one occupies the desk at the town’s only hotel. The place seems totally uninhabited. Perhaps all the people are off napping somewhere. But it is only ten-thirty in the morning, far too early for that. Perhaps something has caused all the people to abandon the town. In any case, the next train will not come until the following morning, so he has no choice but to spend the night here. He wanders around the town to kill time.

In fact, this is a town of cats. When the sun starts to go down, many cats come trooping across the bridge—cats of all different kinds and colors. They are much larger than ordinary cats, but they are still cats. The young man is shocked by this sight. He rushes into the bell tower in the center of town and climbs to the top to hide. The cats go about their business, raising the shop shutters or seating themselves at their desks to start their day’s work. Soon, more cats come, crossing the bridge into town like the others. They enter the shops to buy things or go to the town hall to handle administrative matters or eat a meal at the hotel restaurant or drink beer at the tavern and sing lively cat songs. Because cats can see in the dark, they need almost no lights, but that particular night the glow of the full moon floods the town, enabling the young man to see every detail from his perch in the bell tower. When dawn approaches, the cats finish their work, close up the shops, and swarm back across the bridge.

By the time the sun comes up, the cats are gone, and the town is deserted again. The young man climbs down, picks one of the hotel beds for himself, and goes to sleep. When he gets hungry, he eats some bread and fish that have been left in the hotel kitchen. When darkness approaches, he hides in the bell tower again and observes the cats’ activities until dawn. Trains stop at the station before noon and in the late afternoon. No passengers alight, and no one boards, either. Still, the trains stop at the station for exactly one minute, then pull out again. He could take one of these trains and leave the creepy cat town behind. But he doesn’t. Being young, he has a lively curiosity and is ready for adventure. He wants to see more of this strange spectacle. If possible, he wants to find out when and how this place became a town of cats.

On his third night, a hubbub breaks out in the square below the bell tower. “Hey, do you smell something human?” one of the cats says. “Now that you mention it, I thought there was a funny smell the past few days,” another chimes in, twitching his nose. “Me, too,” yet another cat says. “That’s weird. There shouldn’t be any humans here,” someone adds. “No, of course not. There’s no way a human could get into this town of cats.” “But that smell is definitely here.”

The cats form groups and begin to search the town like bands of vigilantes. It takes them very little time to discover that the bell tower is the source of the smell. The young man hears their soft paws padding up the stairs. That’s it, they’ve got me! he thinks. His smell seems to have roused the cats to anger. Humans are not supposed to set foot in this town. The cats have big, sharp claws and white fangs. He has no idea what terrible fate awaits him if he is discovered, but he is sure that they will not let him leave the town alive.

Three cats climb to the top of the bell tower and sniff the air. “Strange,” one cat says, twitching his whiskers, “I smell a human, but there’s no one here.”

“It is strange,” a second cat says. “But there really isn’t anyone here. Let’s go and look somewhere else.”

The cats cock their heads, puzzled, then retreat down the stairs. The young man hears their footsteps fading into the dark of night. He breathes a sigh of relief, but he doesn’t understand what just happened. There was no way they could have missed him. But for some reason they didn’t see him. In any case, he decides that when morning comes he will go to the station and take the train out of this town. His luck can’t last forever.

The next morning, however, the train does not stop at the station. He watches it pass by without slowing down. The afternoon train does the same. He can see the engineer seated at the controls. But the train shows no sign of stopping. It is as though no one can see the young man waiting for a train—or even see the station itself. Once the afternoon train disappears down the track, the place grows quieter than ever. The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from.

Tengo read the story twice. The phrase “the place where he is meant to be lost” attracted his attention. He closed the book and let his eyes wander across the drab industrial scene passing by the train window. Soon afterward, he drifted off to sleep—not a long nap but a deep one. He woke covered in sweat. The train was moving along the southern coastline of the Boso Peninsula in midsummer.

One morning when he was in fifth grade, after much careful thinking, Tengo declared that he was going to stop making the rounds with his father on Sundays. He told his father that he wanted to use the time for studying and reading books and playing with other kids. He wanted to live a normal life like everybody else.

Tengo said what he needed to say, concisely and coherently.

His father, of course, blew up. He didn’t give a damn what other families did, he said. “We have our own way of doing things. And don’t you dare talk to me about a ‘normal life,’ Mr. Know-It-All. What do you know about a ‘normal life’?” Tengo did not try to argue with him. He merely stared back in silence, knowing that nothing he said would get through to his father. Finally, his father told him that if he wouldn’t listen then he couldn’t go on feeding him. Tengo should get the hell out.

Tengo did as he was told. He had made up his mind. He was not going to be afraid. Now that he had been given permission to leave his cage, he was more relieved than anything else. But there was no way that a ten-year-old boy could live on his own. When his class was dismissed at the end of the day, he confessed his predicament to his teacher. The teacher was a single woman in her mid-thirties, a fair-minded, warmhearted person. She heard Tengo out with sympathy, and that evening she took him back to his father’s place for a long talk.

Tengo was told to leave the room, so he was not sure what they said to each other, but finally his father had to sheathe his sword. However extreme his anger might be, he could not leave a ten-year-old boy to wander the streets alone. The duty of a parent to support his child was a matter of law.

As a result of the teacher’s talk with his father, Tengo was free to spend Sundays as he pleased. This was the first tangible right that he had ever won from his father. He had taken his first step toward freedom and independence.

At the reception desk of the sanatorium, Tengo gave his name and his father’s name.

The nurse asked, “Have you by any chance notified us of your intention to visit today?” There was a hard edge to her voice. A small woman, she wore metal-framed glasses, and her short hair had a touch of gray.

“No, it just occurred to me to come this morning and I hopped on a train,” Tengo answered honestly.

The nurse gave him a look of mild disgust. Then she said, “Visitors are supposed to notify us before they arrive to see a patient. We have our schedules to meet, and the wishes of the patient must also be taken into account.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“When was your last visit?”

“Two years ago.”

“Two years ago,” she said as she checked the list of visitors with a ballpoint pen in hand. “You mean to say that you have not made a single visit in two years?”

“That’s right,” Tengo said.

“According to our records, you are Mr. Kawana’s only relative.”

“That is correct.”

She glanced at Tengo, but she said nothing. Her eyes were not blaming him, just checking the facts. Apparently, Tengo’s case was not exceptional.

“At the moment, your father is in group rehabilitation. That will end in half an hour. You can see him then.”

“How is he doing?”

“Physically, he’s healthy. It’s in the other area that he has his ups and downs,” she said, tapping her temple with an index finger.

Tengo thanked her and went to wait in the lounge by the entrance, reading more of his book. A breeze passed through now and then, carrying the scent of the sea and the cooling sound of the pine windbreak outside. Cicadas clung to the branches of the trees, screeching their hearts out. Summer was at its height, but the cicadas seemed to know that it would not last long.

Eventually, the bespectacled nurse came to tell Tengo that he could see his father now. “I’ll show you to his room,” she said. Tengo got up from the sofa and, passing by a large mirror on the wall, realized for the first time what a sloppy outfit he was wearing: a Jeff Beck Japan Tour T-shirt under a faded dungaree shirt with mismatched buttons, chinos with specks of pizza sauce near one knee, a baseball cap—no way for a thirty-year-old son to dress on his first hospital visit to his father in two years. Nor did he have anything with him that might serve as a gift on such an occasion. No wonder the nurse had given him that look of disgust.

Tengo’s father was in his room, sitting in a chair by the open window, his hands on his knees. A nearby table held a potted plant with several delicate yellow flowers. The floor was made of some soft material to prevent injury in case of a fall. Tengo did not realize at first that the old man seated by the window was his father. He had shrunk—“shrivelled up” might be more accurate. His hair was shorter and as white as a frost-covered lawn. His cheeks were sunken, which may have been why the hollows of his eyes looked much bigger than they had before. Three deep creases marked his forehead. His eyebrows were extremely long and thick, and his pointed ears were larger than ever; they looked like bat wings. From a distance, he seemed less like a human being than like some kind of creature, a rat or a squirrel—a creature with some cunning. He was, however, Tengo’s father—or, rather, the wreckage of Tengo’s father. The father that Tengo remembered was a tough, hardworking man. Introspection and imagination might have been foreign to him, but he had his own moral code and a strong sense of purpose. The man Tengo saw before him was nothing but an empty shell.

“Mr. Kawana!” the nurse said to Tengo’s father in the crisp, clear tone she must have been trained to use when addressing patients. “Mr. Kawana! Look who’s here! It’s your son, here from Tokyo!”

Tengo’s father turned in his direction. His expressionless eyes made Tengo think of two empty swallow’s nests hanging from the eaves.

“Hello,” Tengo said.

His father said nothing. Instead, he looked straight at Tengo as if he were reading a bulletin written in a foreign language.

“Dinner starts at six-thirty,” the nurse said to Tengo. “Please feel free to stay until then.”

Tengo hesitated for a moment after the nurse left, and then approached his father, sitting down in the chair opposite his—a faded, cloth-covered chair, its wooden parts scarred from long use. His father’s eyes followed his movements.

“How are you?” Tengo asked.

“Fine, thank you,” his father said formally.

Tengo did not know what to say after that. Toying with the third button of his dungaree shirt, he turned his gaze toward the pine trees outside and then back again to his father.

“You have come from Tokyo, is it?” his father asked.

“Yes, from Tokyo.”

“You must have come by express train.”

“That’s right,” Tengo said. “As far as Tateyama. Then I transferred to a local for the trip here to Chikura.”

“You’ve come to swim?” his father asked.

“I’m Tengo. Tengo Kawana. Your son.”

The wrinkles in his father’s forehead deepened. “A lot of people tell lies because they don’t want to pay their NHK subscription fee.”

“Father!” Tengo called out to him. He had not spoken the word in a very long time. “I’m Tengo. Your son.”

“I don’t have a son,” his father declared.

“You don’t have a son,” Tengo repeated mechanically.

His father nodded.

“So what am I?” Tengo asked.

“You’re nothing,” his father said with two short shakes of the head.

Tengo caught his breath. He could find no words. Nor did his father have any more to say. Each sat in silence, searching through his own tangled thoughts. Only the cicadas sang without confusion, at top volume.

He may be speaking the truth, Tengo thought. His memory may have been destroyed, but his words are probably true.

“What do you mean?” Tengo asked.

“You are nothing,” his father repeated, his voice devoid of emotion. “You were nothing, you are nothing, and you will be nothing.”

Tengo wanted to get up from his chair, walk to the station, and go back to Tokyo then and there. But he could not stand up. He was like the young man who travelled to the town of cats. He had curiosity. He wanted a clearer answer. There was danger lurking, of course. But if he let this opportunity escape he would have no chance to learn the secret about himself. Tengo arranged and rearranged words in his head until at last he was ready to speak them. This was the question he had wanted to ask since childhood but could never quite manage to get out: “What you’re saying, then, is that you are not my biological father, correct? You are telling me that there is no blood connection between us, is that it?”

“Stealing radio waves is an unlawful act,” his father said, looking into Tengo’s eyes. “It is no different from stealing money or valuables, don’t you think?”

“You’re probably right.” Tengo decided to agree for now.

“Radio waves don’t come falling out of the sky for free like rain or snow,” his father said.

Tengo stared at his father’s hands. They were lined up neatly on his knees. Small, dark hands, they looked tanned to the bone by long years of outdoor work.

“My mother didn’t really die of an illness when I was little, did she?” Tengo asked slowly.

His father did not answer. His expression did not change, and his hands did not move. His eyes focussed on Tengo as if they were observing something unfamiliar.

“My mother left you. She left you and me behind. She went off with another man. Am I wrong?”

His father nodded. “It is not good to steal radio waves. You can’t get away with it, just doing whatever you want.”

This man understands my questions perfectly well. He just doesn’t want to answer them directly, Tengo thought.

“Father,” Tengo addressed him. “You may not actually be my father, but I’ll call you that for now because I don’t know what else to call you. To tell you the truth, I’ve never liked you. Maybe I’ve even hated you most of the time. You know that, don’t you? But, even supposing that there is no blood connection between us, I no longer have any reason to hate you. I don’t know if I can go so far as to be fond of you, but I think that at least I should be able to understand you better than I do now. I have always wanted to know the truth about who I am and where I came from. That’s all. If you will tell me the truth here and now, I won’t hate you anymore. In fact, I would welcome the opportunity not to have to hate you any longer.”

Tengo’s father went on staring at him with expressionless eyes, but Tengo felt that he might be seeing the tiniest gleam of light somewhere deep within those empty swallow’s nests.

“I am nothing,” Tengo said. “You are right. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I have no connection to anything. The closest thing I have to a family is you, but you hold on to the secret. Meanwhile, your memory deteriorates day by day. Along with your memory, the truth about me is being lost. Without the aid of truth, I am nothing, and I can never be anything. You are right about that, too.”

“Knowledge is a precious social asset,” his father said in a monotone, though his voice was somewhat quieter than before, as if someone had reached over and turned down the volume. “It is an asset that must be amassed in abundant stockpiles and utilized with the utmost care. It must be handed down to the next generation in fruitful forms. For that reason, too, NHK needs to have all your subscription fees and—”

He cut his father short. “What kind of person was my mother? Where did she go? What happened to her?”

His father brought his incantation to a halt, his lips shut tight.

His voice softer now, Tengo went on, “A vision often comes to me—the same one, over and over. I suspect it’s not so much a vision as a memory of something that actually happened. I’m one and a half years old, and my mother is next to me. She and a young man are holding each other. The man is not you. Who he is I have no idea, but he is definitely not you.”

His father said nothing, but his eyes were clearly seeing something else—something not there.

“I wonder if I might ask you to read me something,” Tengo’s father said in formal tones after a long pause. “My eyesight has deteriorated to the point where I can’t read books anymore. That bookcase has some books. Choose any one you like.”

Tengo got up to scan the spines of the volumes in the bookcase. Most of them were historical novels set in ancient times when samurai roamed the land. Tengo couldn’t bring himself to read his father some musty old book full of archaic language.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather read a story about a town of cats,” Tengo said. “It’s in a book that I brought to read myself.”

“A story about a town of cats,” his father said, savoring the words. “Please read that to me, if it is not too much trouble.”

Tengo looked at his watch. “It’s no trouble at all. I have plenty of time before my train leaves. It’s an odd story. I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

Tengo pulled out his paperback and started reading slowly, in a clear, audible voice, taking two or three breaks along the way to catch his breath. He glanced at his father whenever he stopped reading but saw no discernible reaction on his face. Was he enjoying the story? He could not tell.

“Does that town of cats have television?” his father asked when Tengo had finished.

“The story was written in Germany in the nineteen-thirties. They didn’t have television yet back then. They did have radio, though.”

“Did the cats build the town? Or did people build it before the cats came to live there?” his father asked, speaking as if to himself.

“I don’t know,” Tengo said. “But it does seem to have been built by human beings. Maybe the people left for some reason—say, they all died in an epidemic of some sort—and the cats came to live there.”

His father nodded. “When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it. That’s what everybody does.”

“That’s what everybody does?”

“Exactly.”

“What kind of vacuum are you filling?”

His father scowled. Then he said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “Don’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” Tengo said.

His father’s nostrils flared. One eyebrow rose slightly. “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

Tengo narrowed his eyes, trying to read the man’s expression. Never once had his father employed such odd, suggestive language. He always spoke in concrete, practical terms.

“I see. So you are filling some kind of vacuum,” Tengo said. “All right, then, who is going to fill the vacuum that you have left behind?”

“You,” his father declared, raising an index finger and thrusting it straight at Tengo. “Isn’t it obvious? I have been filling the vacuum that somebody else made, so you will fill the vacuum that I have made.”

“The way the cats filled the town after the people were gone.”

“Right,” his father said. Then he stared vacantly at his own outstretched index finger as if at some mysterious, misplaced object.

Tengo sighed. “So, then, who is my father?”

“Just a vacuum. Your mother joined her body with a vacuum and gave birth to you. I filled that vacuum.”

Having said that much, his father closed his eyes and closed his mouth.

“And you raised me after she left. Is that what you’re saying?”

After a ceremonious clearing of his throat, his father said, as if trying to explain a simple truth to a slow-witted child, “That is why I said, ‘If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.’ ”

Tengo folded his hands in his lap and looked straight into his father’s face. This man is no empty shell, he thought. He is a flesh-and-blood human being with a narrow, stubborn soul, surviving in fits and starts on this patch of land by the sea. He has no choice but to coexist with the vacuum that is slowly spreading inside him. Eventually, that vacuum will swallow up whatever memories are left. It is only a matter of time.

Tengo said goodbye to his father just before 6 P.M. While he waited for the taxi to come, they sat across from each other by the window, saying nothing. Tengo had many more questions he wanted to ask, but he knew that he would get no answers. The sight of his father’s tightly clenched lips told him that. If you couldn’t understand something without an explanation, you couldn’t understand it with an explanation. As his father had said.

When the time for him to leave drew near, Tengo said, “You told me a lot today. It was indirect and often hard to grasp, but it was probably as honest and open as you could make it. I should be grateful for that.”

Still his father said nothing, his eyes fixed on the view like a soldier on guard duty, determined not to miss the signal flare sent up by a savage tribe on a distant hill. Tengo tried looking out along his father’s line of vision, but all that was out there was the pine grove, tinted by the coming sunset.

“I’m sorry to say it, but there is virtually nothing I can do for you—other than to hope that the process forming a vacuum inside you is a painless one. I’m sure you have suffered a lot. You loved my mother as deeply as you knew how. I do get that sense. But she left, and that must have been hard on you—like living in an empty town. Still, you raised me in that empty town.”

A pack of crows cut across the sky, cawing. Tengo stood up, went over to his father, and put his hand on his shoulder. “Goodbye, Father. I’ll come again soon.”

As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday” (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath.

Yesterday

Is two days before tomorrow,

The day after two days ago.

This is how it began, as I recall, but I haven’t heard it for a long time and I’m not positive that’s how it went. From start to finish, though, Kitaru’s lyrics were almost meaningless, nonsense that had nothing to do with the original words. That familiar lovely, melancholy melody paired with the breezy Kansai dialect—which you might call the opposite of pathos—made for a strange combination, a bold denial of anything constructive. At least, that’s how it sounded to me. At the time, I just listened and shook my head. I was able to laugh it off, but I also read a kind of hidden import in it.

I first met Kitaru at a coffee shop near the main gate of Waseda University, where we worked part time, I in the kitchen and Kitaru as a waiter. We used to talk a lot during downtime at the shop. We were both twenty, our birthdays only a week apart.

“Kitaru is an unusual last name,” I said one day.

“Yeah, for sure,” Kitaru replied in his heavy Kansai accent.

“The Lotte baseball team had a pitcher with the same name.”

“The two of us aren’t related. Not so common a name, though, so who knows? Maybe there’s a connection somewhere.”

I was a sophomore at Waseda then, in the literature department. Kitaru had failed the entrance exam and was attending a prep course to cram for the retake. He’d failed the exam twice, actually, but you wouldn’t have guessed it by the way he acted. He didn’t seem to put much effort into studying. When he was free, he read a lot, but nothing related to the exam—a biography of Jimi Hendrix, books of shogi problems, “Where Did the Universe Come From?,” and the like. He told me that he commuted to the cram school from his parents’ place in Ota Ward, in Tokyo.

“Ota Ward?” I asked, astonished. “But I was sure you were from Kansai.”

“No way. Denenchofu, born and bred.”

This really threw me.

“Then how come you speak Kansai dialect?” I asked.

“I acquired it. Just made up my mind to learn it.”

“Acquired it?”

“Yeah, I studied hard, see? Verbs, nouns, accent—the whole nine yards. Same as studying English or French. Went to Kansai for training, even.”

So there were people who studied Kansai dialect as if it were a foreign language? That was news to me. It made me realize all over again how huge Tokyo was, and how many things there were that I didn’t know. Reminded me of the novel “Sanshiro,” a typical country-boy-bumbles-his-way-around-the-big-city story.

“As a kid, I was a huge Hanshin Tigers fan,” Kitaru explained. “Went to their games whenever they played in Tokyo. But if I sat in the Hanshin bleachers and spoke with a Tokyo dialect nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. Couldn’t be part of the community, y’know? So I figured, I gotta learn Kansai dialect, and I worked like a dog to do just that.”

“That was your motivation?” I could hardly believe it.

“Right. That’s how much the Tigers mean to me,” Kitaru said. “Now Kansai dialect’s all I speak—at school, at home, even when I talk in my sleep. My dialect’s near perfect, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. I was positive you were from Kansai,” I said.

“If I’d put as much effort into studying for the entrance exams as I did into studying Kansai dialect, I wouldn’t be a two-time loser like I am now.”

He had a point. Even his self-directed putdown was kind of Kansai-like.

“So where’re you from?” he asked.

“Kansai. Near Kobe,” I said.

“Near Kobe? Where?”

“Ashiya,” I replied.

“Wow, nice place. Why didn’t you say so from the start?”

I explained. When people asked me where I was from and I said Ashiya, they always assumed that my family was wealthy. But there were all types in Ashiya. My family, for one, wasn’t particularly well off. My dad worked for a pharmaceutical company and my mom was a librarian. Our house was small and our car a cream-colored Corolla. So when people asked me where I was from I always said “near Kobe,” so they didn’t get any preconceived ideas about me.

“Man, sounds like you and me are the same,” Kitaru said. “My address is Denenchofu—a pretty high-class place—but my house is in the shabbiest part of town. Shabby house as well. You should come over sometime. You’ll be, like,Wha’? This is Denenchofu? No way! But worrying about something like that makes no sense, yeah? It’s just an address. I do the opposite—hit ’em right up front with the fact that I’m from Den-en-cho-fu. Like, how d’you like that, huh?”

I was impressed. And after this we became friends.

Until I graduated from high school, I spoke nothing but Kansai dialect. But all it took was a month in Tokyo for me to become completely fluent in Tokyo standard. I was kind of surprised that I could adapt so quickly. Maybe I have a chameleon type of personality. Or maybe my sense of language is more advanced than most people’s. Either way, no one believed now that I was actually from Kansai.

Another reason I stopped using Kansai dialect was that I wanted to become a totally different person.

When I moved from Kansai to Tokyo to start college, I spent the whole bullet-train ride mentally reviewing my eighteen years and realized that almost everything that had happened to me was pretty embarrassing. I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it—it was so pathetic. The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories—I did. A handful of happy experiences. But, if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea). Anyway, I wanted to get rid of it all and start a new life in Tokyo as a brand-new person. Jettisoning Kansai dialect was a practical (as well as symbolic) method of accomplishing this. Because, in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people. At least that’s the way it seemed to me at eighteen.

“Embarrassing? What was so embarrassing?” Kitaru asked me.

“You name it.”

“Didn’t get along with your folks?”

“We get along O.K.,” I said. “But it was still embarrassing. Just being with them made me feel embarrassed.”

“You’re weird, y’know that?” Kitaru said. “What’s so embarrassing about being with your folks? I have a good time with mine.”

I couldn’t really explain it. What’s so bad about having a cream-colored Corolla? I couldn’t say. My parents weren’t interested in spending money for the sake of appearances, that’s all.

“My parents are on my case all the time ’cause I don’t study enough. I hate it, but whaddaya gonna do? That’s their job. You gotta look past that, y’know?”

“You’re pretty easygoing, aren’t you?” I said.

“You got a girl?” Kitaru asked.

“Not right now.”

“But you had one before?”

“Until a little while ago.”

“You guys broke up?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Why’d you break up?”

“It’s a long story. I don’t want to get into it.”

“She let you go all the way?”

I shook my head. “No, not all the way.”

“That’s why you broke up?”

I thought about it. “That’s part of it.”

“But she let you get to third base?”

“Rounding third base.”

“How far’d you go, exactly?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“Is that one of those embarrassing things you mentioned?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Man, complicated life you got there,” Kitaru said.

The first time I heard Kitaru sing “Yesterday” with those crazy lyrics he was in the bath at his house in Denenchofu (which, despite his description, was not a shabby house in a shabby neighborhood but an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood, an older house, but bigger than my house in Ashiya, not a standout in any way—and, incidentally, the car in the driveway was a navy-blue Golf, a recent model). Whenever Kitaru came home, he immediately dropped everything and jumped in the bath. And, once he was in the tub, he stayed there forever. So I would often lug a little round stool to the adjacent changing room and sit there, talking to him through the sliding door that was open an inch or so. That was the only way to avoid listening to his mother drone on and on (mostly complaints about her weird son and how he needed to study more).

“Those lyrics don’t make any sense,” I told him. “It just sounds like you’re making fun of the song ‘Yesterday.’ ”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m not making fun of it. Even if I was, you gotta remember that John loved nonsense and word games. Right?”

“But Paul’s the one who wrote the words and music for ‘Yesterday.’ ”

“You sure about that?”

“Absolutely,” I declared. “Paul wrote the song and recorded it by himself in the studio with a guitar. A string quartet was added later, but the other Beatles weren’t involved at all. They thought it was too wimpy for a Beatles song.”

“Really? I’m not up on that kind of privileged information.”

“It’s not privileged information. It’s a well-known fact,” I said.

“Who cares? Those are just details,” Kitaru’s voice said calmly from a cloud of steam. “I’m singing in the bath in my own house. Not putting out a record or anything. I’m not violating any copyright, or bothering a soul. You’ve got no right to complain.”

And he launched into the chorus, his voice carrying loud and clear. He hit the high notes especially well. I could hear him lightly splashing the bathwater as an accompaniment. I probably should have sung along to encourage him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. Sitting there, talking through a glass door to keep him company while he soaked in the tub for an hour wasn’t all that much fun.

“But how can you spend so long soaking in the bath?” I asked. “Doesn’t your body get all swollen?”

“When I soak in a bath for a long time, all kinds of good ideas come to me,” Kitaru said.

“You mean like those lyrics to ‘Yesterday’?”

“Well, that’d be one of them,” Kitaru said.

“Instead of spending so much time thinking up ideas in the bath, shouldn’t you be studying for the entrance exam?” I asked.

“Jeez, aren’t you a downer. My mom says exactly the same thing. Aren’t you a little young to be, like, the voice of wisdom or something?”

“But you’ve been cramming for two years. Aren’t you getting tired of it?”

“For sure. Of course I wanna be in college as soon as I can.”

“Then why not study harder?”

“Yeah—well,” he said, drawing the words out. “If I could do that, I’d be doing it already.”

“College is a drag,” I said. “I was totally disappointed once I got in. But not getting in would be even more of a drag.”

“Fair enough,” Kitaru said. “I got no comeback for that.”

“So why don’t you study?”

“Lack of motivation,” he said.

“Motivation?” I said. “Shouldn’t being able to go out on dates with your girlfriend be good motivation?”

There was a girl Kitaru had known since they were in elementary school together. A childhood girlfriend, you could say. They’d been in the same grade in school, but unlike him she had got into Sophia University straight out of high school. She was now majoring in French literature and had joined the tennis club. He’d shown me a photograph of her, and she was stunning. A beautiful figure and a lively expression. But the two of them weren’t seeing each other much these days. They’d talked it over and decided that it was better not to date until Kitaru had passed the entrance exams, so that he could focus on his studies. Kitaru had been the one who suggested this. “O.K.,” she’d said, “if that’s what you want.” They talked on the phone a lot but met at most once a week, and those meetings were more like interviews than regular dates. They’d have tea and catch up on what they’d each been doing. They’d hold hands and exchange a brief kiss, but that was as far as it went.

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant-looking enough. He was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything, you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth this over-all positive effect collapsed like a sandcastle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming; even for me it was, at first, a little too much to handle.

“Hey, Tanimura, aren’t you lonely without a girlfriend?” Kitaru asked me the next day.

“I don’t deny it,” I told him.

“Then how about you go out with my girl?”

I couldn’t understand what he meant. “What do you mean—go out with her?”

“She’s a great girl. Pretty, honest, smart like all getout. You go out with her, you won’t regret it. I guarantee it.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” I said. “But why would I go out with your girlfriend? It doesn’t make sense.”

“ ’Cause you’re a good guy,” Kitaru said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t suggest it. Erika and I have spent almost our whole lives together so far. We sort of naturally became a couple, and everybody around us approved. Our friends, our parents, our teachers. A tight little couple, always together.”

Kitaru clasped his hands to illustrate.

“If we’d both gone straight into college, our lives would’ve been all warm and fuzzy, but I blew the entrance exam big time, and here we are. I’m not sure why, exactly, but things kept on getting worse. I’m not blaming anyone for that—it’s all my fault.”

I listened to him in silence.

“So I kinda split myself in two,” Kitaru said. He pulled his hands apart.

“How so?” I asked.

He stared at his palms for a moment and then spoke. “What I mean is part of me’s, like, worried, y’know? I mean, I’m going to some fricking cram school, studying for the fricking entrance exams, while Erika’s having a ball in college. Playing tennis, doing whatever. She’s got new friends, is probably dating some new guy, for all I know. When I think of all that, I feel left behind. Like my mind’s in a fog. You know what I mean?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“But another part of me is, like—relieved? If we’d just kept going like we were, with no problems or anything, a nice couple smoothly sailing through life, it’s like . . . we graduate from college, get married, we’re this wonderful married couple everybody’s happy about, we have the typical two kids, put ’em in the good old Denenchofu elementary school, go out to the Tama River banks on Sundays, Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da . . . I’m not saying that kinda life’s bad. But I wonder, y’know, if life should really be that easy, that comfortable. It might be better to go our separate ways for a while, and if we find out that we really can’t get along without each other, then we get back together.”

“So you’re saying that things being smooth and comfortable is a problem. Is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

“But why do I have to go out with your girlfriend?” I asked.

“I figure, if she’s gonna go out with other guys, it’s better if it’s you. ’Cause I know you. And you can gimme, like, updates and stuff.”

That didn’t make any sense to me, though I admit I was interested in the idea of meeting Erika. I also wanted to find out why a beautiful girl like her would want to go out with a weird character like Kitaru. I’ve always been a little shy around new people, but I never lack curiosity.

“How far have you gone with her?” I asked.

“You mean sex?” Kitaru said.

“Yeah. Have you gone all the way?”

Kitaru shook his head. “I just couldn’t, see? I’ve known her since she was a kid, and it’s kinda embarrassing, y’know, to act like we’re just starting out, and take her clothes off, fondle her, touch her, whatever. If it were some other girl, I don’t think I’d have a problem, but putting my hand in her underpants, even just thinking about doing it with her—I dunno—it just seems wrong. You know?”

I didn’t.

“I can’t explain it well,” Kitaru said. “Like, when you’re jerking off, you picture some actual girl, yeah?”

“I suppose,” I said.

“But I can’t picture Erika. It’s like doing that’s wrong, y’know? So when I do it I think about some other girl. Somebody I don’t really like that much. Whaddya think?”

I thought it over but couldn’t reach any conclusion. Other people’s masturbation habits were beyond me. There were things about my own that I couldn’t fathom.

“Anyway, let’s all get together once, the three of us,” Kitaru said. “Then you can think it over.”

The three of us—me, Kitaru, and his girlfriend, whose full name was Erika Kuritani—met on a Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop near Denenchofu Station. She was almost as tall as Kitaru, nicely tanned, and decked out in a neatly ironed short-sleeved white blouse and navy-blue miniskirt. Like the perfect model of a respectable uptown college girl. She was as attractive as in her photograph, but what really drew me in person was less her looks than the kind of effortless vitality that seemed to radiate from her. She was the opposite of Kitaru, who paled a bit in comparison.

“I’m really happy that Aki-kun has a friend,” Erika told me. Kitaru’s first name was Akiyoshi. She was the only person in the world who called him Aki-kun.

“Don’t exaggerate. I got tons of friends,” Kitaru said.

“No, you don’t,” Erika said. “A person like you can’t make friends. You were born in Tokyo, yet all you speak is Kansai dialect, and every time you open your mouth it’s one annoying thing after another about the Hanshin Tigers or shogi moves. There’s no way a weird person like you can get along well with normal people.”

“Well, if you’re gonna get into that, this guy’s pretty weird, too.” Kitaru pointed at me. “He’s from Ashiya but only speaks Tokyo dialect.”

“That’s much more common,” Erika said. “At least more common than the opposite.”

“Hold on, now—that’s cultural discrimination,” Kitaru said. “Cultures are all equal, y’know. Tokyo dialect’s no better than Kansai.”

“Maybe they are equal,” Erika said, “but since the Meiji Restoration the way people speak in Tokyo has been the standard for spoken Japanese. I mean, has anyone ever translated ‘Franny and Zooey’ into Kansai dialect?”

“If they did, I’d buy it, for sure,” Kitaru said.

I probably would, too, I thought, but kept quiet.

Wisely, instead of being dragged deeper into that discussion, Erika Kuritani changed the subject.

“There’s a girl in my tennis club who’s from Ashiya, too,” she said, turning to me. “Eiko Sakurai. Do you happen to know her?”

“I do,” I said. Eiko Sakurai was a tall, gangly girl, whose parents operated a large golf course. Stuck-up, flat-chested, with a funny-looking nose and a none too wonderful personality. Tennis was the one thing she’d always been good at. If I never saw her again, it would be too soon for me.

“He’s a nice guy, and he hasn’t got a girlfriend right now,” Kitaru said to Erika. “His looks are O.K., he has good manners, and he knows all kinds of things. He’s neat and clean, as you can see, and doesn’t have any terrible diseases. A promising young man, I’d say.”

“All right,” Erika said. “There are some really cute new members of our club I’d be happy to introduce him to.”

“Nah, that’s not what I mean,” Kitaru said. “Could you go out with him? I’m not in college yet and I can’t go out with you the way I’d like to. Instead of me, you could go out with him. And then I wouldn’t have to worry.”

“What do you mean, you wouldn’t have to worry?” Erika asked.

“I mean, like, I know both of you, and I’d feel better if you went out with him instead of some guy I’ve never laid eyes on.”

Erika stared at Kitaru as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. Finally, she spoke. “So you’re saying it’s O.K. for me to go out with another guy if it’s Tanimura-kun here? You’re seriously suggesting we go out, on a date?”

“Hey, it’s not such a terrible idea, is it? Or are you already going out with some other guy?”

“No, there’s no one else,” Erika said in a quiet voice.

“Then why not go out with him? It can be a kinda cultural exchange.”

“Cultural exchange,” Erika repeated. She looked at me.

It didn’t seem as though anything I said would help, so I kept silent. I held my coffee spoon in my hand, studying the design on it, like a museum curator scrutinizing an artifact from an Egyptian tomb.

“Cultural exchange? What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked Kitaru.

“Like, bringing in another viewpoint might not be so bad for us . . .”

“That’s your idea of cultural exchange?”

“Yeah, what I mean is . . .”

“All right,” Erika Kuritani said firmly. If there had been a pencil nearby, I might have picked it up and snapped it in two. “If you think we should do it, Aki-kun, then O.K. Let’s do a cultural exchange.”

She took a sip of tea, returned the cup to the saucer, turned to me, and smiled. “Since Aki-kun has recommended we do this, Tanimura-kun, let’s go on a date. Sounds like fun. When are you free?”

I couldn’t speak. Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems.

Erika took a red leather planner from her bag, opened it, and checked her schedule. “How is this Saturday?” she asked.

“I have no plans,” I said.

“Saturday it is, then. Where shall we go?”

“He likes movies,” Kitaru told her. “His dream is to write screenplays someday.”

“Then let’s go see a movie. What kind of movie should we see? I’ll let you decide that, Tanimura-kun. I don’t like horror films, but, other than that, anything’s fine.”

“She’s really a scaredy-cat,” Kitaru said to me. “When we were kids and went to the haunted house at Korakuen, she had to hold my hand and—”

“After the movie let’s have a nice meal together,” Erika said, cutting him off. She wrote her phone number down on a sheet from her notebook and passed it to me. “When you decide the time and place, could you give me a call?”

I didn’t have a phone back then (this was long before cell phones were even a glimmer on the horizon), so I gave her the number for the coffee shop where Kitaru and I worked. I glanced at my watch.

“I’m sorry but I’ve got to get going,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. “I have this report I have to finish up by tomorrow.”

“Can’t it wait?” Kitaru said. “We only just got here. Why don’t you stay so we can talk some more? There’s a great noodle shop right around the corner.”

Erika didn’t express an opinion. I put the money for my coffee on the table and stood up. “It’s an important report,” I explained, “so I really can’t put it off.” Actually, it didn’t matter all that much.

“I’ll call you tomorrow or the day after,” I told Erika.

“I’ll be looking forward to it,” she said, a wonderful smile rising to her lips. A smile that, to me at least, seemed a little too good to be true.

I left the coffee shop and as I walked to the station I wondered what the hell I was doing. Brooding over how things had turned out—after everything had already been decided—was another of my chronic problems.

That Saturday, Erika and I met in Shibuya and saw a Woody Allen film set in New York. Somehow I’d got the sense that she might be fond of Woody Allen movies. And I was pretty sure that Kitaru had never taken her to see one. Luckily, it was a good movie, and we were both feeling cheerful when we left the theatre.

We strolled around the twilight streets for a while, then went to a small Italian place in Sakuragaoka and had pizza and Chianti. It was a casual, moderately priced restaurant. Subdued lighting, candles on the tables. (Most Italian restaurants at the time had candles on the tables and checked gingham tablecloths.) We talked about all kinds of things, the sort of conversation you’d expect two college sophomores on a first date to have (assuming you could actually call this a date). The movie we’d just seen, our college life, hobbies. We enjoyed talking more than I’d expected, and she even laughed out loud a couple of times. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I seem to have a knack for getting girls to laugh.

“I heard from Aki-kun that you broke up with your high-school girlfriend not long ago?” Erika asked me.

“Yeah,” I replied. “We went out for almost three years, but it didn’t work out. Unfortunately.”

“Aki-kun said things didn’t work out with her because of sex. That she didn’t—how should I put it?—give you what you wanted?”

“That was part of it. But not all. If I’d really loved her, I think I could have been patient. If I’d been sure that I loved her, I mean. But I wasn’t.”

Erika nodded.

“Even if we’d gone all the way, things most likely would have ended up the same,” I said. “I think it was inevitable.”

“Is it hard on you?” she asked.

“Is what hard?”

“Suddenly being on your own after being a couple.”

“Sometimes,” I said honestly.

“But maybe going through that kind of tough, lonely experience is necessary when you’re young? Part of the process of growing up?”

“You think so?”

“The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grow stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter.”

I tried to imagine growth rings inside me. But the only thing I could picture was a leftover slice of Baumkuchen cake, the kind with treelike rings inside it.

“I agree that people need that sort of period in their lives,” I said. “It’s even better if they know that it’ll end someday.”

She smiled. “Don’t worry. I know you’ll meet somebody nice soon.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Erika mulled over something while I helped myself to the pizza.

“Tanimura-kun, I wanted to ask your advice on something. Is it O.K.?”

“Sure,” I said. This was another problem I often had to deal with: people I’d just met wanting my advice about something important. And I was pretty sure that what Erika wanted my advice about wasn’t very pleasant.

“I’m confused,” she began.

Her eyes shifted back and forth, like those of a cat in search of something.

“I’m sure you know this already, but though Aki-kun’s in his second year of cramming for the entrance exams, he barely studies. He skips exam-prep school a lot, too. So I’m sure he’ll fail again next year. If he aimed for a lower-tier school, he could get in somewhere, but he has his heart set on Waseda. He doesn’t listen to me, or to his parents. It’s become like an obsession for him. . . . But if he really feels that way he should study hard so that he can pass the Waseda exam, and he doesn’t.”

“Why doesn’t he study more?”

“He truly believes that he’ll pass the entrance exam if luck is on his side,” Erika said. “That studying is a waste of time.” She sighed and went on, “In elementary school he was always at the top of his class academically. But once he got to junior high his grades started to slide. He was a bit of a child prodigy—his personality just isn’t suited to the daily grind of studying. He’d rather go off and do crazy things on his own. I’m the exact opposite. I’m not all that bright, but I always buckle down and get the job done.”

I hadn’t studied very hard myself and had got into college on the first try. Maybe luck had been on my side.

“I’m very fond of Aki-kun,” she continued. “He’s got a lot of wonderful qualities. But sometimes it’s hard for me to go along with his extreme way of thinking. Take this thing with Kansai dialect. Why does somebody who was born and raised in Tokyo go to the trouble of learning Kansai dialect and speak it all the time? I don’t get it, I really don’t. At first I thought it was a joke, but it isn’t. He’s dead serious.”

“I think he wants to have a different personality, to be somebody different from who he’s been up till now,” I said.

“That’s why he only speaks Kansai dialect?”

“I agree with you that it’s a radical way of dealing with it.”

Erika picked up a slice of pizza and bit off a piece the size of a large postage stamp. She chewed it thoughtfully before she spoke.

“Tanimura-kun, I’m asking this because I don’t have anyone else to ask. You don’t mind?”

“Of course not,” I said. What else could I say?

“As a general rule,” she said, “when a guy and a girl go out for a long time and get to know each other really well, the guy has a physical interest in the girl, right?”

“As a general rule, I’d say so, yes.”

“If they kiss, he’ll want to go further?”

“Normally, sure.”

“You feel that way, too?”

“Of course,” I said.

“But Aki-kun doesn’t. When we’re alone, he doesn’t want to go any further.”

It took a while for me to choose the right words. “That’s a personal thing,” I said finally. “People have different ways of getting what they want. Kitaru likes you a lot—that’s a given—but your relationship is so close and comfortable he may not be able to take things to the next level, the way most people do.”

“You really think so?”

I shook my head. “To tell the truth, I don’t really understand it. I’ve never experienced it myself. I’m just saying that could be one possibility.”

“Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t have any sexual desire for me.”

“I’m sure he does. But it might be a little embarrassing for him to admit it.”

“But we’re twenty, adults already. Old enough not to be embarrassed.”

“Some people might mature a little faster than others,” I said.

Erika thought about this. She seemed to be the type who always tackles things head on.

“I think Kitaru is honestly seeking something,” I went on. “In his own way, at his own pace. It’s just that I don’t think he’s grasped yet what it is. That’s why he can’t make any progress. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s not easy to look for it.”

Erika raised her head and stared me right in the eye. The candle flame was reflected in her dark eyes, a small, brilliant point of light. It was so beautiful I had to look away.

“Of course, you know him much better than I do,” I averred.

She sighed again.

“Actually, I’m seeing another guy besides Aki-kun,” she said. “A boy in my tennis club who’s a year ahead of me.”

It was my turn to remain silent.

“I truly love Aki-kun, and I don’t think I could ever feel the same way about anybody else. Whenever I’m away from him I get this terrible ache in my chest, always in the same spot. It’s true. There’s a place in my heart reserved just for him. But at the same time I have this strong urge inside me to try something else, to come into contact with all kinds of people. Call it curiosity, a thirst to know more. It’s a natural emotion and I can’t suppress it, no matter how much I try.”

I pictured a healthy plant outgrowing the pot it had been planted in.

“When I say I’m confused, that’s what I mean,” Erika said.

“Then you should tell Kitaru exactly how you feel,” I said. “If you hide it from him that you’re seeing someone else, and he happens to find out anyway, it’ll hurt him. You don’t want that.”

“But can he accept that? The fact that I’m going out with someone else?”

“I imagine he’ll understand how you feel,” I said.

“You think so?”

“I do,” I said.

I figured that Kitaru would understand her confusion, because he was feeling the same thing. In that sense, they really were on the same wavelength. Still, I wasn’t entirely confident that he would calmly accept what she was actually doing (or might be doing). He didn’t seem that strong a person to me. But it would be even harder for him if she kept a secret from him or lied to him.

Erika stared at the candle flame flickering in the breeze from the A.C. “I often have the same dream,” she said. “Aki-kun and I are on a ship. A long journey on a large ship. We’re together in a small cabin, it’s late at night, and through the porthole we can see the full moon. But that moon is made of pure, transparent ice. And the bottom half of it is sunk in the sea. ‘That looks like the moon,’ Aki-kun tells me, ‘but it’s really made of ice and is only about eight inches thick. So when the sun comes out in the morning it all melts. You should get a good look at it now, while you have the chance.’ I’ve had this dream so many times. It’s a beautiful dream. Always the same moon. Always eight inches thick. I’m leaning against Aki-kun, it’s just the two of us, the waves lapping gently outside. But every time I wake up I feel unbearably sad.”

Erika Kuritani was silent for a time. Then she spoke again. “I think how wonderful it would be if Aki-kun and I could continue on that voyage forever. Every night we’d snuggle close and gaze out the porthole at that moon made of ice. Come morning the moon would melt away, and at night it would reappear. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe one night the moon wouldn’t be there. It scares me to think that. I get so frightened it’s like I can actually feel my body shrinking.”

When I saw Kitaru at the coffee shop the next day, he asked me how the date had gone.

“You kiss her?”

“No way,” I said.

“Don’t worry—I’m not gonna freak if you did,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything like that.”

“Didn’t hold her hand?”

“No, I didn’t hold her hand.”

“So what’d you do?”

“We went to see a movie, took a walk, had dinner, and talked,” I said.

“That’s it?”

“Usually you don’t try to move too fast on a first date.”

“Really?” Kitaru said. “I never been out on a regular date, so I don’t know.”

“But I enjoyed being with her. If she were my girlfriend, I’d never let her out of my sight.”

Kitaru considered this. He was about to say something but thought better of it. “So what’d you eat?” he asked finally.

I told him about the pizza and the Chianti.

“Pizza and Chianti?” He sounded surprised. “I never knew she liked pizza. We’ve only been to, like, noodle shops and cheap diners. Wine? I didn’t even know she could drink.”

Kitaru never touched liquor himself.

“There are probably quite a few things you don’t know about her,” I said.

I answered all his questions about the date. About the Woody Allen film (at his insistence I reviewed the whole plot), the meal (how much the bill came to, whether we split it or not), what she had on (white cotton dress, hair pinned up), what kind of underwear she wore (how would I know that?), what we talked about. I said nothing about her going out with another guy. Nor did I mention her dreams of an icy moon.

“You guys decide when you’ll have a second date?”

“No, we didn’t,” I said.

“Why not? You liked her, didn’t you?”

“She’s great. But we can’t go on like this. I mean, she’s your girlfriend, right? You say it’s O.K. to kiss her, but there’s no way I can do that.”

More pondering by Kitaru. “Y’know something?” he said finally. “I’ve been seeing a therapist since the end of junior high. My parents and teachers, they all said to go to one. ’Cause I used to do things at school from time to time. Y’know—not normal kinda things. But going to a therapist hasn’t helped, far as I can see. It sounds good in theory, but therapists don’t give a crap. They look at you like they know what’s going on, then make you talk on and on and just listen. Man, I could do that.”

“You’re still seeing a therapist?”

“Yeah. Twice a month. Like throwing your money away, if you ask me. Erika didn’t tell you about it?”

I shook my head.

“Tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s so weird about my way of thinking. To me, it seems like I’m just doing ordinary things in an ordinary way. But people tell me that almost everything I do is weird.”

“Well, there are some things about you that are definitely not normal,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like your Kansai dialect.”

“You could be right,” Kitaru admitted. “That is a little out of the ordinary.”

“Normal people wouldn’t take things that far.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“But, as far as I can tell, even if what you do isn’t normal, it’s not bothering anybody.”

“Not right now.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” I said. I might have been a little upset then (at what or whom I couldn’t say). I could feel my tone getting rough around the edges. “If you’re not bothering anybody, then so what? You want to speak Kansai dialect, then you should. Go for it. You don’t want to study for the entrance exam? Then don’t. Don’t feel like sticking your hand inside Erika Kuritani’s panties? Who’s saying you have to? It’s your life. You should do what you want and forget about what other people think.”

Kitaru, mouth slightly open, stared at me in amazement. “You know something, Tanimura? You’re a good guy. Though sometimes a little too normal, y’know?”

“What’re you gonna do?” I said. “You can’t just change your personality.”

“Exactly. You can’t change your personality. That’s what I’m tryin’ to say.”

“But Erika is a great girl,” I said. “She really cares about you. Whatever you do, don’t let her go. You’ll never find such a great girl again.”

“I know. You don’t gotta tell me,” Kitaru said. “But just knowing isn’t gonna help.”

About two weeks later, Kitaru quit working at the coffee shop. I say quit, but he just suddenly stopped showing up. He didn’t get in touch, didn’t mention anything about taking time off. And this was during our busiest season, so the owner was pretty pissed. Kitaru was owed a week’s pay, but he didn’t come to pick it up. He simply vanished. I have to say it hurt me. I’d thought we were good friends, and it was tough to be cut off so completely like that. I didn’t have any other friends in Tokyo.

The last two days before he disappeared, Kitaru was unusually quiet. He wouldn’t say much when I talked to him. And then he went and vanished. I could have called Erika Kuritani to check on his whereabouts, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to. I figured that what went on between the two of them was their business, and that it wasn’t a healthy thing for me to get any more involved than I was. Somehow I had to get by in the narrow little world I belonged to.

After all this happened, for some reason I kept thinking about my ex-girlfriend. Probably I’d felt something, seeing Kitaru and Erika together. I wrote her a long letter apologizing for how I’d behaved. I could have been a whole lot kinder to her. But I never got a reply.

I recognized Erika Kuritani right away. I’d only seen her twice, and sixteen years had passed since then. But there was no mistaking her. She was still lovely, with the same lively, animated expression. She was wearing a black lace dress, with black high heels and two strands of pearls around her slim neck. She remembered me right away, too. We were at a wine-tasting party at a hotel in Akasaka. It was a black-tie event, and I had put on a dark suit and tie for the occasion. She was a rep for the advertising firm that was sponsoring the event, and was clearly doing a great job of handling it. It’d take too long to get into the reasons that I was there.

“Tanimura-kun, how come you never got in touch with me after that night we went out?” she asked. “I was hoping we could talk some more.”

“You were a little too beautiful for me,” I said.

She smiled. “That’s nice to hear, even if you’re just flattering me.”

But what I’d said was neither a lie nor flattery. She was too gorgeous for me to be seriously interested in her. Back then, and even now.

“I called that coffee shop you used to work at, but they said you didn’t work there anymore,” she said.

After Kitaru left, the job became a total bore, and I quit two weeks later.

Erika and I briefly reviewed the lives we’d led over the past sixteen years. After college, I was hired by a small publisher, but quit after three years and had been a writer ever since. I got married at twenty-seven but didn’t have any children yet. Erika was still single. “They drive me so hard at work,” she joked, “that I have no time to get married.” She was the first one to bring up the topic of Kitaru.

“Aki-kun is working as a sushi chef in Denver now,” she said.

“Denver?”

“Denver, Colorado. At least, according to the postcard he sent me a couple of months ago.”

“Why Denver?”

“I don’t know,” Erika said. “The postcard before that was from Seattle. He was a sushi chef there, too. That was about a year ago. He sends me postcards sporadically. Always some silly card with just a couple of lines dashed off. Sometimes he doesn’t even write his return address.”

“A sushi chef,” I mused. “So he never did go to college?”

She shook her head. “At the end of that summer, I think it was, he suddenly announced that he’d had it with studying for the entrance exams and he went off to a cooking school in Osaka. Said he really wanted to learn Kansai cuisine and go to games at Koshien Stadium, the Hanshin Tigers’ stadium. Of course, I asked him, ‘How can you decide something so important without even asking me? What about me?’ ”

“And what did he say to that?”

She didn’t respond. She just held her lips tight, as if she’d break into tears if she tried to speak. I quickly changed the subject.

“When we went to that Italian restaurant in Shibuya, I remember we had cheap Chianti. Now look at us, tasting premium Napa wines. Kind of a strange twist of fate.”

“I remember,” she said, pulling herself together. “We saw a Woody Allen movie. Which one was it again?”

I told her.

“That was a great movie.”

I agreed. It was definitely one of Woody Allen’s masterpieces.

“Did things work out with that guy in your tennis club you were seeing?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. We just didn’t connect the way I thought we would. We went out for six months and then broke up.”

“Can I ask a question?” I said. “It’s very personal, though.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want you to be offended.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You slept with that guy, right?”

Erika looked at me in surprise, her cheeks reddening.

“Why are you bringing that up now?”

“Good question,” I said. “It’s just been on my mind for a long time. But that was a weird thing to ask. I’m sorry.”

Erika shook her head slightly. “No, it’s O.K. I’m not offended. I just wasn’t expecting it. It was all so long ago.”

I looked around the room. People in formal wear were scattered about. Corks popped one after another from expensive bottles of wine. A female pianist was playing “Like Someone in Love.”

“The answer is yes,” Erika said. “I had sex with him a number of times.”

“Curiosity, a thirst to know more,” I said.

She gave a hint of a smile. “That’s right. Curiosity, a thirst to know more.”

“That’s how we develop our growth rings.”

“If you say so,” she said.

“And I’m guessing that the first time you slept with him was soon after we had our date in Shibuya?”

She turned a page in her mental record book. “I think so. About a week after that. I remember that whole time pretty well. It was the first time for me.”

“And Kitaru was pretty quick on the uptake,” I said, gazing into her eyes.

She looked down and fingered the pearls on her necklace one by one, as if making sure that they were all still there. She gave a small sigh, perhaps remembering something. “Yes, you’re right about that. Aki-kun had a very strong sense of intuition.”

“But it didn’t work out with the other man.”

She nodded. “Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart. I needed to take the long way around. I always take a roundabout way.”

That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around. I wanted to tell her this, but kept silent. Blurting out aphorisms like that was another one of my problems.

“Is Kitaru married?”

“As far as I know, he’s still single,” Erika said. “At least, he hasn’t told me that he got married. Maybe the two of us are the type who never make a go of marriage.”

“Or maybe you’re just taking a roundabout way of getting there.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you still dream about the moon made of ice?” I asked.

Her head snapped up and she stared at me. Very calmly, slowly, a smile spread across her face. A completely natural, open smile.

“You remember my dream?” she asked.

“For some reason, I do.”

“Even though it’s someone else’s dream?”

“Dreams are the kind of things you can borrow and lend out,” I said.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” she said.

Someone called her name from behind me. It was time for her to get back to work.

“I don’t have that dream anymore,” she said in parting. “But I still remember every detail. What I saw, the way I felt. I can’t forget it. I probably never will.”

When I’m driving and the Beatles song “Yesterday” comes on the radio, I can’t help but hear those crazy lyrics Kitaru crooned in the bath. And I regret not writing them down. The lyrics were so weird that I remembered them for a while, but gradually my memory started to fade until finally I had nearly forgotten them. All I recall now are fragments, and I’m not even sure if these are actually what Kitaru sang. As time passes, memory, inevitably, reconstitutes itself.

When I was twenty or so, I tried several times to keep a diary, but I just couldn’t do it. So many things were happening around me back then that I could barely keep up with them, let alone stand still and write them all down in a notebook. And most of these things weren’t the kind that made me think, Oh, I’ve got to write this down. It was all I could do to open my eyes in the strong headwind, catch my breath, and forge ahead.

But, oddly enough, I remember Kitaru so well. We were friends for just a few months, yet every time I hear “Yesterday” scenes and conversations with him well up in my mind. The two of us talking while he soaked in the bath at his home in Denenchofu. Talking about the Hanshin Tigers’ batting order, how troublesome certain aspects of sex could be, how mind-numbingly boring it was to study for the entrance exams, how emotionally rich Kansai dialect was. And I remember the strange date with Erika Kuritani. And what Erika—over the candlelit table at the Italian restaurant—confessed. It feels as though these things happened just yesterday. Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt.

But when I look back at myself at age twenty what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes I’d go a week without talking to anybody. That kind of life continued for a year. A long, long year. Whether this period was a cold winter that left valuable growth rings inside me, I can’t really say. At the time I felt as if every night I, too, were gazing out a porthole at a moon made of ice. A transparent, eight-inch-thick, frozen moon. But I watched that moon alone, unable to share its cold beauty with anyone.

Yesterday

Is two days before tomorrow,

He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.

He lay flat on his back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. It took time for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The ceiling seemed to be a common, everyday ceiling of the sort one might find anywhere. Once, it had been painted white, or possibly a pale cream. Years of dust and dirt, however, had given it the color of spoiled milk. It had no ornament, no defining characteristic. No argument, no message. It fulfilled its structural role but aspired to nothing further.

There was a tall window on one side of the room, to his left, but its curtain had been removed and thick boards nailed across the frame. An inch or so of space had been left between the horizontal boards, whether on purpose or not wasn’t clear; rays of morning sun shone through, casting a row of bright parallel lines on the floor. Why was the window barricaded in such a rough fashion? Was a major storm or tornado in the offing? Or was it to keep someone from getting in? Or to prevent someone (him, perhaps?) from leaving?

Still on his back, he slowly turned his head and examined the rest of the room. He could see no furniture, apart from the bed on which he lay. No chest of drawers, no desk, no chair. No painting, clock, or mirror on the walls. No lamp or light. Nor could he make out any rug or carpet on the floor. Just bare wood. The walls were covered with wallpaper of a complex design, but it was so old and faded that in the weak light it was next to impossible to make out what the design was.

The room had perhaps once served as a normal bedroom. Yet now all vestiges of human life had been stripped away. The only thing that remained was his solitary bed in the center. And it had no bedding. No sheets, no coverlet, no pillow. Just an ancient mattress.

Samsa had no idea where he was, or what he should do. All he knew was that he was now a human whose name was Gregor Samsa. And how did he know that? Perhaps someone had whispered it in his ear while he lay sleeping? But who had he been before he became Gregor Samsa? What had he been?

The moment he began contemplating that question, however, something like a black column of mosquitoes swirled up in his head. The column grew thicker and denser as it moved to a softer part of his brain, buzzing all the way. Samsa decided to stop thinking. Trying to think anything through at this point was too great a burden.

In any case, he had to learn how to move his body. He couldn’t lie there staring up at the ceiling forever. The posture left him much too vulnerable. He had no chance of surviving an attack—by predatory birds, for example. As a first step, he tried to move his fingers. There were ten of them, long things affixed to his two hands. Each was equipped with a number of joints, which made synchronizing their movements very complicated. To make matters worse, his body felt numb, as though it were immersed in a sticky, heavy liquid, so that it was difficult to send strength to his extremities.

Nevertheless, after repeated attempts and failures, by closing his eyes and focussing his mind he was able to bring his fingers more under control. Little by little, he was learning how to make them work together. As his fingers became operational, the numbness that had enveloped his body withdrew. In its place—like a dark and sinister reef revealed by a retreating tide—came an excruciating pain.

It took Samsa some time to realize that the pain was hunger. This ravenous desire for food was new to him, or at least he had no memory of experiencing anything like it. It was as if he had not had a bite to eat for a week. As if the center of his body were now a cavernous void. His bones creaked; his muscles clenched; his organs twitched.

Unable to withstand the pain any longer, Samsa put his elbows on the mattress and, bit by bit, pushed himself up. His spine emitted several low and sickening cracks in the process. My God, Samsa thought, how long have I been lying here? His body protested each move. But he struggled through, marshalling his strength, until, at last, he managed to sit up.

Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world? Why hadn’t he been turned into a fish? Or a sunflower? A fish or a sunflower made sense. More sense, anyway, than this human being, Gregor Samsa.

Steeling himself, he lowered his legs over the edge of the bed until the soles of his feet touched the floor. The unexpected cold of the bare wood made him gasp. After several failed attempts that sent him crashing to the floor, at last he was able to balance on his two feet. He stood there, bruised and sore, one hand clutching the frame of the bed for support. His head was inordinately heavy and hard to hold up. Sweat streamed from his armpits, and his genitals shrank from the stress. He had to take several deep breaths before his constricted muscles began to relax.

Once he was used to standing, he had to learn to walk. Walking on two legs amounted to a kind of torture, each movement an exercise in pain. No matter how he looked at it, advancing his right and left legs one after the other was a bizarre proposition that flouted all natural laws, while the precarious distance from his eyes to the ground made him cringe in fear. He had to learn how to coördinate his hip and knee joints. Each time he took a step forward, his knees shook, and he steadied himself against the wall with both hands.

But he knew that he could not remain in this room forever. If he didn’t find food, and quickly, his starving belly would consume his own flesh, and he would cease to exist.

He tottered toward the door, pawing at the wall as he went. The journey seemed to take hours, although he had no way of measuring the time, except by the pain. His movements were awkward, his pace snail-like. He couldn’t advance without leaning on something for support. On the street, his best hope would be that people saw him as disabled.

He grasped the doorknob and pulled. It didn’t budge. A push yielded the same result. Next, he turned the knob to the right and pulled. The door opened partway with a slight squeak. He poked his head through the opening and looked out. The hallway was deserted. It was as quiet as the bottom of the ocean. He extended his left leg through the doorway, swung the upper half of his body out, with one hand on the doorframe, and followed with his right leg. He moved slowly down the corridor, hands on the wall.

There were four doors in the hallway, including the one he had just used. All were identical, fashioned of the same dark wood. What, or who, lay beyond them? He longed to open them and find out. Perhaps then he might begin to understand the mysterious circumstances in which he found himself. Or at least discover a clue of some sort. Nevertheless, he passed by each of the doors, making as little noise as possible. The need to fill his belly trumped his curiosity. He had to find something substantial to eat.

And now he knew where to find it.

Just follow the smell, he thought, sniffing. It was the aroma of cooked food, tiny particles that wafted to him through the air. The information gathered by olfactory receptors in his nose was being transmitted to his brain, producing an anticipation so vivid, a craving so violent, that he could feel his innards being slowly twisted, as if by an experienced torturer. Saliva flooded his mouth.

To reach the source of the aroma, however, he would have to go down a steep flight of stairs, seventeen of them. He was having a hard enough time walking on level ground—navigating those steps would be a true nightmare. He grabbed the bannister with both hands and began his descent. His skinny ankles felt ready to collapse under his weight, and he almost went tumbling down the steps.

And what was on Samsa’s mind as he made his way down the staircase? Fish and sunflowers, for the most part. Had I been transformed into a fish or a sunflower, he thought, I could have lived out my life in peace, without struggling up and down steps like these.

When Samsa reached the bottom of the seventeen steps, he pulled himself upright, summoned his remaining strength, and hobbled in the direction of the enticing smell. He crossed the high-ceilinged entrance hall and stepped through the dining room’s open doorway. The food was laid out on a large oval table. There were five chairs, but no sign of people. White wisps of steam rose from the serving plates. A glass vase bearing a dozen lilies occupied the center of the table. Four places were set with napkins and cutlery, untouched, by the look of it. It seemed as though people had been sitting down to eat their breakfast a few minutes earlier, when some sudden and unforeseen event sent them all running off. What had happened? Where had they gone? Or where had they been taken? Would they return to eat their breakfast?

But Samsa had no time to ponder such questions. Falling into the nearest chair, he grabbed whatever food he could reach with his bare hands and stuffed it into his mouth, quite ignoring the knives, spoons, forks, and napkins. He tore bread into pieces and downed it without jam or butter, gobbled fat boiled sausages whole, devoured hard-boiled eggs with such speed that he almost forgot to peel them, scooped up handfuls of still warm mashed potatoes, and plucked pickles with his fingers. He chewed it all together, and washed the remnants down with water from a jug. Taste was of no consequence. Bland or delicious, spicy or sour—it was all the same to him. All that mattered was filling that empty cavern inside him. He ate with total concentration, as if racing against time. He was so fixated on eating that once, as he was licking his fingers, he sank his teeth into them by mistake. Scraps of food flew everywhere, and when a platter fell to the floor and smashed he paid no attention whatsoever.

By the time Samsa had eaten his fill and sat back to catch his breath, almost nothing was left, and the dining table was an awful sight. It looked as if a flock of quarrelsome crows had flown in through an open window, gorged themselves, and flown away again. The only thing untouched was the vase of lilies; had there been less food, he might have devoured them as well.

He sat, dazed, in his chair for a long while. Hands on the table, he gazed at the lilies through half-closed eyes and took long, slow breaths, while the food he had eaten worked its way through his digestive system, from his esophagus to his intestines. A sense of satiety came over him like a rising tide. He picked up a metal pot and poured coffee into a white ceramic cup. The pungent fragrance recalled something to him. It did not come directly, however; it arrived in stages. It was a strange feeling, as if he were recollecting the present from the future. As if time had somehow been split in two, so that memory and experience revolved within a closed cycle, each following the other. He poured a liberal amount of cream into his coffee, stirred it with his finger, and drank. Although the coffee had cooled, a slight warmth remained. He held it in his mouth before warily allowing it to trickle down his throat. He found that it calmed him to a degree.

All of a sudden, he felt cold. The intensity of his hunger had blotted out his other senses. Now that he was sated, the morning chill on his skin made him tremble. The fire had gone out. None of the heaters seemed to be turned on. On top of that, he was stark naked—even his feet were bare.

He knewthat he had to find something to wear. He was too cold like this. Moreover, his lack of clothes was bound to be an issue should someone appear. There might be a knock at the door. Or the people who had been about to sit down to breakfast a short while before might return. Who knew how they would react if they found him in this state?

He understood all this. He did not surmise it, or perceive it in an intellectual way; he knew it, pure and simple. Samsa had no idea where such knowledge came from. Perhaps it was related to those revolving memories he was having.

He stood up from his chair and walked out to the front hall. He was still awkward, but now, at least, he could stand and walk on two legs without clinging to something. There was a wrought-iron umbrella stand in the hall that held several walking sticks. He pulled out a black one made of oak to help him move around; just grasping its sturdy handle relaxed and encouraged him. And now he would have a weapon to fight back with should birds attack. He went to the window and looked out through the crack in the lace curtains.

The house faced onto a street. It was not a very big street. Nor were many people on it. Nevertheless, he noted that every person who passed was fully clothed. The clothes were of various colors and styles. Men and women wore different garments. Shoes of stiff leather covered their feet. A few sported brightly polished boots. He could hear the soles of their footwear clack on the cobblestones. Many of the men and women wore hats. They seemed to think nothing of walking on two legs and keeping their genitals covered. Samsa compared his reflection in the hall’s full-length mirror with the people walking outside. The man he saw in the mirror was a shabby, frail-looking creature. His belly was smeared with gravy, and bread crumbs clung to his pubic hair like bits of cotton. He swept the filth away with his hand.

Yes, he thought again, I must find something to cover my body.

He looked out at the street once more, checking for birds. But there were no birds in sight.

The ground floor of the house consisted of the hallway, the dining room, a kitchen, and a living room. As far as he could tell, however, none of those rooms held anything resembling clothes. Which meant that the putting on and taking off of clothing must occur somewhere else. Perhaps in a room on the second floor.

Samsa returned to the staircase and began to climb. He was surprised to discover how much easier it was to go up than to go down. Clutching the railing, he was able to make his way up the seventeen steps at a much faster rate and without undue pain or fear, stopping several times along the way (though never for long) to catch his breath.

One might say that luck was with him, for none of the doors on the second floor were locked. All he had to do was turn the knob and push, and each door swung open. There were four rooms in total, and, apart from the freezing room with the bare floor in which he had woken, all were comfortably furnished. Each had a bed with clean bedding, a dresser, a writing desk, a lamp affixed to the ceiling or the wall, and a rug or a carpet with an intricate pattern. Books were neatly lined up in their cases, and framed oil paintings of landscapes adorned the walls. Each room had a glass vase filled with bright flowers. None had rough boards nailed across the windows. Their windows had lace curtains, through which sunlight poured like a blessing from above. The beds all showed signs of someone’s having slept in them. He could see the imprint of heads on pillows.

Samsa found a dressing gown his size in the closet of the largest room. It looked like something he might be able to manage. He hadn’t a clue what to do with the other clothes—how to put them on, how to wear them. They were just too complicated: too many buttons, for one thing, and he was unsure how to tell front from back, or top from bottom. Which was supposed to go on the outside, and which underneath? The dressing gown, on the other hand, was simple, practical, and quite free of ornament. Its light, soft cloth felt good against his skin, and its color was dark blue. He even turned up a matching pair of slippers.

He pulled the dressing gown over his naked body and, after much trial and error, succeeded in fastening the belt around his waist. He looked at himself in the mirror, clad now in gown and slippers. This was certainly better than walking around naked. It wasn’t as warm as it might have been, to be sure, but as long as he remained indoors it would stave off the cold. Best of all, he no longer had to worry that his soft skin would be exposed to vicious birds.

When the doorbell rang, Samsa was dozing in the biggest room (and in the biggest bed) in the house. It was warm under the feather quilts, as cozy as if he were sleeping in an egg. He woke from a dream. He couldn’t remember it in detail, but it had been pleasant and cheerful. The bell echoing through the house, however, yanked him back to cold reality.

He dragged himself from the bed, fastened his gown, put on his dark-blue slippers, grabbed his black walking stick, and, hand on railing, tottered down the stairs. It was far easier than it had been on the first occasion. Still, the danger of falling was ever present. He could not afford to let down his guard. Keeping a close eye on his feet, he picked his way down the stairs one step at a time, as the doorbell continued to ring. Whoever was pushing the buzzer had to be a most impatient and stubborn person.

Walking stick in his left hand, Samsa approached the front door. He twisted the knob to the right and pulled, and the door swung in.

A little woman was standing outside. A very little woman. It was a wonder she was able to reach the buzzer. When he looked more closely, however, he realized that the issue wasn’t her size. It was her back, which was bent forward in a perpetual stoop. This made her appear small, though, in fact, her frame was of normal dimensions. She had fastened her hair with a rubber band to prevent it from spilling over her face. The hair was a deep chestnut and very abundant. She was dressed in a battered tweed jacket and a full, loose-fitting skirt that covered her ankles. A striped cotton scarf was wrapped around her neck. She wore no hat. Her shoes were of the tall lace-up variety, and she appeared to be in her early twenties. There was still something of the girl about her. Her eyes were big, her nose small, and her lips twisted a little to one side, like a skinny moon. Her dark eyebrows formed two straight lines across her forehead, giving her a skeptical look.

“Is this the Samsa residence?” the woman said, craning her head up to look at him. Then she twisted her body all over. Much the way the earth twists during a violent earthquake.

He was taken aback at first, but pulled himself together. “Yes,” he said. Since he was Gregor Samsa, this was likely the Samsa residence. At any rate, there could be no harm in saying so.

Yet the woman seemed to find his answer less than satisfying. A slight frown creased her brow. Perhaps she had picked up a note of confusion in his voice.

“So this is really the Samsa residence?” she said in a sharp voice. Like an experienced gatekeeper grilling a shabby visitor.

“I am Gregor Samsa,” Samsa said, in as relaxed a tone as possible. Of this, at least, he was sure.

“I hope you’re right,” she said, reaching down for a cloth bag at her feet. It was black, and seemed very heavy. Worn through in places, it had doubtless had a number of owners. “So let’s get started.”

She strode into the house without waiting for a reply. Samsa closed the door behind her. She stood there, looking him up and down. It seemed that his gown and slippers had aroused her suspicions.

“I appear to have woken you,” she said, her voice cold.

“That’s perfectly all right,” Samsa replied. He could tell by her dark expression that his clothes were a poor fit for the occasion. “I must apologize for my appearance,” he went on. “There are reasons. . . .”

The woman ignored this. “So, then?” she said through pursed lips.

“So, then?” Samsa echoed.

“So, then, where is the lock that’s causing the problem?” the woman said.

“The lock?”

“The lock that’s broken,” she said. “You asked us to come and repair it.”

“Ah,” Samsa said. “The broken lock.”

Samsa ransacked his mind. No sooner had he managed to focus on one thing, however, than that black column of mosquitoes rose up again.

“I haven’t heard anything in particular about a lock,” he said. “My guess is it belongs to one of the doors on the second floor.”

The woman glowered at him. “Your guess?” she said, peering up at his face. Her voice had grown even icier. An eyebrow arched in disbelief. “One of the doors?” she went on.

Samsa could feel his face flush. His ignorance regarding the lock struck him as most embarrassing. He cleared his throat to speak, but the words did not come.

“Mr. Samsa, are your parents in? I think it’s better if I talk to them.”

“They seem to have gone out on an errand,” Samsa said.

“An errand?” she said, appalled. “In the midst of these troubles?”

“I really have no idea. When I woke up this morning, everyone was gone,” Samsa said.

“Good grief,” the young woman said. She heaved a long sigh. “We did tell them that someone would come at this time today.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

The woman stood there for a moment. Then, slowly, her arched eyebrow descended, and she looked at the black walking stick in Samsa’s left hand. “Are your legs bothering you, Gregor Samsa?”

“Yes, a little,” he prevaricated.

Once again, the woman writhed suddenly. Samsa had no idea what this action meant or what its purpose was. Yet he was drawn by instinct to the complex sequence of movements.

“Well, what’s to be done,” the woman said in a tone of resignation. “Let’s take a look at those doors on the second floor. I came over the bridge and all the way across town through this terrible upheaval to get here. Risked my life, in fact. So it wouldn’t make much sense to say, ‘Oh, really, no one is here? I’ll come back later,’ would it?”

This terrible upheaval? Samsa couldn’t grasp what she was talking about. What awful change was taking place? But he decided not to ask for details. Better to avoid exposing his ignorance even further.

Back bent, the young woman took the heavy black bag in her right hand and toiled up the stairs, much like a crawling insect. Samsa labored after her, his hand on the railing. Her creeping gait aroused his sympathy—it reminded him of something.

The woman stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the hallway. “So,” she said, “one of these four doors probably has a broken lock, right?”

Samsa’s face reddened. “Yes,” he said. “One of these. It could be the one at the end of the hall on the left, possibly,” he said, faltering. This was the door to the bare room in which he had woken that morning.

“It could be,” the woman said in a voice as lifeless as an extinguished bonfire. “Possibly.” She turned around to examine Samsa’s face.

“Somehow or other,” Samsa said.

The woman sighed again. “Gregor Samsa,” she said dryly. “You are a true joy to talk to. Such a rich vocabulary, and you always get to the point.” Then her tone changed. “But no matter. Let’s check the door on the left at the end of the hall first.”

The woman went to the door. She turned the knob back and forth and pushed, and it opened inward. The room was as it had been before: only a bed with a bare mattress that was less than clean. The floor bare as well. Boards nailed across the window. The woman must have noticed all this, but she showed no sign of surprise. Her demeanor suggested that similar rooms could be found all over the city.

She squatted down, opened the black bag, pulled out a white flannel cloth, and spread it on the floor. Then she took out a number of tools, which she lined up carefully on the cloth, like a hardened torturer displaying the sinister instruments of his trade before some poor martyr.

Selecting a wire of medium thickness, she inserted it into the lock and, with a practiced hand, manipulated it from a variety of angles. Her eyes were narrowed in concentration, her ears alert for the slightest sound. Next, she chose a thinner wire and repeated the process. Her face grew sombre, and her mouth twisted into a ruthless shape, like a Chinese sword. She took a large flashlight and, with a black look in her eyes, began to examine the lock in detail.

“Do you have the key for this lock?” she asked Samsa.

“I haven’t the slightest idea where the key is,” he answered honestly.

“Ah, Gregor Samsa, sometimes you make me want to die,” she said.

After that, she quite ignored him. She selected a screwdriver from the tools lined up on the cloth and proceeded to remove the lock from the door. Her movements were slow and cautious. She paused from time to time to twist and writhe about as she had before.

While he stood behind her, watching her move in that fashion, Samsa’s own body began to respond in a strange way. He was growing hot all over, and his nostrils were flaring. His mouth was so dry that he produced a loud gulp whenever he swallowed. His earlobes itched. And his sexual organ, which had dangled in such a sloppy way until that point, began to stiffen and expand. As it rose, a bulge developed at the front of his gown. He was in the dark, however, as to what that might signify.

Having extracted the lock, the young woman took it to the window to inspect in the sunlight that shone between the boards. She poked it with a thin wire and gave it a hard shake to see how it sounded, her face glum and her lips pursed. Finally, she sighed again and turned to face Samsa.

“The insides are shot,” the woman said. “It’s kaput. This is the one, just like you said.”

“That’s good,” Samsa said.

“No, it’s not,” the woman said. “There’s no way I can repair it here on the spot. It’s a special kind of lock. I’ll have to take it back and let my father or one of my older brothers work on it. They may be able to fix it. I’m just an apprentice—I can only handle regular locks.”

“I see,” Samsa said. So this young woman had a father and several brothers. A whole family of locksmiths.

“Actually, one of my brothers was supposed to come today, but because of the commotion going on out there they sent me instead. The city is riddled with checkpoints.” She looked back down at the lock in her hands. “But how did the lock get broken like this? It’s weird. Someone must have gouged out the insides with a special kind of tool. There’s no other way to explain it.”

Again she writhed. Her arms rotated as if she were a swimmer practicing a new stroke. He found the action mesmerizing and very exciting.

Samsa made up his mind. “May I ask you a question?” he said.

“A question?” she said, casting him a dubious glance. “I can’t imagine what, but go ahead.”

“Why do you twist about like that every so often?”

She looked at Samsa with her lips slightly parted. “Twist about?” She thought for a moment. “You mean like this?” She demonstrated the motion for him.

“Yes, that’s it.”

“My brassiere doesn’t fit,” she said dourly. “That’s all.”

“Brassiere?” Samsa said in a dull voice. It was a word he couldn’t call up from his memory.

“A brassiere. You know what that is, don’t you?” the woman said. “Or do you find it strange that hunchback women wear brassieres? Do you think it’s presumptuous of us?”

“Hunchback?” Samsa said. Yet another word that was sucked into that vast emptiness he carried within. He had no idea what she was talking about. Still, he knew that he should say something.

“No, I don’t think so at all,” he mumbled.

“Listen up. We hunchbacks have two breasts, just like other women, and we have to use a brassiere to support them. We can’t walk around like cows with our udders swinging.”

“Of course not.” Samsa was lost.

“But brassieres aren’t designed for us—they get loose. We’re built differently from regular women, right? So we have to twist around every so often to put them back in place. Hunchbacks have more problems than you can imagine. Is that why you’ve been staring at me from behind? Is that how you get your kicks?”

“No, not at all. I was just curious why you were doing that.”

So, he inferred, a brassiere was an apparatus designed to hold the breasts in place, and a hunchback was a person with this woman’s particular build. There was so much in this world that he had to learn.

“Are you sure you’re not making fun of me?” the woman asked.

“I’m not making fun of you.”

The woman cocked her head and looked up at Samsa. She could tell that he was speaking the truth—there didn’t seem to be any malice in him. He was just a little weak in the head, that was all. He was probably a few years older than she was. As well as being lame, he seemed to be intellectually challenged. But he was from a good family, and his manners were impeccable. He was nice-looking, too, though a little scrawny and pasty-faced.

It was then that she noticed the protuberance pushing out the lower part of his gown.

“What the hell is that?” she said stonily. “What’s that bulge doing there?”

Samsa looked down at the front of his gown. His organ was really very swollen. He could surmise from her tone that its condition was somehow inappropriate.

“I get it,” she spat out. “You’re wondering what it would be like to fuck a hunchback, aren’t you?”

“Fuck?” he said. One more word he couldn’t place.

“You imagine that, since a hunchback is bent at the waist, you can just take her from the rear with no problem, right?” the woman said. “Believe me, there are lots of perverts like you around, who seem to think that we’ll let you do what you want because we’re hunchbacks. Well, think again, buster. We’re not that easy!”

“I’m very confused,” Samsa said. “If I have displeased you in some way, I am truly sorry. I apologize. Please forgive me. I meant no harm. I’ve been unwell, and there are so many things I don’t understand.”

“All right, I get the picture.” She sighed. “You’re a little slow, right? But your wiener is in great shape. Those are the breaks, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” Samsa said again.

“Forget it.” She relented. “I’ve got four no-good brothers at home, and since I was a little girl they’ve shown me everything. They treat it like a big joke. Mean buggers, all of them. So I’m not kidding when I say I know the score.”

She squatted to put her tools back in the bag, wrapping the broken lock in the flannel and gently placing it alongside.

“I’m taking the lock home with me,” she said, standing up. “Tell your parents. We’ll either fix it or replace it. If we have to get a new one, though, it may take some time, things being the way they are. Don’t forget to tell them, O.K.? Do you follow me? Will you remember?”

“I’ll tell them,” Samsa said.

She walked slowly down the staircase, Samsa trailing behind. They made quite a study in contrasts: she looked as if she were crawling on all fours, while he tilted backward in a most unnatural way. Yet their pace was identical. Samsa was trying hard to quell his “bulge,” but the thing just wouldn’t return to its former state. Watching her movements from behind as she descended the stairs made his heart pound. Hot, fresh blood coursed through his veins. The stubborn bulge persisted.

“As I told you before, one of my brothers was supposed to come today,” the woman said when they reached the front door. “But the streets are crawling with soldiers and tanks. People are being rounded up. That’s why the men in my family can’t go out. Once you get arrested, there’s no telling when you’ll return. That’s why I was sent. All the way across Prague, alone. ‘No one will notice a hunchback girl,’ they said.”

“Tanks?” Samsa murmured.

“Yeah, lots of them. Tanks with cannons and machine guns. Your cannon is impressive,” she said, pointing at the bulge beneath his gown, “but these cannons are bigger and harder, and a lot more lethal. Let’s hope everyone in your family makes it back safely.”

Samsa decided to take the bull by the horns. “Would it be possible to meet again?” he said.

The young woman craned her head at Samsa. “Are you saying you want to see me again?”

“Yes. I want to see you one more time.”

“With your thing sticking out like that?”

Samsa looked down again at the bulge. “I don’t know how to explain it, but that has nothing to do with my feelings. It must be some kind of heart problem.”

“No kidding,” she said, impressed. “A heart problem, you say. That’s an interesting way to look at it. Never heard that one before.”

“You see, it’s out of my control.”

“And it has nothing to do with fucking?”

“Fucking isn’t on my mind. Really.”

“So let me get this straight. When your thing grows big and hard like that, it’s not your mind but your heart that’s causing it?”

Samsa nodded in assent.

“Swear to God?” the woman said.

“God,” Samsa echoed. Another word he couldn’t remember having heard before. He fell silent.

The woman gave a weary shake of her head. She twisted and turned again to adjust her brassiere. “Forget it. It seems God left Prague a few days ago. Let’s forget about him.”

“So can I see you again?” Samsa asked.

A new look came over the girl’s face—her eyes seemed fixed on some distant and misty landscape. “You really want to see me again?”

Samsa nodded.

“What would we do?”

“We could talk together.”

“About what?” the woman asked.

“About lots of things.”

“Just talk?”

“There is so much I want to ask you,” Samsa said.

“About what?”

“About this world. About you. About me. I feel like there are so many things we need to talk about. Tanks, for example. And God. And brassieres. And locks.”

Another silence fell over the two of them.

“I don’t know,” the woman said at last. She shook her head slowly, but the chill in her voice was less noticeable. “You’re better brought up than me. And I doubt your parents would be thrilled to see their precious son involved with a hunchback from the wrong side of town. Even if that son is lame and a little slow. On top of that, our city is overflowing with foreign tanks and troops. Who knows what lies ahead.”

Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well. What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.

“At any rate, I’ll come back this way in a few days,” the hunchbacked young woman said. “If we can fix it, I’ll bring the lock, and if we can’t I’ll return it to you anyway. You’ll be charged for the service call, of course. If you’re here, then we can see each other. Whether we’ll be able to have that long talk or not I don’t know. But if I were you I’d keep that bulge hidden from your parents. In the real world, you don’t get compliments for exposing that kind of thing.”

Samsa nodded. He wasn’t at all clear, though, how that kind of thing could be kept out of sight.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” the woman said in a pensive voice. “Everything is blowing up around us, but there are still those who care about a broken lock, and others who are dutiful enough to try to fix it. . . . But maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.”

The woman looked up at Samsa’s face. “I don’t mean to pry, but what was going on in that room on the second floor? Why did your parents need such a big lock for a room that held nothing but a bed, and why did it bother them so much when the lock got broken? And what about those boards nailed across the window? Was something locked up in there—is that it?”

Samsa shook his head. If someone or something had been shut up in there, it must have been him. But why had that been necessary? He hadn’t a clue.

“I guess there’s no point in asking you,” the woman said. “Well, I’ve got to go. They’ll worry about me if I’m late. Pray that I make it across town in one piece. That the soldiers will overlook a poor little hunchback girl. That none of them is perverted. We’re being fucked over enough as it is.”

“I will pray,” Samsa said. But he had no idea what “perverted” meant. Or “pray,” for that matter.

The woman picked up her black bag and, still bent over, headed for the door.

“Will I see you again?” Samsa asked one last time.

“If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again,” she said in parting. This time there was real warmth in her voice.

“Look out for birds,” he called after her. She turned and nodded. Then she walked out to the street.

Samsa watched through the crack in the curtains as her hunched form set off across the cobblestones. She moved awkwardly but with surprising speed. He found her every gesture charming. She reminded him of a water strider that had left the water to scamper about on dry land. As far as he could tell, walking the way she did made a lot more sense than wobbling around upright on two legs.

She had not been out of sight long when he noticed that his genitals had returned to their soft and shrunken state. That brief and violent bulge had, at some point, vanished. Now his organ dangled between his legs like an innocent fruit, peaceful and defenseless. His balls rested comfortably in their sac. Readjusting the belt of his gown, he sat down at the dining-room table and drank what remained of his cold coffee.

The people who lived here had gone somewhere else. He didn’t know who they were, but he imagined that they were his family. Something had happened all of a sudden, and they had left. Perhaps they would never return. What did “the world is falling apart” mean? Gregor Samsa had no idea. Foreign troops, checkpoints, tanks—everything was wrapped in mystery.

The only thing he knew for certain was that he wanted to see that hunchback girl again. To sit face to face and talk to his heart’s content. To unravel the riddles of the world with her. He wanted to watch from every angle the way she twisted and writhed when she adjusted her brassiere. If possible, he wanted to run his hands over her body. To touch her soft skin and feel her warmth with his fingertips. To walk side by side with her up and down the staircases of the world.

Just thinking about her made him warm inside. No longer did he wish to be a fish or a sunflower—or anything else, for that matter. He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many things he didn’t know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion. So he felt.

Samsa sat there for a long time with his eyes closed. Then, making up his mind, he stood, grabbed his black walking stick, and headed for the stairs. He would return to the second floor and figure out the proper way to dress. For now, at least, that would be his mission.

Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights.” Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid, intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to spend every day cooped up indoors.

Because of this, Habara had dubbed the woman Scheherazade. He never used the name to her face, but it was how he referred to her in the small diary he kept. “Scheherazade came today,” he’d note in ballpoint pen. Then he’d record the gist of that day’s story in simple, cryptic terms that were sure to baffle anyone who might read the diary later.

Habara didn’t know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented. He had no way of telling. Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives. Habara therefore enjoyed them as a child might, without questioning too much. What possible difference could it make to him, after all, if they were lies or truth, or a complicated patchwork of the two?

Whatever the case, Scheherazade had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart. No matter what sort of story it was, she made it special. Her voice, her timing, her pacing were all flawless. She captured her listener’s attention, tantalized him, drove him to ponder and speculate, and then, in the end, gave him precisely what he’d been seeking. Enthralled, Habara was able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment. Like a blackboard wiped with a damp cloth, he was erased of worries, of unpleasant memories. Who could ask for more? At this point in his life, that kind of forgetting was what Habara desired more than anything else.

Scheherazade was thirty-five, four years older than Habara, and a full-time housewife with two children in elementary school (though she was also a registered nurse and was apparently called in for the occasional job). Her husband was a typical company man. Their home was a twenty-minute drive away from Habara’s. This was all (or almost all) the personal information she had volunteered. Habara had no way of verifying any of it, but he could think of no particular reason to doubt her. She had never revealed her name. “There’s no need for you to know, is there?” Scheherazade had asked. Nor had she ever called Habara by his name, though of course she knew what it was. She judiciously steered clear of the name, as if it would somehow be unlucky or inappropriate to have it pass her lips.

On the surface, at least, this Scheherazade had nothing in common with the beautiful queen of “A Thousand and One Nights.” She was on the road to middle age and already running to flab, with jowls and lines webbing the corners of her eyes. Her hair style, her makeup, and her manner of dress weren’t exactly slapdash, but neither were they likely to receive any compliments. Her features were not unattractive, but her face lacked focus, so that the impression she left was somehow blurry. As a consequence, those who walked by her on the street, or shared the same elevator, probably took little notice of her. Ten years earlier, she might well have been a lively and attractive young woman, perhaps even turned a few heads. At some point, however, the curtain had fallen on that part of her life and it seemed unlikely to rise again.

Scheherazade came to see Habara twice a week. Her days were not fixed, but she never came on weekends. No doubt she spent that time with her family. She always phoned an hour before arriving. She bought groceries at the local supermarket and brought them to him in her car, a small blue Mazda hatchback. An older model, it had a dent in its rear bumper and its wheels were black with grime. Parking it in the reserved space assigned to the house, she would carry the bags to the front door and ring the bell. After checking the peephole, Habara would release the lock, unhook the chain, and let her in. In the kitchen, she’d sort the groceries and arrange them in the refrigerator. Then she’d make a list of things to buy for her next visit. She performed these tasks skillfully, with a minimum of wasted motion, and saying little throughout.

Once she’d finished, the two of them would move wordlessly to the bedroom, as if borne there by an invisible current. Scheherazade quickly removed her clothes and, still silent, joined Habara in bed. She barely spoke during their lovemaking, either, performing each act as if completing an assignment. When she was menstruating, she used her hand to accomplish the same end. Her deft, rather businesslike manner reminded Habara that she was a licensed nurse.

After sex, they lay in bed and talked. More accurately, she talked and he listened, adding an appropriate word here, asking the occasional question there. When the clock said four-thirty, she would break off her story (for some reason, it always seemed to have just reached a climax), jump out of bed, gather up her clothes, and get ready to leave. She had to go home, she said, to prepare dinner.

Habara would see her to the door, replace the chain, and watch through the curtains as the grimy little blue car drove away. At six o’ clock, he made a simple dinner and ate it by himself. He had once worked as a cook, so putting a meal together was no great hardship. He drank Perrier with his dinner (he never touched alcohol) and followed it with a cup of coffee, which he sipped while watching a DVD or reading. He liked long books, especially those he had to read several times to understand. There wasn’t much else to do. He had no one to talk to. No one to phone. With no computer, he had no way of accessing the Internet. No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television. (There was a good reason for that.) It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside. Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone.

Habara was not overly concerned about this prospect. If that happens, he thought, it will be hard, but I’ll scrape by one way or another. I’m not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. He had always been comfortable being by himself. What did bother him, though, was the thought of not being able to talk in bed with Scheherazade. Or, more precisely, missing the next installment of her story.

“I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject.

“Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.

He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.

“Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”

“Huh? Eels have jaws?”

“Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.

“I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”

“Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”

Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.

“Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”

“I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.

“Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.”

Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.

“The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.”

“Can you remember eating them?”

“No, I can’t.”

“That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?”

“A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?”

“No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.

“Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.”

“And you can see all these things now?”

“As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.”

“To what you were thinking then?”

“Yeah.”

“What do lampreys think about?”

“Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”

“Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”

“Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”

No, he said. He couldn’t.

“Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”

“Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.

Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier. He had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.” Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house. She also tracked down whatever books and magazines he wished to read, and any CDs he wanted to listen to. In addition, she chose an assortment of DVDs—though he had a hard time accepting her criteria for selection on this front.

A week after he arrived, as if it were a self-evident next step, Scheherazade had taken him to bed. There had been condoms on the bedside table when he arrived. Habara guessed that sex was one of her assigned duties—or perhaps “support activities” was the term they used. Whatever the term, and whatever her motivation, he’d gone with the flow and accepted her proposal without hesitation.

Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. She seemed to be on guard, lest they grow too enthusiastic—just as a driving instructor might not want his students to get too excited about their driving. Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike, either. It may have begun as one of her duties (or, at least, as something that was strongly encouraged), but at a certain point she seemed—if only in a small way—to have found a kind of pleasure in it. Habara could tell this from certain subtle ways in which her body responded, a response that delighted him as well. After all, he was not a wild animal penned up in a cage but a human being equipped with his own range of emotions, and sex for the sole purpose of physical release was hardly fulfilling. Yet to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life? He couldn’t tell.

This was true of other things, too. Habara often found Scheherazade’s feelings and intentions hard to read. For example, she wore plain cotton panties most of the time. The kind of panties he imagined housewives in their thirties usually wore—though this was pure conjecture, since he had no experience with housewives of that age. Some days, however, she turned up in colorful, frilly silk panties instead. Why she switched between the two he hadn’t a clue.

The other thing that puzzled him was the fact that their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard to tell where one ended and the other began. He had never experienced anything like this before: although he didn’t love her, and the sex was so-so, he was tightly bound to her physically. It was all rather confusing.

“I was a teen-ager when I started breaking into empty houses,” she said one day as they lay in bed.

Habara—as was often the case when she told stories—found himself at a loss for words.

“Have you ever broken into somebody’s house?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he answered in a dry voice.

“Do it once and you get addicted.”

“But it’s illegal.”

“You betcha. It’s dangerous, but you still get hooked.”

Habara waited quietly for her to continue.

“The coolest thing about being in someone else’s house when there’s no one there,” Scheherazade said, “is how silent it is. Not a sound. It’s like the quietest place in the world. That’s how it felt to me, anyway. When I sat on the floor and kept absolutely still, my life as a lamprey came back to me. I told you about my being a lamprey in a former life, right?”

“Yes, you did.”

“It was just like that. My suckers stuck to a rock underwater and my body waving back and forth overhead, like the weeds around me. Everything so quiet. Though that may have been because I had no ears. On sunny days, light shot down from the surface like an arrow. Fish of all colors and shapes drifted by above. And my mind was empty of thoughts. Other than lamprey thoughts, that is. Those were cloudy but very pure. It was a wonderful place to be.”

The first time Scheherazade broke into someone’s house, she explained, she was a high-school junior and had a serious crush on a boy in her class. Though he wasn’t what you would call handsome, he was tall and clean-cut, a good student who played on the soccer team, and she was powerfully attracted to him. But he apparently liked another girl in their class and took no notice of Scheherazade. In fact, it was possible that he was unaware she existed. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Just seeing him made her breathless; sometimes she felt as if she were going to throw up. If she didn’t do something about it, she thought, she might go crazy. But confessing her love was out of the question.

One day, Scheherazade skipped school and went to the boy’s house. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived. She had researched his family situation beforehand. His mother taught Japanese language at a school in a neighboring town. His father, who had worked at a cement company, had been killed in a car accident some years earlier. His sister was a junior-high-school student. This meant that the house should be empty during the day.

Not surprisingly, the front door was locked. Scheherazade checked under the mat for a key. Sure enough, there was one there. Quiet residential communities in provincial cities like theirs had little crime, and a spare key was often left under a mat or a potted plant.

To be safe, Scheherazade rang the bell, waited to make sure there was no answer, scanned the street in case she was being observed, opened the door, and entered. She locked the door again from the inside. Taking off her shoes, she put them in a plastic bag and stuck it in the knapsack on her back. Then she tiptoed up the stairs to the second floor.

His bedroom was there, as she had imagined. His bed was neatly made. On the bookshelf was a small stereo, with a few CDs. On the wall, there was a calendar with a photo of the Barcelona soccer team and, next to it, what looked like a team banner, but nothing else. No posters, no pictures. Just a cream-colored wall. A white curtain hung over the window. The room was tidy, everything in its place. No books strewn about, no clothes on the floor. The room testified to the meticulous personality of its inhabitant. Or else to a mother who kept a perfect house. Or both. It made Scheherazade nervous. Had the room been sloppier, no one would have noticed whatever little messes she might make. Yet, at the same time, the very cleanliness and simplicity of the room, its perfect order, made her happy. It was so like him.

Scheherazade lowered herself into the desk chair and sat there for a while. This is where he studies every night, she thought, her heart pounding. One by one, she picked up the implements on the desk, rolled them between her fingers, smelled them, held them to her lips. His pencils, his scissors, his ruler, his stapler—the most mundane objects became somehow radiant because they were his.

She opened his desk drawers and carefully checked their contents. The uppermost drawer was divided into compartments, each of which contained a small tray with a scattering of objects and souvenirs. The second drawer was largely occupied by notebooks for the classes he was taking at the moment, while the one on the bottom (the deepest drawer) was filled with an assortment of old papers, notebooks, and exams. Almost everything was connected either to school or to soccer. She’d hoped to come across something personal—a diary, perhaps, or letters—but the desk held nothing of that sort. Not even a photograph. That struck Scheherazade as a bit unnatural. Did he have no life outside of school and soccer? Or had he carefully hidden everything of a private nature, where no one would come across it?

Still, just sitting at his desk and running her eyes over his handwriting moved Scheherazade beyond words. To calm herself, she got out of the chair and sat on the floor. She looked up at the ceiling. The quiet around her was absolute. In this way, she returned to the lampreys’ world.

“So all you did,” Habara asked, “was enter his room, go through his stuff, and sit on the floor?”

“No,” Scheherazade said. “There was more. I wanted something of his to take home. Something that he handled every day or that had been close to his body. But it couldn’t be anything important that he would miss. So I stole one of his pencils.”

“A single pencil?”

“Yes. One that he’d been using. But stealing wasn’t enough. That would make it a straightforward case of burglary. The fact that I had done it would be lost. I was the Love Thief, after all.”

The Love Thief? It sounded to Habara like the title of a silent film.

“So I decided to leave something behind in its place, a token of some sort. As proof that I had been there. A declaration that this was an exchange, not a simple theft. But what should it be? Nothing popped into my head. I searched my knapsack and my pockets, but I couldn’t find anything appropriate. I kicked myself for not having thought to bring something suitable. Finally, I decided to leave a tampon behind. An unused one, of course, still in its plastic wrapper. My period was getting close, so I was carrying it around just to be safe. I hid it at the very back of the bottom drawer, where it would be difficult to find. That really turned me on. The fact that a tampon of mine was stashed away in his desk drawer. Maybe it was because I was so turned on that my period started almost immediately after that.”

A tampon for a pencil, Habara thought. Perhaps that was what he should write in his diary that day: “Love Thief, Pencil, Tampon.” He’d like to see what they’d make of that!

“I was there in his home for only fifteen minutes or so. I couldn’t stay any longer than that: it was my first experience of sneaking into a house, and I was scared that someone would turn up while I was there. I checked the street to make sure that the coast was clear, slipped out the door, locked it, and replaced the key under the mat. Then I went to school. Carrying his precious pencil.”Scheherazade fell silent. From the look of it, she had gone back in time and was picturing the various things that had happened next, one by one.

“That week was the happiest of my life,” she said after a long pause. “I scribbled random things in my notebook with his pencil. I sniffed it, kissed it, rubbed my cheek with it, rolled it between my fingers. Sometimes I even stuck it in my mouth and sucked on it. Of course, it pained me that the more I wrote the shorter it got, but I couldn’t help myself. If it got too short, I thought, I could always go back and get another. There was a whole bunch of used pencils in the pencil holder on his desk. He wouldn’t have a clue that one was missing. And he probably still hadn’t found the tampon tucked away in his drawer. That idea excited me no end—it gave me a strange ticklish sensation down below. It didn’t bother me anymore that in the real world he never looked at me or showed that he was even aware of my existence. Because I secretly possessed something of his—a part of him, as it were.”

Ten days later, Scheherazade skipped school again and paid a second visit to the boy’s house. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. As before, she fished the key from under the mat and opened the door. Again, his room was in flawless order. First, she selected a pencil with a lot of use left in it and carefully placed it in her pencil case. Then she gingerly lay down on his bed, her hands clasped on her chest, and looked up at the ceiling. This was the bed where he slept every night. The thought made her heart beat faster, and she found it difficult to breathe normally. Her lungs weren’t filling with air and her throat was as dry as a bone, making each breath painful.

Scheherazade got off the bed, straightened the covers, and sat down on the floor, as she had on her first visit. She looked back up at the ceiling. I’m not quite ready for his bed, she told herself. That’s still too much to handle.

This time, Scheherazade spent half an hour in the house. She pulled his notebooks from the drawer and glanced through them. She found a book report and read it. It was on “Kokoro,” a novel by Soseki Natsume, that summer’s reading assignment. His handwriting was beautiful, as one would expect from a straight-A student, not an error or an omission anywhere. The grade on it was Excellent. What else could it be? Any teacher confronted with penmanship that perfect would automatically give it an Excellent, whether he bothered to read a single line or not.

Scheherazade moved on to the chest of drawers, examining its contents in order. His underwear and socks. Shirts and pants. His soccer uniform. They were all neatly folded. Nothing stained or frayed. Had he done the folding? Or, more likely, had his mother done it for him? She felt a pang of jealousy toward the mother, who could do these things for him each and every day.

Scheherazade leaned over and sniffed the clothes in the drawers. They all smelled freshly laundered and redolent of the sun. She took out a plain gray T-shirt, unfolded it, and pressed it to her face. Might not a whiff of his sweat remain under the arms? But there was nothing. Nevertheless, she held it there for some time, inhaling through her nose. She wanted to keep the shirt for herself. But that would be too risky. His clothes were so meticulously arranged and maintained. He (or his mother) probably knew the exact number of T-shirts in the drawer. If one went missing, all hell might break loose.Scheherazade carefully refolded the T-shirt and returned it to its proper place. In its stead, she took a small badge, shaped like a soccer ball, that she found in one of the desk drawers. It seemed to date back to a team from his grade-school years. She doubted that he would miss it. At the very least, it would be some time before he noticed that it was gone. While she was at it, she checked the bottom drawer of the desk for the tampon. It was still there.

Scheherazade tried to imagine what would happen if his mother discovered the tampon. What would she think? Would she demand that he explain what on earth a tampon was doing in his desk? Or would she keep her discovery a secret, turning her dark suspicions over and over in her mind? Scheherazade had no idea. But she decided to leave the tampon where it was. After all, it was her very first token.

To commemorate her second visit, Scheherazade left behind three strands of her hair. The night before, she had plucked them out, wrapped them in plastic, and sealed them in a tiny envelope. Now she took this envelope from her knapsack and slipped it into one of the old math notebooks in his drawer. The three hairs were straight and black, neither too long nor too short. No one would know whose they were without a DNA test, though they were clearly a girl’s.

She left his house and went straight to school, arriving in time for her first afternoon class. Once again, she was content for about ten days. She felt that he had become that much more hers. But, as you might expect, this chain of events would not end without incident. For, as Scheherazade had said, sneaking into other people’s homes is highly addictive.

At this point in the story Scheherazade glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was 4:32 P.M. “Got to get going,” she said, as if to herself. She hopped out of bed and put on her plain white panties, hooked her bra, slipped into her jeans, and pulled her dark-blue Nike sweatshirt over her head. Then she scrubbed her hands in the bathroom, ran a brush through her hair, and drove away in her blue Mazda.

Left alone with nothing in particular to do, Habara lay in bed and ruminated on the story she had just told him, savoring it bit by bit, like a cow chewing its cud. Where was it headed? he wondered. As with all her stories, he hadn’t a clue. He found it difficult to picture Scheherazade as a high-school student. Was she slender then, free of the flab she carried today? School uniform, white socks, her hair in braids?

He wasn’t hungry yet, so he put off preparing his dinner and went back to the book he had been reading, only to find that he couldn’t concentrate. The image of Scheherazade sneaking into her classmate’s room and burying her face in his shirt was too fresh in his mind. He was impatient to hear what had happened next.

Scheherazade’s next visit to the house was three days later, after the weekend had passed. As always, she came bearing large paper bags stuffed with provisions. She went through the food in the fridge, replacing everything that was past its expiration date, examined the canned and bottled goods in the cupboard, checked the supply of condiments and spices to see what was running low, and wrote up a shopping list. She put some bottles of Perrier in the fridge to chill. Finally, she stacked the new books and DVDs she had brought with her on the table.

“Is there something more you need or want?”

“Can’t think of anything,” Habara replied.

Then, as always, the two went to bed and had sex. After an appropriate amount of foreplay, he slipped on his condom, entered her, and, after an appropriate amount of time, ejaculated. After casting a professional eye on the contents of his condom, Scheherazade began the latest installment of her story.

As before, she felt happy and fulfilled for ten days after her second break-in. She tucked the soccer badge away in her pencil case and from time to time fingered it during class. She nibbled on the pencil she had taken and licked the lead. All the time she was thinking of his room. She thought of his desk, the bed where he slept, the chest of drawers packed with his clothes, his pristine white boxer shorts, and the tampon and three strands of hair she had hidden in his drawer.

She had lost all interest in schoolwork. In class, she either fiddled with the badge and the pencil or gave in to daydreams. When she went home, she was in no state of mind to tackle her homework. Scheherazade’s grades had never been a problem. She wasn’t a top student, but she was a serious girl who always did her assignments. So when her teacher called on her in class and she was unable to give a proper answer, he was more puzzled than angry. Eventually, he summoned her to the staff room during the lunch break. “What’s the problem?” he asked her. “Is anything bothering you?” She could only mumble something vague about not feeling well. Her secret was too weighty and dark to reveal to anyone—she had to bear it alone.

“I had to keep breaking into his house,” Scheherazade said. “I was compelled to. As you can imagine, it was a very risky business. Even I could see that. Sooner or later, someone would find me there, and the police would be called. The idea scared me to death. But, once the ball was rolling, there was no way I could stop it. Ten days after my second ‘visit,’ I went there again. I had no choice. I felt that if I didn’t I would go off the deep end. Looking back, I think I really was a little crazy.”

“Didn’t it cause problems for you at school, skipping class so often?” Habara asked.

“My parents had their own business, so they were too busy to pay much attention to me. I’d never caused any problems up to then, never challenged their authority. So they figured a hands-off approach was best. Forging notes for school was a piece of cake. I explained to my homeroom teacher that I had a medical problem that required me to spend half a day at the hospital from time to time. Since the teachers were racking their brains over what to do about the kids who hadn’t come to school in ages, they weren’t too concerned about me taking half a day off every now and then.”

Scheherazade shot a quick glance at the clock next to the bed before continuing.

“I got the key from under the mat and entered the house for a third time. It was as quiet as before—no, even quieter for some reason. It rattled me when the refrigerator turned on—it sounded like a huge beast sighing. The phone rang while I was there. The ringing was so loud and harsh that I thought my heart would stop. I was covered with sweat. No one picked up, of course, and it stopped after about ten rings. The house felt even quieter then.”

Scheherazade spent a long time stretched out on his bed that day. This time her heart did not pound so wildly, and she was able to breathe normally. She could imagine him sleeping peacefully beside her, even feel as if she were watching over him as he slept. She felt that, if she reached out, she could touch his muscular arm. He wasn’t there next to her, of course. She was just lost in a haze of daydreams.

She felt an overpowering urge to smell him. Rising from the bed, she walked over to his chest of drawers, opened one, and examined the shirts inside. All had been washed and neatly folded. They were pristine, and free of odor, just like before.

Then an idea struck her. She raced down the stairs to the first floor. There, in the room beside the bath, she found the laundry hamper and removed the lid. Mixed together were the soiled clothes of the three family members—mother, daughter, and son. A day’s worth, from the looks of it. Scheherazade extracted a piece of male clothing. A white crew-neck T-shirt. She took a whiff. The unmistakable scent of a young man. A mustiness she had smelled before, when her male classmates were close by. Not a scintillating odor, to be sure. But the fact that this smell was his brought Scheherazade unbounded joy. When she put her nose next to the armpits and inhaled, she felt as though she were in his embrace, his arms wrapped firmly about her.

T-shirt in hand, Scheherazade climbed the stairs to the second floor and lay on his bed once more. She buried her face in his shirt and greedily breathed in. Now she could feel a languid sensation in the lower part of her body. Her nipples were stiffening as well. Could her period be on the way? No, it was much too early. Was this sexual desire? If so, then what could she do about it? She had no idea. One thing was for sure, though—there was nothing to be done under these circumstances. Not here in his room, on his bed.

In the end, Scheherazade decided to take the shirt home with her. It was risky, for sure. His mother was likely to figure out that a shirt was missing. Even if she didn’t realize that it had been stolen, she would still wonder where it had gone. Any woman who kept her house so spotless was bound to be a neat freak of the first order. When something went missing, she would search the house from top to bottom, like a police dog, until she found it. Undoubtedly, she would uncover the traces of Scheherazade in her precious son’s room. But, even as Scheherazade understood this, she didn’t want to part with the shirt. Her brain was powerless to persuade her heart.

Instead, she began thinking about what to leave behind. Her panties seemed like the best choice. They were of an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning. She could hide them at the very back of his closet. Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange? But, when she took them off, the crotch was damp. I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought. It would hardly do to leave something tainted by her lust in his room. She would only be degrading herself. She slipped them back on and began to think about what else to leave.

Scheherazade broke off her story. For a long time, she didn’t say a word. She lay there breathing quietly with her eyes closed. Beside her, Habara followed suit, waiting for her to resume.

At last, she opened her eyes and spoke. “Hey, Mr. Habara,” she said. It was the first time she had addressed him by name.

Habara looked at her.

“Do you think we could do it one more time?”

“I think I could manage that,” he said.

So they made love again. This time, though, was very different from the time before. Violent, passionate, and drawn out. Her climax at the end was unmistakable. A series of powerful spasms that left her trembling. Even her face was transformed. For Habara, it was like catching a brief glimpse of Scheherazade in her youth: the woman in his arms was now a troubled seventeen-year-old girl who had somehow become trapped in the body of a thirty-five-year-old housewife. Habara could feel her in there, her eyes closed, her body quivering, innocently inhaling the aroma of a boy’s sweaty T-shirt.

This time, Scheherazade did not tell him a story after sex. Nor did she check the contents of his condom. They lay there quietly next to each other. Her eyes were wide open, and she was staring at the ceiling. Like a lamprey gazing up at the bright surface of the water. How wonderful it would be, Habara thought, if he, too, could inhabit another time or space—leave this single, clearly defined human being named Nobutaka Habara behind and become a nameless lamprey. He pictured himself and Scheherazade side by side, their suckers fastened to a rock, their bodies waving in the current, eying the surface as they waited for a fat trout to swim smugly by.

“So what did you leave in exchange for the shirt?” Habara broke the silence.

She did not reply immediately.

“Nothing,” she said at last. “Nothing I had brought along could come close to that shirt with his odor. So I just took it and sneaked out. That was when I became a burglar, pure and simple.”

When, twelve days later, Scheherazade went back to the boy’s house for the fourth time, there was a new lock on the front door. Its gold color gleamed in the midday sun, as if to boast of its great sturdiness. And there was no key hidden under the mat. Clearly, his mother’s suspicions had been aroused by the missing shirt. She must have searched high and low, coming across other signs that told of something strange going on in her house. Her instincts had been unerring, her reaction swift.

Scheherazade was, of course, disappointed by this development, but at the same time she felt relieved. It was as if someone had stepped behind her and removed a great weight from her shoulders. This means I don’t have to go on breaking into his house, she thought. There was no doubt that, had the lock not been changed, her invasions would have gone on indefinitely. Nor was there any doubt that her actions would have escalated with each visit. Eventually, a member of the family would have shown up while she was on the second floor. There would have been no avenue of escape. No way to talk herself out of her predicament. This was the future that had been waiting for her, sooner or later, and the outcome would have been devastating. Now she had dodged it. Perhaps she should thank his mother—though she had never met the woman—for having eyes like a hawk.

Scheherazade inhaled the aroma of his T-shirt each night before she went to bed. She slept with it next to her. She would wrap it in paper and hide it before she left for school in the morning. Then, after dinner, she would pull it out to caress and sniff. She worried that the odor might fade as the days went by, but that didn’t happen. The smell of his sweat had permeated the shirt for good.

Now that further break-ins were out of the question, Scheherazade’s state of mind slowly began to return to normal. She daydreamed less in class, and her teacher’s words began to register. Nevertheless, her chief focus was not on her teacher’s voice but on her classmate’s behavior. She kept her eye discreetly trained on him, trying to detect a change, any indication at all that he might be nervous about something. But he acted exactly the same as always. He threw his head back and laughed as unaffectedly as ever, and answered promptly when called upon. He shouted as loudly in soccer practice and got just as sweaty. She could see no trace of anything out of the ordinary—just an upright young man, leading a seemingly unclouded existence.

Still, Scheherazade knew of one shadow that was hanging over him. Or something close to that. No one else knew, in all likelihood. Just her (and, come to think of it, possibly his mother). On her third break-in, she had come across a number of pornographic magazines cleverly concealed in the farthest recesses of his closet. They were full of pictures of naked women, spreading their legs and offering generous views of their genitals. Some pictures portrayed the act of sex: men inserted rodlike penises into female bodies in the most unnatural of positions. Scheherazade had never laid eyes on photographs like these before. She sat at his desk and flipped slowly through the magazines, studying each photo with great interest. She guessed that he masturbated while viewing them. But the idea did not strike her as especially repulsive. She accepted masturbation as a perfectly normal activity. All those sperm had to go somewhere, just as girls had to have periods. In other words, he was a typical teen-ager. Neither hero nor saint. She found that knowledge something of a relief.

“When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool. It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach. Somehow or other, I found myself smelling his shirt less often and spending less time caressing his pencil and badge. The fever was passing. What I had contracted was not something like sickness but the real thing. As long as it lasted, I couldn’t think straight. Maybe everybody goes through a crazy period like that at one time or another. Or maybe it was something that happened only to me. How about you? Did you ever have an experience like that?”

Habara tried to remember, but drew a blank. “No, nothing that extreme, I don’t think,” he said.

Scheherazade looked somewhat disappointed by his answer.

“Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that’s the story of my ‘breaking-and-entering’ period.”

She made it sound like Picasso’s Blue Period, Habara thought. But he understood what she was trying to convey.

She glanced at the clock next to the bed. It was almost time for her to leave.

“To tell the truth,” she said finally, “the story doesn’t end there. A few years later, when I was in my second year of nursing school, a strange stroke of fate brought us together again. His mother played a big role in it; in fact, there was something spooky about the whole thing—it was like one of those old ghost stories. Events took a rather unbelievable course. Would you like to hear about it?”

“I’d love to,” Habara said.

“It had better wait till my next visit,” Scheherazade said. “It’s getting late. I’ve got to head home and fix dinner.”

She got out of bed and put on her clothes—panties, stockings, camisole, and, finally, her skirt and blouse. Habara casually watched her movements from the bed. It struck him that the way women put on their clothes could be even more interesting than the way they took them off.

“Any books in particular you’d like me to pick up?” she asked, on her way out the door.

“No, nothing I can think of,” he answered. What he really wanted, he thought, was for her to tell him the rest of her story, but he didn’t put that into words. Doing so might jeopardize his chances of ever hearing it.

Habara went to bed early that night and thought about Scheherazade. Perhaps he would never see her again. That worried him. The possibility was just too real. Nothing of a personal nature—no vow, no implicit understanding—held them together. Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim. In other words, they were attached by a slender thread. It was likely—no, certain—that that thread would eventually be broken and all the strange and unfamiliar tales she might have told would be lost to him. The only question was when.

It was also possible that he would, at some point, be deprived of his freedom entirely, in which case not only Scheherazade but all women would disappear from his life. Never again would he be able to enter the warm moistness of their bodies. Never again would he feel them quiver in response. Perhaps an even more distressing prospect for Habara than the cessation of sexual activity, however, was the loss of the moments of shared intimacy. What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one hand, while negating it entirely on the other. That was something Scheherazade had provided in abundance—indeed, her gift was inexhaustible. The prospect of losing that made him saddest of all.

I was born in 1949. I started high school in 1963 and went to college in 1967. And so it was amid the crazy, confused uproar of 1968 that I saw in my otherwise auspicious twentieth year. Which, I guess, makes me a typical child of the sixties. It was the most vulnerable, most formative, and therefore most important period in my life, and there I was, breathing in deep lungfuls of abandon and quite naturally getting high on it all. I kicked in a few deserving doors - and what a thrill it was whenever a door that deserved kicking in presented itself before me, as Jim Morrison, the Beatles and Bob Dylan played in the background. The whole shebang.

Even now, looking back on it all, I think that those years were special. I'm sure that if you were to examine the attributes of the time one by one, you wouldn't discover anything all that noteworthy. Just the heat generated by the engine of history, that limited gleam that certain things give off in certain places at certain times - that and a kind of inexplicable antsiness, as if we were viewing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. Heroics and villainy, rapture and disillusionment, martyrdom and revisionism, silence and eloquence, etcetera, etcetera... the stuff of any age. Only, in our day - if you'll forgive the overblown expression - it was all so colourful somehow, so very reach-out-and-grab-it palpable. There were no gimmicks, no discount coupons, no hidden advertising, no keep-'em-coming point-card schemes, no insidious, loopholing paper trails. Cause and effect shook hands; theory and reality embraced with aplomb. A prehistory to high capitalism: that's what I personally call those years.

But as to whether the era brought us - my generation, that is - any special radiance, well, I'm not so sure. In the final analysis, perhaps we simply passed through it as if we were watching an exciting movie: we experienced it as real - our hearts pounded, our palms sweated - but when the lights came on we just walked out of the cinema and picked up where we'd left off. For whatever reason, we neglected to learn any truly valuable lesson from it all. Don't ask me why. I am much too deeply bound up in those years to answer the question. There's just one thing I'd like you to understand: I'm not the least bit proud that I came of age then; I'm simply reporting the facts.

Now let me tell you about the girls. About the mixed-up sexual relations between us boys, with our brand new genitals, and the girls, who at the time were, well, still girls.

But, first, about virginity. In the sixties, virginity held a greater significance than it does today. As I see it - not that I've ever conducted a survey - about 50% of the girls of my generation were no longer virgins by the age of 20. Or, at least, that seemed to be the ratio in my general vicinity. Which means that, consciously or not, about half the girls around still revered this thing called virginity.

Looking back now, I'd say that a large portion of the girls of my generation, whether virgins or not, had their share of inner conflicts about sex. It all depended on the circumstances, on the partner. Sandwiching this relatively silent majority were the liberals, who thought of sex as a kind of sport, and the conservatives, who were adamant that girls should stay virgins until they were married.

Among the boys, there were also those who thought that the girl they married should be a virgin.

People differ, values differ. That much is constant, no matter what the period. But the thing about the sixties that was totally unlike any other time is that we believed that those differences could be resolved.

This is the story of someone I knew. He was in my class during my senior year of high school in Kobe, and, frankly, he was the kind of guy who could do it all. His grades were good, he was athletic, he was considerate, he had leadership qualities. He wasn't outstandingly handsome, but he was good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way. He could even sing. A forceful speaker, he was always the one to mobilise opinion in our classroom discussions. This didn't mean that he was much of an original thinker - but who expects originality in a classroom discussion? All we ever wanted was for it to be over as quickly as possible, and if he opened his mouth we were sure to be done on time. In that sense, you could say that he was a real friend.

There was no faulting him. But then again I could never begin to imagine what went on in his mind. Sometimes I felt like unscrewing his head and shaking it, just to see what kind of sound it would make. Still, he was very popular with the girls. Whenever he stood up to say something in class, all the girls would gaze at him admiringly. Any maths problem they didn't understand, they'd take to him. He must have been twenty-seven times more popular than I was. He was just that kind of guy.

We all learn our share of lessons from the textbook of life, and one piece of wisdom I've picked up along the way is that you just have to accept that in any collective body there will be such types. Needless to say, though, I personally wasn't too keen on his type. I guess I preferred, I don't know, someone more flawed, someone with a more unusual presence. So in the course of an entire year in the same class I never once hung out with the guy. I doubt that I even spoke to him. The first time I ever had a proper conversation with him was during the summer vacation after my freshman year of college. We happened to be attending the same driving school, and we'd chat now and then, or have coffee together during the breaks. That driving school was such a bore that I'd have been happy to kill time with any acquaintance I ran into. I don't remember much about our conversations; whatever we talked about, it left no impression, good or bad.

The other thing I remember about him is that he had a girlfriend. She was in a different class, and she was hands down the prettiest girl in the school. She got good grades, but she was also an athlete, and she was a leader - like him, she had the last word in every class discussion. The two of them were simply made for each other: Mr and Miss Clean, like something out of a toothpaste commercial.

I'd see them around. Every lunch hour, they sat in a corner of the schoolyard, talking. After school, they rode the train home together, getting off at different stations. He was on the soccer team, and she was in the English conversation club. When their extra-curricular activities weren't over at the same time, the one who finished first would go and study in the library. Any free time they had they spent together.

None of us - in my crowd - had anything against them. We didn't make fun of them, we never gave them a hard time; in fact, we hardly paid any attention to them at all. They really didn't give us much to speculate about. They were like the weather - just there, a physical fact. Inevitably, we spent our time talking about the things that interested us more: sex and rock and roll and Jean-Luc Godard films, political movements and Kenzaburo Oe novels, things like that. But especially sex.

OK, we were ignorant and full of ourselves. We didn't have a clue about life. But, for us, Mr and Miss Clean existed only in their Clean world. Which probably means that the illusions we entertained back then and the illusions they embraced were, to some extent, interchangeable.

This is their story. It's not a particularly happy story, nor, by this point in time, is it one with much of a moral. But no matter: it's our story as much as theirs. Which, I guess, makes it a form of cultural history. Suitable material for me to collect and relate here - me, the insensitive folklorist.

He and I ran into each other in the Italian town of Lucca, in the Tuscan foothills. My wife and I were renting an apartment in Rome at the time, but she was back in Japan for a few weeks, and I was travelling around by train. From Venice to Verona to Mantua to Modena, then a short stopover in Lucca, a peaceful little town, with a restaurant on the outskirts that served wonderful mushroom dishes. By coincidence, he was staying at the same hotel I was.

Small world.

That evening, we dined together at the restaurant. Both of us were travelling alone; both of us were bored. The older you get, the less fun it is to travel by yourself. The scenery starts to seem less scenic; other people's endless conversations are grating to your ears. You don't bother to try out new restaurants, and the waits for trains seem endless. You look at your watch again and again, and you don't even attempt to speak the language of the country you are travelling in. You close your eyes, and all that comes to mind are the mistakes of the past.

Perhaps that's why he and I felt somehow relieved to see each other, just as we had at driving school. We took a table by the fireplace, ordered a quality rosso, and proceeded to eat our way through an antipasto of funghi trifolati, followed by fettuccine ai porcini and arrosto di tartufo bianco.

He had come to Lucca to buy furniture, he told me. He ran a trading firm that specialised in European furniture, and, of course, he was successful. He didn't brag or anything, but I could tell at a glance that this man had the world in his hands. It was in the clothes he wore, in the way he talked, the way he carried himself. Success looked good on him, and, in a way, it was pleasing to see.

Initially, we talked about Italy. The unreliable train schedules, the inordinate amount of time devoted to meals. Then, I don't remember what led up to it, but by the time the waiter brought a second bottle of wine he was already telling me his story, and I was commenting on it at appropriate intervals. I guess he'd been wanting to tell someone for a long time, but hadn't been able to bring himself to do it. If it hadn't been for the cosy restaurant and the bouquet of the '83 Coltibuono, he might never have broached the subject. But talk he did.

"I always thought I was a boring person," he said. "Even when I was little, I was boxed in. I saw fences all around me, and I was careful never to go beyond them. There were guidelines, like on a highway: take the right lane only for this exit, merge ahead, no passing. You just had to follow the signs and you'd get there. So that was how I did everything - I did it the right way - and, as a result, all the adults fussed over me and praised me. When I was young, I thought that everyone saw things the same way. But, sooner or later, I learned that that wasn't the case."

I held my wineglass toward the fire and gazed at it for a while.

"My whole life - or at least the first part of it - things went smoothly for me. I had no problems to speak of, but, on the other hand, did I have any notion of what it meant to be alive? I had no idea what I was doing, what I was after. I mean, I was good at maths, I was good at English, I was good at sports. Straight flush. My folks patted me on the back, my teachers told me I had nothing to worry about. But what was it that I was really cut out for? What did I want to do with myself? Should I study law? Engineering? Should I go to medical school? Any of the above would have been fine. So I did what my parents and teachers told me to do and I majored in law at Tokyo University."

He took another sip of wine. "Do you remember my girlfriend in high school?"

"Fujisawa something, wasn't it?" I dredged my memory for her name. I wasn't at all sure, but it came up correct.

He nodded. "That's right, Yoshiko Fujisawa. Well, the same went for her. I could tell her everything I was feeling, and she understood. We could have gone on talking for ever. It was... I mean, until I met her, I'd never had a friend I could really talk to."

He and Yoshiko Fujisawa were such spiritual twins it was creepy. They were leaders. School superstars. They came from good homes, where their parents never the less didn't really get along. The fathers had other women and didn't always come home at night. The only thing that kept the parents from divorcing was what other people would think. The mothers ruled the households, and the children were pushed to be the best at whatever they did. Neither child could get close to anyone. They were both popular, but essentially friendless, and they didn't understand why. Perhaps normal imperfect human beings simply preferred the company of other normal imperfect human beings.

They were always lonely, always on edge. But then, out of the blue, they met each other. They accepted each other. They fell in love. They felt completely at ease with each other, especially when they were alone together. They had so many secrets to share; they never tired of talking about their isolation, their insecurities, their dreams.

When it came to physical contact, they had their rules: never to take off their clothes, to touch each other only with their hands. Once a week, they'd spend the afternoon in one or the other's bedroom. Both houses were quiet - absent father, mother out on errands. They allowed themselves ten or fifteen minutes of hectic groping before returning to their studies, chairs side by side at the desk. "OK, enough of this, huh? Back to the books," she'd say, straightening her skirt.

They both got good grades. Studying, for them, was no hardship at all, just second nature. They'd even race each other to solve math problems. "That was fun," he'd say. Yes, it sounds stupid, but to them it was fun. Such fun as we flawed humans will likely never understand.

Yet somehow these relations didn't entirely satisfy him. He felt as though something was missing. He wanted to sleep with her. He wanted to have sex. "Physical union" were the words he used. "I thought it would give us a more intimate understanding of each other," he told me. "It just seemed like the most natural next step."

She, however, didn't agree. She pinched her lips together and gave a little shake of her head. "I like you and all, but I want to stay a virgin until I'm married," she said. No matter how hard he tried to persuade her, she wouldn't change her mind. "You know I like you," she'd say. "Really and truly, I do. But that's that, and this is different. I'm sorry, but just bear with me. Please. If you truly love me, can't you let it go?"

"If that was how she wanted it," he told me, "I had to respect her wishes. It wasn't like she was asking for the impossible. I personally didn't think virginity was such a big deal. I doubt I'd have cared whether the girl I married was a virgin or not. I'm no radical thinker, but that doesn't make me a fundamentalist. I'm simply a realist. The important thing is for a man and a woman to know where they're coming from, mutually. That's what I thought. But she had an image of the life she wanted to live. And I put up with it. We went on petting, hands under our clothes - you know the kind of thing."

"I believe so," I said.

He blushed, then smiled. "It wasn't so bad, as far as it went, but I couldn't stop thinking about sex. To me, we were only halfway there. I wanted to be one with her. I wanted nothing covered up, nothing hidden. It was a matter of staking a claim. I needed some kind of sign. Sure, my sex drive was part of it, but it wasn't just that. Never once in my life had I felt completely united with anything or anyone. I was always alone. Always cramped up inside that box. I wanted to free myself. I wanted to discover the real me. By sleeping with her, I thought I might be able to break out."

He approached her with a plan. As soon as they finished college, he said, they could get married. If she wanted to get engaged, they could do that even sooner. It was no problem at all. She looked straight at him for a second. Then a smile floated across her face. A really lovely smile. She was clearly happy to hear those words from him. But, at the same time, it was a smile hedged with forbearance, with a faint hint of sadness. Not condescending, exactly, but not encouraging, either - at least, that's what he sensed.

"It's impossible," she said. "You and I will never get married. I'm going to marry someone a little older than me, and you're going to marry someone a little younger. That's just how it goes. Women mature earlier than men, and they age faster, too. Even if we did get married right after college, it wouldn't last. Anyway, we can't keep going like this. You know I like you, more than I've ever liked anyone else. But that's that, and this is this" - a pet phrase of hers, apparently. "We're still in high school. We lead protected lives. The real world is a lot bigger and a lot more difficult. We have to prepare ourselves."

He knew what she was trying to say. He was much more of a realist in his thinking, after all, than most boys of his generation. If he'd been told the same thing as a general proposition, he might well have agreed. But this was no general proposition; this concerned him very specifically.

"I don't buy that," he told her. "I love you and I want to be with you. I'm very clear on this. It's very important to me. I don't care if some things don't hold up in the real world - honestly, this will. I love you that much. I'm crazy about you."

She shook her head, as if to say, "It can't be helped." Then, stroking his hair, she asked, "Do you really think we know the first thing about love? Our love has never been tested. We're still children, you and I."

He was too disheartened to respond. Once again, he hadn't been able to break down the walls that surrounded him, and he was only too aware of how powerless he was. I can't do a damn thing, he thought. If things keep going like this, I'll probably live out my whole life inside this box, year after pointless year.

The two of them stayed together until they graduated from high school. Rendezvousing in the library, studying together, petting under their clothes. She didn't seem to think that there was anything wrong with this arrangement; in fact, she seemed almost to relish the incompleteness of it. While everyone else imagined that they - Mr and Miss Clean - were enjoying an ideal youth, he alone was unconsoled.

Finally, in the spring of 1967, he left for Tokyo University. She stayed in Kobe, where she enrolled at a very proper women's college. It was a top-rated school among such institutions, but hardly a challenge for her. She could easily have got into Tokyo University, but she didn't even sit for the entrance exams. To her mind, that kind of education was unnecessary. "I'm not looking for a career in the ministry of finance. I'm a girl - it's different for me. You, you're going to go far, but I'm just going to take it easy for these four years. An interlude, you know, a kind of rest stop. Because once I get married, I won't be having a career, now, will I?"

Her attitude disappointed him. He'd been hoping that the two of them would go to Tokyo together and reshape their relationship into something new. He urged her to rethink it, but she just shook her head.

The summer after his first year in college (the same summer that he and I met up at the driving school), he went home to Kobe, and they saw each other almost every day. She took him on long drives, and they petted, just like old times. But he couldn't help noticing that something had begun to change between them. The change wasn't drastic. In a way, things were a little too much the same. The way she talked, the way she dressed, her opinions - almost everything about her was as it had been before. But he no longer wanted to blend back into his old life. It was the law of dynamics: little by little, repetition after repetition, the two of them had fallen out of synch. And it wouldn't have been so bad, if only he knew what direction he was veering in.

He had been lonely in Tokyo, still unable to make friends. The city was crowded and dirty, the food tasteless. He thought about her all the time. At night, he'd hole up in his room and write to her. She wrote back (albeit much less frequently), letters detailing her daily activities, which he read over and over; if it hadn't been for those letters, he was sure he'd have gone mad. He took up smoking; he started drinking. Sometimes he even cut class.

How he had longed for the summer break, so that he could go home to Kobe! But now that he was there he was even more depressed. The funny thing was that he had been away for only three months. Why did everything suddenly seem so dusty, so lacklustre? The city he'd missed so much now looked rundown to him, just another self-absorbed provincial town. Making conversation with his mother was an ordeal. Going to the barbershop where he'd had his hair cut since he was a boy was a gloomy prospect. The waterfront where he walked the dog every day was a derelict tract of rubbish.

Even seeing her failed to boost his spirits. What the hell was wrong with him? Of course he still loved her, but that wasn't enough. Passion can't sustain itself for ever. He had to play his hand, somehow, or the relationship would be suffocated into extinction.

He decided that he had to take the sex question out of the freezer and serve it up again. It was his last chance.

"These three months alone in Tokyo, I've thought of nothing but you. I really must be in love with you. No matter how far apart we are, my feelings are still the same. But while we're apart I get so insecure. I have dark moods. You may not understand this, but I've never felt so alone in my life. I need to have a real bond with you, an assurance that no matter how far we are from each other we will always be solidly connected."

She took a deep breath and kissed him. Ever so gently. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just can't give you my virginity. This is this, and that is that. I would do anything for you, anything but that. If you truly love me, please don't bring it up again."

Once more, he tried the subject of marriage.

"There are two girls in my class who are engaged," she told him, "but their fiancés already have real jobs. Marriage means responsibility."

"I can take responsibility," he said firmly. "I got into a good school, and I promise you I'll get good grades. Any company, any government office would take me on. I'll get a job any place you name. I can do anything if I put my mind to it. What on earth is the problem?"

She closed her eyes and rested her head against her seat and fell silent. "I'm scared," she said after a while, then buried her face in her hands, sobbing. "Really scared. So scared I can't help myself. I'm scared of living, of having to make a life. In a few years, I'll have to go out into the real world, and it frightens me sick. Why can't you understand that? Why must you torture me like this?"

He put his arms around her. "There's nothing to be afraid of," he said. "I'm here. Look at me, I'm scared, too, as scared as you are. But if you and I are together I know that we can make it. If we pool our strengths, there's nothing to be scared of, nothing at all."

She shook her head. "You just don't understand. I'm a woman. I'm not like you. You don't know a thing about it. Not a thing."

Nothing he could say did any good. She just kept on crying. And then she said the strangest thing. "Listen, even if I break up with you, I'll still remember you for ever. Honestly. I'll never forget. You know how much I like you. You're the first person I've ever cared for, and it's made me so happy just to be with you. Please understand. If it's some kind of promise you want, I promise. I'll sleep with you. But not now. After I'm married I'll sleep with you. I promise."

"What the hell was she saying? It boggled my mind," he said, gazing at the glowing hearth. The waiter brought our primi piatti and added another log to the fire, sending out crackling sparks. The middle-aged couple at the next table were deliberating over the dessert menu. "I just couldn't figure it out. I went home and her words kept playing over and over in my mind, but I simply could not follow her reasoning. Does it make any sense to you?"

"I guess she meant that she was going to stay a virgin until her wedding night, but once she was married and her virginity wasn't an issue she'd be able to have an affair with you. Something like that."

"Yeah, something along those lines. That's the only way I could read it."

"Unique, I'll give her that. And logical, in a way."

A mild smile played over his lips. "True enough. There was some logic to it."

"A virgin bride, an adulterous wife. It's like a classic French novel. But with no ballrooms or foot servants."

"And yet to her that was the only realistic solution," he said.

"Sad," I said.

He shot me a penetrating look, then nodded slowly. "Yeah, sad. Pathetic, really. You hit the nail on the head," he said. "By now I think so, too. I've done my share of growing older. But at the time, no, I couldn't see it that way. I was still a kid, and totally in the dark about the little tremors that unsettle people's minds. The whole thing came as such a surprise - it threw me for a loop."

"I imagine it would," I concurred.

Then, by tacit agreement, we both ate our tartufi.

"l guess you can see what's coming," he said after a while. "She and I broke up. Neither one of us came out and said anything. It just came to a natural end. Very peacefully. We just got tired of trying to keep the relationship going. As I saw it, her notions about life weren't... How can I put it? Well, she didn't come off as very sincere. No, that's not right. What I mean is I knew she could do better. I was disappointed in her. Virginity, marriage - instead of agonising over such conventional issues, she should have been trying for more out of life."

"But that was beyond her," I said.

He nodded. "I suppose," he said, forking a meaty slice of mushroom to his mouth. "It happens. You lose resilience. There comes a point where you're stretched to the limit, and you can't go any further. The same thing could've happened to me. From childhood on, both of us had been herded along. Pushed and prodded - go forward, get ahead. It gets to where you're so well trained, so conditioned, you can do only what you're told to do. Until, one day, you just snap."

"But you, how is it that you didn't end up that way?" I asked.

"I got over it somehow," he said after a moment's thought. Then he set down his knife and fork, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "After she and I broke up, I got a girlfriend in Tokyo. A nice girl. We lived together for a while. And, to tell the truth, there were none of the rumblings and jitters I'd had with Yoshiko Fujisawa. It was an honest relationship, and I really liked her. She taught me a lot about real human beings, and I also began to make friends. I took an interest in politics. I learned that realism can come in all shapes and sizes. The world is big enough for different values to co-exist. There's no universal need to be an honours student. And that's how I found my footing in society."

"And became successful."

"Successful enough," he said, with a slightly disgruntled sigh. Then, looking at me as he might at a co-conspirator, he said, "Compared with other people our age, I admit, my income level is higher, objectively speaking." That's all he would say.

But I knew that that wasn't the end of the story, so I didn't say anything. I just waited for him to go on.

"I didn't see Yoshiko Fujisawa for a long time," he resumed. "A really long time. I graduated from university and got a job at a trading firm. And I worked there for five years, part of it at an overseas posting. Every day was filled with work. I was incredibly busy. Two years after college, I heard, through her mother, that she'd got married, but I didn't ask to whom. My first thought when I heard was, I wonder if she actually stayed a virgin until her wedding night. But then I felt a little sad. And a little sadder the next day. It was as if an era had come to an end, a door was closing behind me for ever. Well, naturally. This was a girl I'd really and truly loved. We'd been sweethearts for four years, and I'd even thought about marriage. She was someone who figured that largely in my youth, so of course it made me sad. But, OK, I really just hoped that she'd be happy. I wished her the best. I was - well, a little worried about her. She had her fragile side."

The waiter cleared our plates, and we ordered coffee.

"I married relatively late, when I was thirty-two. So I was still single when I got a phone call from Yoshiko. I was twenty-eight. Which makes it just over ten years ago now. In the meantime, I'd quit the company I was working for and had gone independent. My father lent me the capital, and I formed my own little company. I saw astronomical market growth potential for imported furniture, and I stepped right in. But, as with any start-up, nothing went smoothly at first. Delivery delays, depleted stock, warehouse charges piling up, the bank breathing down my neck - to be honest, I ran myself down and I nearly lost hope. It was probably the most difficult time in my life. And right in the middle of it she calls. I have no idea how she got my number. It was eight at night when the phone rang. I recognised her voice immediately. That's something you never forget. I felt a tinge of nostalgia - you bet I did. It just felt so good to hear an old girlfriend's voice at a time like that."

He looked long and hard at the fireplace, as if remembering. The restaurant had filled to capacity. People were talking and laughing at every table, utensils clattering, glasses tinkling.

"I don't know who her informants were, but she was up to date on everything about me. I mean everything. She knew that I was still single and had been based overseas, that I'd quit my company and struck out on my own. She knew it all. 'You'll come through it, you're the can-do guy. Just have confidence,' she told me.

I can't tell you how happy it made me to hear such kind words. So then I asked about her. What sort of guy she'd married, whether they had kids, where they were living. Well, she didn't have any children. Her husband was four years older than she, and worked in television. A director, she tells me. I say, 'Sounds like he keeps busy.' 'He's busy, all right, too busy to have kids,' she says, then laughs.

They lived in Tokyo, in a condo near Shinagawa. I was living in Shiroganedai. Not exactly neighbours, but close enough. 'Strange how things work out, isn't it?' I say - you know, whatever. Well, we talked about all the usual things that former high-school sweethearts talk about under the circumstances. It felt a little strained and awkward, but nice over all. Like two old friends catching up on everything. We talked for what seemed like hours.

Then, when there was nothing more for either of us to say, this silence comes over the line. A real... how to put it? A really dense silence. The kind that invites all sorts of thoughts." He was focusing on his hands, folded on the tablecloth; then he looked up to meet my eyes. "I should have hung up then and there. 'Thanks for calling, it's been nice talking to you' - click, end of story. You see what I'm saying?"

"That would have been the most realistic thing to do," I agreed.

"But she stays on the line. She invites me to her place. Like, 'Why don't you drop by? My husband's away on business, and I'm bored all by myself.' Well, I don't know what to say, so I don't say anything. So she doesn't say anything. More silence. And then, do you know what she says? She says, 'You know, I still remember the promise I made to you.'"

"You know, I still remember the promise I made to you." At first, he claimed, he hadn't known what she was talking about - he'd never once considered it a real promise. But when it did come back to him he had to think that it was just a slip of the tongue, that she must have been confused.

No, she wasn't confused. To her, a promise was a promise. For a moment, he lost sight of where all this was heading. What was the right thing to do? He looked around in desperation, but there were no walls around him, nothing to guide him any more. Of course he wanted to sleep with her, that went without saying. Since their break-up, he'd imagined sleeping with her plenty of times. Even when he was seeing other women, his thoughts had found their way to her in the dark. Though he'd never seen her naked, he knew her body from the feel of it under her clothes.

He knew how risky it would be to sleep with her at this stage. He didn't want to go stirring up what he'd so calmly left behind in the shadows of his past. Intuition told him that this was not something he should do. But of course he couldn't refuse. Why should he refuse? It was a perfect fairy tale, a wish granted only once in a lifetime. She lived nearby, and she wanted to fulfil a promise made in the forests of the distant past.

He closed his eyes and couldn't say anything. He'd lost the power of speech.

"Hello?" she said. "You there?"

"I'll come right over," he said. "Can you tell me your address?"

"What would you have done?" he asked me.

I shook my head. I never know how to answer such questions. He laughed, and looked down at the coffee cup on the table.

"I went to her place. I knocked on her door. In a way, I was hoping that she wouldn't be at home. But she was there all right, and as beautiful as ever. She poured us drinks, and we talked about the old days. We even listened to old records. Then what do you think happened?"

I had no idea. I told him I had no idea.

"When I was a kid, I read a children's story." He seemed to be addressing the far wall of the restaurant. "I forget the plot, but I still remember the last line. It went, 'And, when it was all over, the King and his courtiers roared with laughter.' Kind of a strange way to end a story, wouldn't you say?"

"I would," I said.

"I wish I could remember what the story was about. God knows I've tried. All I remember is that crazy last line: 'And, when it was all over, the King and his courtiers roared with laughter.' What the hell kind of story ends like that?"

By then we'd finished our coffee.

"We embraced," he said, "but I didn't sleep with her. She didn't undress. We used our hands, just like old times. I thought it would be for the best. And she seemed to think so, too. We petted for a long, long time, without saying anything. What was there for us to say? That was the only way that we could really recognise each other after all those years. Back when we were in school, of course, it would have been different. Plain, ordinary, natural sex might have brought us to some kind of mutual understanding. And, just maybe, we could have been happy together. But we were long past that now. Those days were locked away, and no one could break the seal."

He twirled his empty cup around on its saucer. He kept at it so long that the waiter came over to check on us. But that merely prompted him to return the cup to its original position and order another espresso.

"I stayed there maybe an hour, all told. Any more than that and I'd probably have gone out of my mind," he said with a sly smile. "I said goodbye to her and left. She said goodbye, too, and this time it really was goodbye, once and for all. I knew it, and she knew it. The last I saw of her, she was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. She looked as if she were about to say something, but she didn't. I knew what she would have said, in any case. I was exhausted... hollowed out, empty. I walked around aimlessly, feeling as if I'd wasted my whole life. I wished I could go back to her place and just screw her, long and hard. But I couldn't bring myself to, nor would it have made anything any better."

He shook his head. He drank his second espresso.

"It embarrasses me to say this, but I went straight out and got myself a hooker. First time in my life. And very likely the last."

I looked at my own coffee cup and thought about what a standoffish jerk I must have been in the old days. I wanted to let him in on what I was thinking, but I doubted that I'd be able to find the right words.

"Telling the story like this, I feel like I'm talking about someone else," he said with a chuckle, then fell silent.

"'And, when it was all over, the King and his courtiers roared with laughter'," he said, finally. "I always think of that sentence whenever I remember that time. Conditioned reflex, I guess. I don't know what it is, but sadness seems to contain some strange little joke."