Thinking about it wouldn't help me understand. The only thing I understood about Sarah was that she had been an adult then. She'd been more of an adult than me, more of an adult than my brother, more of an adult than Mari. She'd been so grown up I felt sorry for her.

I was drunk now. The darkness of the bar seemed so incredibly still and settled that it startled me. And yet Mari seemed more sharply visible than anyone else, the outline of her form even clearer than that of the dismal-looking young waitress chatting with a customer at the bar on the other side of the room, clearer than that of the stunningly gorgeous woman with the long hair who was sitting with her boyfriend, holding her head close to his, and clearer than that of the woman with the childlike features sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette and looking at a magazine. Why was it that Mari appeared this way? I considered the matter vaguely.

“So . . . is Sarah back in Japan now?” Mari asked.

“What do you mean?” I said, startled. “She only came to Japan to study, right? And that was years ago. She didn't even come back when Yoshihiro died!”

Mari's expression softened. No doubt my reaction had made it perfectly clear to her that I wasn't hiding Sarah's return to Japan from her, trying to make things easy.

“You see, I got this mysterious phone call yesterday,” she said.

“Mysterious in what way?”

“Well, when I picked up the phone and said hello there was no response—-just silence. So I kept listening for a while, right, and then I heard this guy's voice in the background, speaking in English. Of course it might just have been a prank call—maybe the person had the public-radio English Conversation Seminar going in the background or something—but I don't know . . . the density of that silence . . . it was like whoever it was was about to start speaking, but couldn't make up her mind to do it, you know, that sort of silence. So I kind of got the idea that it might be Sarah. That's all.”

“I see,” I said.

To tell the truth, right then I wasn't the slightest bit concerned about Sarah and whether it had been her calling. More than anything, it frightened me that Mari was talking about these things—things related to my brother, who'd been dead for so long—as if it were all perfectly ordinary, part of everyday life.

“I'll let you know if I hear anything.”

“Good, I hope you do,” Mari said, and smiled.

When we parted, Mari called out her good-bye in a voice so incredibly loud you'd have thought it was the middle of the day, and then walked briskly off. I listened for a moment to the sound of her shoes scraping across the asphalt, and then started walking down the night-dark road myself.

* * *

When I was in junior high school my mother found out that my father was having an affair. There was a huge commotion at home, and in the end both my parents left the house. It was the middle of winter.