“Sounds reasonable,” I said.

Then I smiled.

Evidently even Mari and my brother hadn't realized how strongly Mari's parents would object to their relationship. But if I think things over, I can see that if I were a parent with an only daughter, and if I'd paid good money so that she could learn to play the piano and take English Conversation classes and all that, I definitely wouldn't want to let her go off with a guy who looked as much like a womanizer as my brother.

I saw the two of them during the days when their love for each other first began to deepen, unknown to anyone, and I watched them during the days after people found out and started putting pressure on them to end the relationship, when they dated in secret. The difference between those two environments was as enormous as that between light and dark. But since my brother was the sort of person who could find pleasure in the very enormity of that difference, and since Mari was the sort of person who was thrilled by anything that she did without telling her parents, and who delighted in that thrill, the two of them seemed to be fairly happy.

The phone would ring twice and then stop.

This was Mari's signal for my brother to call her.

Hearing it and heading for the phone. His sweet steps.

Yoshihiro got in a car accident and died in the emergency room of the hospital. He'd been on his way to a rendezvous with Mari when the accident happened, so he'd kept the date a secret from the rest of us. Our father worked as a surgeon at a very big hospital, so if we'd known where he'd been headed we could have had him rushed straight there, and it's possible that he might have been saved.

Could any story leave you with an aftertaste as unpleasant as this one? I think the reason Mari got so terribly depressed was that it happened while she was waiting. She was waiting in a café just across from the train station. It was a very bright shop that everyone used as a meeting place. She got any number of refills on her coffee, ate two pieces of cake, drank a lemon soda, had some ice cream. . . . She waited for five hours. Then she trudged back to her house and was informed of her lover's death.

She told me about it much later.

“It felt like the inside of my stomach had turned completely black. Like a black hole. You could throw in anything you liked, I wouldn't even notice—my head was drifting through the clouds—everything would just go right in, things just kept going in. And all the while my heart kept its eyes trained on the door. I'd flip through a magazine, but my heart wouldn't be in it at all. My eyes would just skitter nervously across the surface of the page. I began remembering all the bad things I'd discovered about Yoshihiro, making them even worse. And with each moment that passed, that dark side of him kept spreading slowly through all the different parts of my body, until eventually it covered everything. That's how it felt. I was dragging all this black stuff along behind me, it was so heavy I could barely stand—so it was night by the time I headed home. I'd go home and go to sleep waiting for his call, that's what I thought. There had to be some reason. I'll understand if only we can talk about it. That's all I thought.”