He tried to put himself in the man’s place. How would he feel if the situation were reversed? Say, he has a wife, two small children, and a tranquil home life, but he discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man once a week—a man ten years her junior, and the affair has been going on for over a year. What would he think if he found himself in such a situation? What emotions would rule his heart? Violent anger? Deep disappointment? Vague sadness? Scornful indifference? A sense of having lost touch with reality? Or an indistinguishable blend of several emotions?

No amount of thinking enabled Tengo to hit upon exactly how he would feel. What came to mind through all his hypothesizing was the image of his mother in a white slip giving her breasts to a young man he did not know. Destiny seems to have come full circle, Tengo thought. The enigmatic young man was perhaps Tengo himself, the woman in his arms Kyoko Yasuda. The composition was exactly the same; only the individuals had changed. Does this meanthat my life has been nothing but a process through which I am giving concrete form to the dormant image inside me? And how much responsibility do I bear for her having become irretrievably lost?

Tengo could not get back to sleep again. He kept hearing the voice of the man who called himself Yasuda. The hints that he had left behind weighed heavily on Tengo, and the words he had spoken bore a strange reality. Tengo thought about Kyoko Yasuda. He pictured her face and body in minute detail. He had last seen her on Friday, two weeks prior. As always, they had spent a lot of time having sex. After the phone call from her husband, though, it seemed like something that had happened in the distant past, like an episode out of history.

On his shelf remained several LP records that she had brought from home to listen to in bed with him, all jazz records from long, long ago—Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday (this one, too, had Barney Bigard as a sideman), some 1940s Duke Ellington. She had listened to them—and handled them—with great care. The jackets had faded somewhat with the years, but the records themselves looked brand-new. Tengo picked up one jacket after another. Gazing at them, he felt with growing certainty that he might never see her again.

Tengo was not, strictly speaking, in love with Kyoko Yasuda. He had never felt that he wanted to spend his life with her or that saying good-bye to her could be painful. She had never made him feel that deep trembling of the heart. But he had grown accustomed to having this older girlfriend as part of his life, and naturally, he had grown fond of her. He looked forward to welcoming her to his apartment once a week and joining his naked flesh with hers. Their relationship was an unusual one for Tengo. He had never been able to feel very close to many women. In fact, most women—whether he was in a sexual relationship with them or not—made Tengo feel uncomfortable. And in order to curb that discomfort, Tengo had to fence off a certain territory inside himself. In other words, he had to keep certain rooms in his heart locked tight. With Kyoko Yasuda, however, such complex operations were unnecessary. First of all, she seemed to grasp exactly what Tengo wanted and what he did not want. And so Tengo counted himself lucky that they had happened to find each other.

Now, however, something had happened, and she was irretrievably lost. For some unknowable reason, she could never visit here in any form. And, according to her husband, it was better for Tengo to know nothing about either the reason or its consequence.

.    .    .

Still unable to sleep, Tengo was sitting on the floor, listening to the Duke Ellington record at low volume, when the phone rang again. The hands of the wall clock were pointing to 10:12. Tengo could think of no one other than Komatsu who might call at a time like this, but the ring didn’t sound like Komatsu’s, which was always more high-strung and impatient. It might be Yasuda again; perhaps he had forgotten to tell Tengo something else. Tengo did not want to answer. Experience had taught him that phone calls at this time of night were never very pleasant. Thinking of his current situation, however, he had no choice but to answer it.

“That is Mr. Kawana, isn’t it?” said a man. It was not Komatsu. Nor was it Yasuda. The voice belonged unmistakably to Ushikawa, speaking as if he had a mouthful of water—or some other elusive liquid. His strange face and flat, misshapen head came to Tengo’s mind automatically.

“Uh, sorry for calling so late. It’s Ushikawa. I know I burst in on you the other day and took much of your valuable time. Today, too, I wish I could have called earlier, but some urgent business came up, and the next thing I knew it was already this late. Believe me, I know you’re a real early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, Mr. Kawana, and that’s a very admirable thing. Staying up until all hours, frittering away your time, doesn’t do anyone any good. The best thing is to go to bed as soon as possible after it gets dark and wake with the sun in the morning. But, I don’t know, call it intuition, it just popped into my mind that you might still be up tonight, Mr. Kawana, so even though I knew it was not the most polite thing to do, I decided to give you a call. Have I caught you at a bad time?”

Tengo did not like what Ushikawa was saying, and he did not like it that Ushikawa knew his home phone number. Intuition had nothing to do with it: he had called because he knew perfectly well that Tengo was up, unable to sleep. Maybe he knew that Tengo’s lights were on. Could someone be watching this apartment? He could almost picture one of Ushikawa’s “eager” and “capable” “researchers” observing Tengo’s apartment from somewhere with a pair of high-powered binoculars.

“I am up tonight, in fact,” Tengo said. “That ‘intuition’ of yours is correct. Maybe I drank too much strong green tea.”

“That is too bad, Mr. Kawana. Wakeful nights often give people useless thoughts. How about it, then, do you mind talking with me a while?”

“As long as it’s not about something that makes it harder for me to sleep.”

Ushikawa burst out laughing. At his end of the line—someplace in this world—his misshapen head shook in its own misshapen way. “Very funny, Mr. Kawana. Of course, what I have to say may not be as comforting as a lullaby, but the subject itself is not so deadly serious as to keep you awake at night, I assure you. It’s a simple question of yes or no. The business about the, uh, grant. It’s an attractive proposition, don’t you think? Have you thought it over? We have to have your final answer now.”

“I believe I declined the grant quite clearly the last time we talked. I appreciate the offer, but I have everything I need at the moment. I’m not hard-pressed financially, and if possible I’d like to keep my life going along at its present pace.”

“Meaning, you don’t want to be beholden to anyone.”

“In a word, yes.”

“I suppose that is very admirable of you, Mr. Kawana,” Ushikawa said with a sound like a light clearing of the throat. “You want to make it on your own. You want to have as little as possible to do with organizations. I understand how you feel, but I’m concerned about you, Mr. Kawana. Look at the world we live in. Anything could happen at any time. So we all need some kind of insurance, something to lean on, a shelter from the wind. I hate to say this, Mr. Kawana, but at the moment you have, uh, exactly nothing that you can lean on. Not one of the people around you can be counted on, it seems to me: all of them would most likely desert you in a pinch. Am I right? You know what they say—‘Better safe than sorry.’ It’s important to insure yourself for when the pinch does come, don’t you think? And I’m not just talking about money. Money, ultimately, is just a kind of symbol of something else.”