Kimi let out a shriek and jumped back, laughing loudly from a distance. Stooping forward, she licked around the puncture wound, like an animal, and then she ran down the slope. Even after she had disappeared from view beyond the azalea hedge on the corner, her laughter could be heard intermittently, and Kōji fancied that, at the end of the dry path on that gentle slope, Kimi’s lolling tongue was still flickering like a small apricot-colored flame.
Kōji turned toward Yūko with a fawning expression. Even with the intention of appealing to her better nature, he did so in high spirits, in a calm and carefree manner.
Taking care to ensure that he wasn’t seen to be laughing along with Kimi, his smile became increasingly apparent.
Yūko turned her back on him and began to walk toward the house.
“Hurry up and take a bath. I can’t stand the stink of sweat.”
Glancing at her from the side, he realized that her brow was knitted in a deeply chiseled frown. It seemed it was just his perspiration that was on her mind. Perhaps she hated it.
The Kusakado family home was unnecessarily large. Ippei and Yūko slept in the detached ten-mat annex on the ground floor. In the main building, besides the ten-mat living room and the eight-mat sitting room, there were several small rooms that were not occupied, Teijirō’s room at the back of the house, as well as a spacious kitchen and bathroom.
On the second floor was a twelve-mat guest room that was seldom ever used, and next to that a six-mat room where Kōji stayed. At night, they slept separately in their various rooms.
That evening, the air was still and humid. Unable to sleep, Kōji lay naked facedown on his futon inside a mosquito net, flicking through a lowbrow magazine he had borrowed from the village library.
He had been starved of reading material in prison, and one would have thought that Kōji had a strong intellectual craving, yet since coming here he had lost the appetite to read serious literature. He preferred the thick, lavishly colorful magazines—the kind with their pages curling at the edges, like the petals of a sullied artificial flower—that were stuffed full of scandal, comic strips, action dramas, and period plays.
Reading one section after another, he tried his luck with “This Month’s Star Sign”—squinting at the fine No. 7 type print by the dim light of a reading lamp until his eyes were sore—and painstakingly pawing over the readers’ columns.
28-year-old bachelor looking for friendship with a lady. Please write enclosing a photo.
I’m a 20-year-old female shop assistant. Please write if you can go to the movies with me on my monthly two days off. I’ll buy the tickets.
Any ladies out there without family—please write. Let’s console one another.
Looking for carrier pigeons nearby at a reasonable price. Also looking for a male friend. 22-year-old factory worker.
Lonely hearts, from all over Japan, jostling for space crammed into several pages of four-column ads in the magazine; solitude masquerading as cheerfulness was laid bare in just a few words.
What a great amount of loneliness. Such a strong desire to be loved. Pairing the lonely hearts up, as if playing cards, Kōji’s well-trained powers of imagination saw the inevitable consequence of such rash exchanges of correspondence.
The couple finally meet, having exchanged countless letters: they discover in one another’s faces the same kind of loneliness, the same kind of neediness… And yet, out of impatience to complete the mental picture they have already created for themselves, the illusion is superimposed on yet another person in a never-ending cycle—the awkward embrace, the morning after—in the shabby hotel, breakfast in the diner, the carrier pigeons that are kept on the roof, the same magazine, placed by the statue of Hotei, the god of fortune, in the alcove, the same readers’ columns, hopes revived again.
Even though it was the middle of the night, it was unbearably hot. Kōji repeatedly wiped away the sweat that ran down the back of his neck. The smell of the new mosquito net that Yūko had bought especially for him pervaded the inside of the netting.
There wasn’t even a slight breeze, and the stiff, light green creases hung indignant, as if the net had just been put up, and wherever the faint light reached, the fresh vermilion of the corner ties shone vibrantly.
It was as if this vaguely distorted mosquito net intimated the form of the world in which Kōji lived.
He had to get some sleep. He turned the light off and, naked, lay spread-eagled. It felt like the sheet was a shadowy image of his own being—absorbing the sweat that seeped from his body.
As he lay there with his eyes closed, an image came to him of the photograph he had been shown that morning, depicting the girl who looked very like Kimi having sex.
He restlessly moved his body about, feeling his senses sharpening like a knife in the midst of the wearily hot darkness. Although the light had been turned off, a moth clung to the mosquito net and scattered its tiny melancholy scales. He saw its agitated shadow through the darkness. The moth struggled for a while, before flying away through the open window.
The hoot of an owl. The transient cry of the cicada woven in with the night. In the stillness of the night, he could even hear the distant sound of the waves.
Kōji was afraid of this thick, gravy-like rural night. The graphic quality of everything that lay in slumber during the day awakening all at once was so much more physical than nights in the city, and the night itself was like a colossal, intense piece of meat saturated with hot blood.
His keen hearing detected the sound of footsteps coming softly up the stairs. His body tensed as he watched through the darkness. Kōji’s six-mat room had a large north-facing window, while the south side gave out onto a wide veranda with a handrail.
In order to draw a breeze through, the rain shutters had all been left open, and from where he lay he could see the vast southern night sky.
The shadowy silhouette that had climbed the stairs stopped and stood still with its back to the starry sky. It was Yūko, wearing a peach-blossom-pink negligee. His heart throbbed violently. He brushed the mosquito net aside and started to step out.
“No, don’t come out. You mustn’t come out,” said Yūko, in a slightly stern voice.
Kōji hesitated and then crouched on top of his bed. Yūko sat sideways on top of the loose south-facing edge of the mosquito net. As a result, that side of the net stretched tightly and the securing cords—already mercilessly strained—quivered dangerously in the two corners of the room where they were attached.
“Come over here. Stay inside, though,” she whispered, her dark face pressed against the net.
The scent of her perfume mingled with the night and came to him as he crawled up to her on his knees. The taut netting traced ever so lightly the curves of Yūko’s body.
Kōji touched his shoulder against her rounded form. She didn’t try to pull back.
“You don’t know why I’m here, do you? You look surprised to see me,” she said, in a cheerful tone, without hesitation. “It’s a petty woman thing, you see. I didn’t like the way you looked at Kimi when she was leaving for home. I stuck my hairpin in her hand, right? I couldn’t stand to look at your face after that. Try as I might, I couldn’t sleep thinking about it. That’s why I came. You were so sure I was jealous, weren’t you?”
Kōji nodded, but he managed to resist the urge to smile the way he had done that afternoon when Kimi was leaving.
“But you would be mistaken. I’m not the sort of woman who would do something like that out of jealousy. I was simply admonishing a conceited and discourteous young lady. When I do that, I don’t use words; I use my hairpin.”