The affair was probably just a tiny little fling, the sort of thing people have all the time, but my mother went into hysterics and ran off to her parents’ house, leaving me and my brother behind. My father went to bring her back. Evidently their talks didn't go very well, things got complicated . . . but it would be totally wrong to suppose that my brother and I were even the slightest bit confounded at being left on our own. The first thing we did was get Mari to come stay with us. Next we took advantage of all the confusion to withdraw huge loads of cash with our parents’ ATM card and buy anything and everything that we'd been wanting. We stayed up until very late every night drinking booze. Mari was just eighteen, but in my eyes she was already a beautiful adult woman.

Come to think of it, the three of us slept side by side then.

It was snowing that evening too, and it was terribly cold—the sort of night where you couldn't even make yourself get up to go to the bathroom. Outside the window, the air was so bitterly cold you almost expected it to snap suddenly into a single frozen block. That frigid air, pushing up against the window. . . .

But inside the room it was warm, and we were all drunk and completely stuffed. That night we slept in our clothes, lying under the kotatsu. My brother was the first to drift off, his breathing becoming slow and steady and deep. Then Mari, already half dozing, settled down. I was so incredibly sleepy myself that I could hardly stand it anymore, and so without saying a word I lay down beside her. Our eyes met. “Why don't we just sleep here tonight,” Mari said. And then she lifted the upper half of her body and bent down over Yoshihiro's cheek and gave him a kiss good night. I goggled at her, startled. She grinned and gave me a kiss too, one that lasted just as long as my brother's.

“Thank you,” I said. Mari answered with a little smile, then flopped artlessly down and shut her eyes. Snow hurtled without a sound into the depths of the night, streaming down all around, closing us in. I went to sleep staring at the shadows that Mari's long eyelashes cast on her white skin.

Our parents finally returned after four days to find the entire house turned upside down, and the three of us all dressed up in fancy clothes that they'd never seen before, suffering from the lingering effects of the previous night's drinking. They were pretty shocked, and they gave my brother an earful: he was older than me, and had been more or less responsible for everything.

But Yoshihiro didn't give in. “The idea that the two of you might split up scared me so much that I didn't know what else to do!” he said, making our parents cry. It was unbelievably fun.