South of the Border, West of the Sun

15

I got back to Tokyo a little before four. Hoping against hope that Shimamoto would return, I had stayed at the cottage in Hakone until past noon. Waiting was torture, so I killed time by cleaning the kitchen and rearranging all the clothes in the house. The silence was oppressive; the occasional sounds of birds and cars struck me as unnatural, out of sync. Every sound was twisted and crushed beneath the weight of some unstoppable force. And in the midst of this, I waited for something to happen. Something’s got to happen, I felt sure. It can’t end like this.

But nothing happened. Once she made up her mind, Shimamoto wasn’t the type of woman to change it I had to get back to Tokyo. It seemed farfetched, but if she did try to get in touch with me, she’d do it through the club. At any rate, staying in the cottage any longer made no sense.

Driving back, I had to force myself to concentrate. I missed curves, nearly ran red lights, and swerved into the wrong lane. When I arrived at the club parking lot, I called home from a phone booth. I told Yukiko I was back and that I was going straight to work.

“You had me worried. At least you could have called.” Her voice sounded hard and dry.

“I’m fine. Not to worry,” I said. I had no idea how my voice sounded to her. “I don’t have much time, so I’m going to the office to check over accounts, then directly on to the club.”

At the office, I sat at my desk and somehow managed to pass the time until evening. I went over the previous night’s events. Shimamoto must have gotten up while I was asleep and, without sleeping a wink herself, left before dawn. How she got back to the city I had no idea. The main road was far off, and at that hour of the morning it would have been next to impossible to get a bus or taxi in the hills around Hakone. And besides, she had on high heels.

Why did Shimamoto have to leave me like that? The entire time I drove back to Tokyo, the question had tormented me. I told her I would be hers, and she said she’d be mine. And dropping all defenses, we made love. Still, she left me alone, without so much as a word of explanation. She’d even taken the record she’d said was a present. There had to be some rhyme or reason to her actions, but logical thinking was beyond me. All trains of thought were sidetracked. Forcing myself to think, I ended up with a dully throbbing head. I realized how worn out I was. I sat down on the bed in my office, leaned against the wall, and closed my eyes. Once they were closed, I couldn’t pry them open. All I could do was remember. Like an endless tape loop, memories of the night before replayed themselves, over and over. Shimamoto’s body. Her naked body as she lay by the stove with eyes closed, and every detail–her neck, her breasts, her sides, her pubic hair, her genitals, her back, her waist, her legs. They were all too close, too clear. Clearer and closer than if they were real.

Alone in that tiny room, I was soon driven to distraction by these graphic illusions. I fled the building and wandered aimlessly. Finally I went over to the club and shaved in the men’s room. I hadn’t washed my face the entire day. And I still wore the same clothes as the day before. My employees said nothing, though I could feel them glancing at me strangely. If I went home now and stood before Yukiko, I knew I would confess it all. How I loved Shimamoto, had spent the night with her, and was about to throw away everything–my home, my daughters, my work.

I know I should have told Yukiko everything. But I couldn’t. Not then. I no longer had the power to distinguish right from wrong, or even grasp what had happened to me. So I didn’t go home. I went to the club and waited for Shimamoto, knowing full well my wait would be in vain. First I checked at the other bar to see if she was there, then I waited at the counter of the Robin’s Nest until the place closed. I talked with a few of the regulars, but it was just so much background static. I made the appropriate listening noises, my head filled all the while with Shimamoto’s body. How her vagina welcomed me ever so gently. And how she called out my name. Every time the phone rang, my heart pounded.

After the bar closed and everyone had headed home, I stayed there at the counter, drinking. No matter how much I drank, I couldn’t get drunk. In fact, the more I drank, the clearer my head became. It was two a.m. when I arrived home, and Yukiko was up and waiting for me. Unable to sleep, I sat drinking whiskey alone at the kitchen table. She came in with her glass to join me.

“Put on some music,” she said. I picked up a nearby cassette, flipped it into the deck, and turned down the volume so as not to wake the kids. We sat in silence for a while across the table from each other, drinking whiskey.

“You have somebody else you like, right?” Yukiko asked, staring straight at me.

I nodded. Her words had a decided outline and gravity. How many times had she gone over these words in her mind in preparation for this moment?

“And you really like that person. You’re not just playing around.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s not just some fling. But it’s not exactly what you’re imagining.”

“How do you know what I’m thinking?” she asked. “You actually believe you know what I’m thinking?”

I couldn’t say a thing. Yukiko was silent too. The music played on softly. Vivaldi or Telemann. One of those. I couldn’t recall the melody.

“I think it’s likely you have no idea what I’m thinking,” she said. She spoke slowly, enunciating each word distinctly, as if explaining something to the children. “I don’t think you have any idea.”

Seeing I wasn’t going to respond, she lifted her glass and drank. And very slowly, she shook her head. “I’m not that stupid, I hope you know. I live with you, sleep with you. I’ve known for some time you like someone else.”

I looked at her in silence.

“I’m not blaming you,” she continued. “If you love someone else, there’s not much anyone can do about it. You love who you love. I’m not enough for you. I know that We’ve gotten along well, and you’ve taken good care of me. I’ve been very happy living with you. I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“There’s no need to apologize,” she said. “If you want to leave me, that’s okay. I won’t say a thing. Do you want to leave me?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Can I explain what’s happened?”

“You mean about you and that woman?”

“Yes,” I said.

She shook her head emphatically. “I don’t want to hear anything about her. Don’t make me suffer any more than I already have. I don’t care what kind of relationship the two of you have, or what plans you’ve made. I don’t want to hear about it. What I do want to know is whether or not you want to leave me. I don’t need the house, or money–or anything. If you want the children, take them. I’m serious. If you want to leave me, just say the word. That’s all I want to know. I don’t want to hear anything else. Just yes or no.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You mean you don’t know if you want to leave me or not?”

“No. I don’t know if I’m even capable of giving you an answer.”

“When will you know?”

I shook my head.

“Well, then, take your time and think about it.” She sighed. “I don’t mind waiting. Take as long as you like.”

Starting that night, I slept on the sofa in the living room. Sometimes the kids would get up in the middle of the night and ask me why I was sleeping there. I explained that my snoring was so loud these days that their mother and I decided to sleep in separate rooms. Otherwise Mom wouldn’t get any sleep. One of the kids would snuggle up next to me on the sofa. And I would hug her tight. Sometimes I could hear Yukiko in the bedroom, crying.

For the next two weeks I spent every day endlessly reliving memories. I’d recall ever single detail of the night I spent with Shimamoto, trying to tease out some meaning. Trying to find a message. I remembered the warmth of her in my arms. Her arms sticking out of the sleeves of her white dress. The Nat King Cole songs. The fire in the stove. I called up each and every word we spoke that night.

From out of those words, these of hers: There is no middle ground with me. No middle-ground objects exist and where there are no such objects, there is no middle ground.

And these words of mine: I’ve already decided, Shimamoto-san. I thought about it when you were gone, and I made my decision.

I remembered her eyes, looking over at me in the car. That intense gaze burned into my cheeks. It was more than a mere glance. The smell of death hovered over her. She really was planning to die. That’s why she came to Hakone–to die, together with me.

“And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?”

When she said that, Shimamoto wanted my life. Only now did I understand.

I had come to a final conclusion, and so had she. Why was I so blind? After a night of making love, she planned to grab the steering wheel of the BMW as we drove back to Tokyo and kill us both. No other options remained for her. But something stopped her. And holding everything inside, she disappeared.

What desperate dead end had she reached? Why? And more important, who had driven her to such desperation? Why, finally, was death the only possible escape? I was grasping for clues, playing the detective, but I came up empty-handed. She just vanished, along with her secrets. No probablys or in a whiles this time-she just silently slipped away. Our bodies had become one, yet in the end she refused to open up her heart to me.

Some kinds of things, once they go forward, can never go back to where they began, Hajime, she would no doubt tell me. In the middle of the night, lying on my sofa, I could hear her voice spinning out these words. Like you said, how wonderful it would be if the two of us could go off somewhere and begin life again. Unfortunately, I can’t get out of where I am. It’s a physical impossibility.

And then Shimamoto was a sixteen-year-old girl again, standing in front of sunflowers in a garden, smiling shyly. I really shouldn’t have gone to see you. I knew that from the beginning. I could predict that it would turn out like this. But I couldn’t stand not to. I just had to see you, and when I did, I had to speak with you. Hajime–that’s me. I don’t plan to, but everything I touch gets ruined in the end.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

Every day, I scanned the papers from top to bottom for articles about women suicides. Lots of people kill themselves, I discovered, but it was always someone else. As far as I knew, this beautiful thirty-seven-year-old woman with the loveliest of smiles was still alive. Though she was gone from me forever.

On the surface, my days were the same as ever. I’d drive the kids back and forth to the nursery school, the three of us singing songs as we went. Sometimes in the line of cars in front of the nursery school I’d see the young woman in the 260E, and we’d talk. Talking with her made me able to forget at least for a while. Our subjects were limited, as always. We’d exchange the latest news about the Aoyama neighborhood, natural foods, clothes. The usual.

At work, too, I made my usual rounds. I’d put on my suit and go to the bars every night make small talk with the regulars, listen to the opinions and complaints of the staff, remember little things like giving a birthday present to an employee. Treat musicians who happened to drop by to dinner, check the cocktails to make sure they were up to par, make sure the piano was in tune, keep an eye out for rowdy drunks–I did it all. Any problems, I straightened out in a flash. Everything ran like clockwork, but the thrill was gone. No one suspected, though. On the surface I was the same as always. Actually, I was friendlier, kinder, more talkative than ever. But as I sat on a barstool, looking around my establishment everything looked monotonous, lusterless. No longer a carefully crafted, colorful castle in the air, what lay before me was a typical noisy bar-artificial, superficial, and shabby. A stage setting, props built for the sole purpose of getting drunks to part with their cash. Any illusions to the contrary had disappeared in a puff of smoke. All because Shimamoto would never grace these places again. Never again would she sit at the bar; never again would I see her smile as she ordered a drink.

My routine at home was unchanged too. I ate dinner with the family and on Sundays took the kids for a walk or to the zoo. Yukiko, at least on the surface, treated me as she always had. We talked about all kinds of things. We were like childhood friends who happened to be living under the same roof. There were certain words we couldn’t speak, certain facts we didn’t acknowledge. But there was no unconcealed hostility in the air. We just didn’t touch each other. At night we slept separately–I on the sofa, Yukiko in the bedroom. Outwardly, that was the only change in our lives.

Sometimes I couldn’t stand how we were just going through the motions, acting out our assigned roles. Something crucial to us was lost, yet still we could carry on as before. I felt awful. This kind of empty, meaningless life was hurting Yukiko deeply. I wanted to give her an answer to her question, but I couldn’t. Of course I didn’t want to leave her, but who was I to say that? Me–the guy who was going to throw his whole family away. Just because Shimamoto was gone, never to return, didn’t mean I could blithely bounce back to the life I’d had and pretend nothing had happened. Life isn’t that easy, and I don’t think it should be. Besides, lingering images of Shimamoto were still too clear, too real. Every time I closed my eyes, every detail of her body floated before me. My palms remembered the feel of her skin, and her voice whispering in my ear wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t make love to Yukiko with those images still implanted so firmly in my brain.

I wanted to be alone, so knowing nothing else, I went swimming every morning at the pool. Then I’d go to my office, stare at the ceiling, and lose myself in daydreams of Shimamoto. With Yukiko’s question hanging before me unanswered, I was living in a void. I couldn’t go on forever like that. It just wasn’t right. As a human being, as a husband, as a father, I had to live up to my responsibilities. Yet as long as these illusions surrounded me, I was paralyzed. It was even worse whenever it rained, for then I was struck by the delusion that Shimamoto would show up: quietly opening the door, bringing with her the scent of rain. I could picture the smile on her face. When I said something wrong, she would silently shake her head, smiling all the while. All my words lost their strength and, like raindrops glued to the window, slowly parted company with reality. On rainy nights I could barely breathe. The rain twisted time and reality.

When I grew exhausted with these visions, I stared at the scenery outside. I was abandoned in a lifeless, dried-out land. Visions had drained color from the world. Everything, every scene before me, lay flat, mere makeshift. Every object was gritty, the color of sand. The parting words of my old high school classmate haunted me. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end … all that remains is a desert.

The following week, as if lying in wait, strange events ambushed me one after another. On Monday morning, for no special reason I recalled the envelope with one hundred thousand yen and decided to look for it Many years before, I’d put it in a drawer in the desk in my office, a locked drawer, second from the top. When I moved into the office, I put some other valuables together with the envelope in that drawer; other than occasionally checking to see that it was there, I never touched it. But now the envelope was gone. This was strange, uncanny even, for I had absolutely no memory of moving it I was absolutely certain of that Just to make sure, I pulled open the other drawers and checked them from top to bottom. No envelope.

I tried to remember when I’d last seen it I couldn’t pin down an exact date. It wasn’t all that long ago, but not so recently, either. A month ago, maybe two. Three at the most.

Bewildered, I sat down on my chair and stared at the drawer. Maybe someone had broken into the room, unlocked the drawer, and removed the envelope. That wasn’t likely, though–the drawer contained more cash and valuables, which were untouched. Yet it was within the realm of possibility. Or maybe unconsciously I’d disposed of the envelope and for whatever reason erased the memory from my mind. Okay, I told myself, what does it matter? I was going to get rid of it someday. I just saved myself the trouble, right?

But once I acknowledged that the envelope had disappeared, its existence and nonexistence traded places in my consciousness. A strange feeling, like vertigo, took hold of me. A conviction that the envelope had never actually existed swelled up inside me, violently chipping away at my mind, crushing and greedily devouring the certainty I’d had that the envelope was real.

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an alternate reality—to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist But something can happen to sever that chain, and we are at a loss. What is real? Is reality on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side?

What I felt at that point, then, was this kind of cut-off sensation. I closed the drawer, deciding to forget all about it I should have thrown that money away when I first got it Keeping it was a mistake.

On Wednesday afternoon of the same week, I was driving down Gaien Higashidori, when I spied a woman who resembled Shimamoto. She had on blue cotton pants, a beige raincoat, and white deck shoes. And she dragged one leg as she walked. As soon as I saw her, everything around me froze. A lump of air forced its way up from my chest to my throat Shimamoto, I thought I drove past her to check her out in the rearview mirror, but her face was hidden in the crowd. I slammed on my brakes, getting an earful of horn from the car behind me. The way the woman held herself, and the length of her hair—it was Shimamoto exactly. I wanted to stop the car right then and there, but all the parking spots along the road were full. Two hundred meters or so ahead, I finally found a place and managed to squeeze my car in, then I ran back to find her. But she was nowhere to be seen. I ran around like a lunatic She had a bad leg, so she couldn’t have gone too far, I told myself. Shoving people aside, jaywalking across streets, I ran up the pedestrian overpass and looked down on all the passersby below. My shirt was soaked with sweat Soon, though, a revelation dawned on me. She had been dragging the opposite leg. And Shimamoto’s leg was no longer bad.

I shook my head and sighed deeply. Something must be wrong with me. I felt dizzy, all my strength drained away. Leaning against the crosswalk signal, I stared at my feet for a while. The signal turned from green to red, from red to green again. People crossed the street, waited, crossed, with me immobile, collapsed against the post, gasping for breath.

Suddenly I looked up and saw Izumi’s face. Izumi was in a taxi stopped right in front of me. From the rear-seat window, she was staring right at me. The taxi had halted at the red light, and at most, three feet separated her face and mine. She was no longer the seventeen-year-old girl I used to know, but I recognized her at once. The girl I’d held in my arms twenty years before, the first girl I kissed. The girl who, on that fall afternoon so long ago, took off her clothes and lost the clasp to her gaiter belt People might change in twenty years’ time, but I knew this was her. Children are afraid of her, my old classmate said. When I’d heard that, I didn’t understand what he meant I couldn’t grasp what those words were attempting to convey. But now, with Izumi right before my eyes, I understood. Her face had nothing you could call an expression. No, that’s not an entirely accurate way of putting it I should put it this way: Like a room from which every last stick of furniture had been taken, anything you could possibly call an expression had been removed, leaving nothing behind. Not a trace of feeling grazed her face; it was like the bottom of a deep ocean, silent and dead. And with that utterly expressionless face, she was staring at me. At least I think she was looking at me. Her eyes were gazing straight ahead in my direction, yet her face showed me nothing. Or rather, what it showed was this: an infinite blank.

I stood there dumbfounded, speechless. Barely able to support my body, I breathed slowly. For a moment or two, my sense of self really did break down, its very outlines melting away into a thick, syrupy goo. Unconsciously I reached out my hand and touched the window of the cab, stroked the surface of the glass with my fingertips. I had no idea why. A couple of passersby, startled, stopped and stared. But I couldn’t help myself. Through the glass, I slowly stroked that faceless face. Izumi didn’t move a muscle or so much as blink. Was she dead? No, not dead. She was still alive, in an unblinking world. In a deep, silent world behind that pane of glass, she lived. And her lips, motionless, spoke of an infinite nothingness.

The light finally changed to green, and the taxi took off. Izumi’s face was unchanged to the end. I stood rooted to the spot, watching until the taxi was swallowed up in the surge of cars.

I walked back to my car and slumped into the seat I had to get out of there. As I was about to turn on the engine I was hit by a sudden wave of nausea. Like I was going to spew my guts out But I didn’t vomit Resting both hands on the steering wheel, I sat there for a good fifteen minutes. My underarms were drenched in sweat, and an awful smell rose from my body. This wasn’t the body that Shimamoto had so gently loved. It was the body of a middle-aged man, giving off an awful acrid stink.

A few minutes later, a patrolman came up to my car and knocked on the window. I rolled it down. “You can’t park here, pal,” he said, looking around inside. “Get your car out of here.” I nodded and started the motor.

“You look terrible. Do you feel sick?” the policeman asked me.

Wordlessly, I shook my head. And started driving.

It took me several hours to recover. I was drained, completely, leaving an empty shell behind. A hollow sound reverberated through my body. I parked my car inside Aoyama Cemetery and stared listlessly through the windshield at the sky beyond. Izumi was waiting for me there. She was always somewhere, waiting for me. On some street corner, beyond some pane of glass, waiting for me to appear. Watching me. I just hadn’t noticed.

For several days afterward, I couldn’t speak. I’d open my mouth to talk, but the words would disappear, as if the utter nothingness that was Izumi had taken over.

After that strange encounter, though, the afterimages of Shimamoto began, gradually, to fade. Color returned to the world, and I no longer had the helpless feeling that I was walking on the surface of the moon. Vaguely, as if looking through a glass window at changes happening to someone else, I could detect a minute shift in gravity and a gradual sloughing off of something that had clung to me.

Something inside me was severed, and disappeared. Silently. Forever.

While the trio was on break, I went up to the pianist and told him he no longer needed to play “Star-Crossed Lovers.” I mustered up the friendliest smile I could. “You’ve played it for me enough. It’s about time to stop.”

He looked at me as if weighing something in his mind. The two of us were friends, had shared a few drinks and gone beyond your usual polite conversation.

“I don’t quite understand,” he said. “You don’t want me to go out of my way to play that song? Or you don’t want me to ever play that song again? There’s a big difference, and I’d like to be clear about this.”

“I don’t want you to play it,” I said.

“You don’t like the way I play it?”

“I have no problems with your playing. It’s great. There aren’t many people who can handle that tune the way you do.”

“So it’s the tune itself you don’t want to hear anymore?”

“You could say that,” I replied.

“Sounds a little like Casablanca to me!” he said.

“Guess so,” I said.

After that, sometimes when he catches sight of me, the pianist breaks into a few bars of “As Time Goes By.”

The reason I didn’t want to hear that tune again had nothing to do with memories of Shimamoto. The song just didn’t do to me what it used to. Why, I can’t say. The special something I’d found ages ago in that melody was no longer there. It was still a beautiful tune, but nothing more. And I had no intention of lingering over the corpse of a beautiful song.

“What are you thinking about?” Yukiko asked me as she came into the room.

It was two-thirty in the morning. I was lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.

“I was thinking about a desert,” I said.

“A desert?” she asked. She’d sat down next to my feet and was looking at me. “What kind of desert?”

“Just a regular desert. With sand dunes and a few cactuses. Lots of things are there, living there.”

“Am I included in this desert too?” she asked.

“Of course you are,” I said. “All of us are living there. But actually what’s really living is the desert itself. Like in the movie.”

“What movie?”

“The Disney film The Living Desert. A documentary about the desert. Didn’t you see it when you were little?”

“No,” she said. I thought that was a bit strange. Everybody in my elementary school had been herded off to the movie theater to watch it. But Yukiko was five years younger than me. She might have been too young to see it when it came out

“Why don’t we rent it next Sunday and watch it together? It’s a good movie. The scenery’s beautiful, and there’re all sorts of animals and flowers. The kids will like it.”

Yukiko smiled at me. It had been such a long time since I’d seen her smile.

“Do you want to leave me?” she asked.

“Yukiko, I love you,” I said.

“Maybe you do, but I’m asking you whether you want to leave me. The answer is either yes or no. I won’t accept any other.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” I said. I shook my head. “I probably don’t have the right to say this, but I don’t want to leave you. If I left you now, I don’t know what would happen to me. I don’t want to be lonely ever again. I’d rather die.”

She stretched out a hand and placed it on my chest. And looked deep into my eyes. “Forget about rights. I don’t think anyone has those kinds of rights,” she said.

Feeling the warmth of her hand on my chest, I thought of death. I might very well have died on that day on the highway with Shimamoto. If I had, my body would not exist I would be gone, lost forever. Like so many other things. But here I am. And here is Yukiko’s warm hand on my chest

“Yukiko,” I said, “I love you very much. I loved you from the first day I met you, and I still feel the same. If I hadn’t met you, my life would have been unbearable. For that I am grateful beyond words. Yet here I am, hurting you. Because I’m a selfish, hopeless, worthless human being. For no apparent reason, I hurt the people around me and end up hurting myself. Ruining someone else’s life and my own. Not because I like to. But that’s how it ends up.”

“No argument there,” Yukiko said quietly. Traces of her smile remained at the corners of her mouth. “You are definitely a selfish, hopeless person, and yes, you have hurt me.”

I looked at her for a while. Nothing in her words seemed to blame me. She was neither angry nor sad. She was merely explaining the obvious.

I took my time, trying to find the right words. “I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself. For your sake, I’d like to become a new person. It may not be easy, but if I give it my best shot, perhaps I can manage to change. The truth is, though, if put in the same situation again, I might very well do the same thing all over. I might very well hurt you all over again. I can’t promise anything. That’s what I meant when I said I had no right I just don’t have the confidence to win over that force in me.”

“And you’ve always been trying to escape that force?”

“I think so,” I said.

Her hand still rested on my chest “You poor man,” she said. As if she were reading aloud something written large on a wall. Maybe it really was written on the wall, I thought.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I know I don’t want to leave you. But I don’t know if that’s the correct answer. I don’t even know if that’s something I myself can choose. Yukiko, you’re suffering. I can see that I can feel your hand here. But there’s something beyond what can be seen or felt Call it feelings. Or possibilities. These well up from somewhere and are mixed together inside me. They’re not something I can choose or can give an answer to.”

Yukiko was silent for a long time. Every so often, a truck rolled by outside. I looked out the window but could see nothing. Just the unnamed time and space linking night and dawn.

“The last few weeks, I really did think I would die,” Yukiko said. “I’m not saying this to threaten you. It’s a fact. That’s how lonely and sad I was. Dying is not that hard. Like the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me. When you feel like that, dying doesn’t seem like such a big deal. I never even thought of the children. What would happen to them after I died didn’t enter my mind. That’s how lonely I felt You didn’t know that did you? You have never seriously given it any thought, have you? What I was feeling, what I was thinking, what I might do.”

I didn’t say anything. She took her hand away from my chest and laid it in her lap.

“Anyhow, the reason I didn’t die, the reason I’m still alive, is that I thought if you were to come back to me, I would be able to take you back. It’s not a question of rights, or right or wrong. Maybe you are a hopeless person. A worthless person. And you might very well hurt me again. But that’s not what’s important here. You don’t understand a thing.”

“Most likely I don’t,” I said.

“And you don’t ask anything,” she said.

I opened my mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out. She was right: I never did ask her anything. Why didn’t I? I had no idea.

“Rights are what you build from here on out,” Yukiko said. “Or rather, we build. We thought we’d constructed a lot together, but actually we hadn’t made a thing. Life went too smoothly. We were too happy. Don’t you think so?”

I nodded.

Yukiko folded her arms over her chest and looked at me. “I used to have dreams too, you know. But somewhere along the line they disappeared. Before I met you. I killed them. I crushed them and threw them away. Like some internal organ you no longer need and you rip out of your body. I don’t know whether that was the right thing to do. But it was the only thing I could do at the time…. Sometimes I have this dream. The same dream over and over. Someone is carrying something in both hands, and comes up to me and says, ‘Here, you’ve forgotten something.’ I’ve been very happy living with you. I’ve wanted for nothing and never had any complaints. Still, something is chasing me. I wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat I’m being chased by what I threw away. You think you’re the only one being chased, but you’re wrong. You’re not the only one who’s thrown away something, who’s lost something. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Maybe you will hurt me again. I don’t know how I’ll react then. Or maybe next time I’ll hurt you. No one can promise anything. Neither of us can make any promises. But I do still love you.”

I held her and stroked her hair.

“Yukiko,” I said, “tomorrow let’s begin again. It’s too late today. I want to start out the right way, with a brand-new day.”

Yukiko looked at me for a while. “I think that you still haven’t asked me anything.”

“I’d like to start a new life beginning tomorrow. What do you think?” I asked.

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said, a faint smile on her lips.

After Yukiko went back to the bedroom, I lay for a while on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. It was an ordinary apartment ceiling, nothing special. But still I stared at it closely. Every once in a while, a car’s headlights would shine on it I had no more illusions. The feel of Shimamoto’s breasts, her voice, the scent of her skin-all had faded. Izumi’s expressionless face floated across my mind. And the feel of the taxi’s window separating us. I closed my eyes and thought of Yukiko. Again and again I thought over what she had said. Eyes closed, I listened to the movements within my body. I might very well be changing. And I had to change.

I don’t know if I have the strength to care for Yukiko and the children, I thought. No more visions can help me, weaving special dreams just for me. As far as the eye can see, the void is simply that–a void. I’ve been in that void before and forced myself to adjust And now, finally, I end up where I began, and I’d better get used to it No one will weave dreams for me–it is my turn to weave dreams for others. That’s what I have to do. Such dreams may have no power, but if my own life is to have any meaning at all, that is what I have to do.

Probably.

As the dawn approached, I gave up trying to sleep. I threw a cardigan over my pajamas, padded out to the kitchen, and made some coffee. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the sky grow lighter by the minute. It had been a long time since I’d seen the dawn. At one end of the sky a line of blue appeared, and like blue ink on a piece of paper, it spread slowly across the horizon. If you gathered together all the shades of blue in the world and picked the bluest, the epitome of blue, this was the color you would choose. I rested my elbows on the table and looked at that scene, my mind blank. When the sun showed itself over the horizon, that blue was swallowed up by ordinary sunlight A single cloud floated above the cemetery, a pure white cloud, its edges distinct A cloud so sharply etched you could write on it A new day had begun. But what this day would bring, I had no idea.

I would take my daughters to nursery school and go swimming. The same as always. I remembered the pool I used to swim in during junior high. The smell of the place, the way voices echoed off the ceiling. I was in the midst of becoming something new. Standing in front of the mirror, I could see the changes in my body. At night, in the stillness, I swore I could hear the sound of my flesh growing. I was about to be clothed in a new self, about to step into a place where I’d never been.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I watched the single cloud over the cemetery. The cloud didn’t move an inch. It was stationary, nailed to the spot. Time to wake my daughters. It was well past dawn, and they had to get up. They were the ones who needed this new day, much more than I ever would. I’d go to their bedroom, pull back the covers, rest my hand on their warm bodies, and announce the beginning of a new day. That’s what I had to do. But somehow I couldn’t stand up from the kitchen table. All strength was drained from my body, as if someone had snuck up behind me and silently pulled the plug. Both elbows on the table, I covered my face with my palms.

Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining.

Until someone came and lightly rested a hand on my shoulder, my thoughts were of the sea.