“What do you mean someone? Who?”

“Someone who's died. Has anyone you know died?”

I puzzled for a bit, but no one came to mind. I shook my head.

“They say that when a dead person wants to say something to someone it was close to in life, that's how it gets the message across. And when you get drunk or when you're just about to fall asleep, at times like that it's easier to get synchronized, you know, so that's when it happens. Anyway that's what I heard somewhere.”

Suddenly I felt icy cold. I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders.

“Is it always someone you know?” I asked.

No matter how happy the song made me feel, the idea of having some dead stranger singing into my ear was not something I liked.

“So they say. Maybe . . . could it be Haru?” he said.

Mizuo is very quick to sense these things. And it's true—I gave a little start and felt almost immediately that he was probably right. In fact what I felt was almost a certainty. I hadn't heard a word from her, and then lately all these memories of her drifting through my mind. . . .

“You should see what you can find out.”

“Yeah, I'll ask some friends,” I said.

Mizuo nodded.

No matter what people said to him, Mizuo never butted in with stories of his own or ignored what they were saying. His parents must have raised him well. And yet you can't deny that his name—Mizuo, written with characters meaning “water” and “man”—is fairly weird, and it's certainly not easy to try and figure out how his parents came up with it. The extraordinary truth is that when his mother was young, conditions made it necessary for her to have an abortion, even though she didn't want one. When she had Mizuo she named him “waterman,” hoping that he'd be happy enough for two—the fetus that had been lost, the “waterbaby” as they're called in Japanese, and himself.

Is that the sort of name you give a child?

The whole interior of the room was flooded with the sweet scent of the white roses he'd brought. It occurred to me that if the scent lasted until night, I might be able to fall asleep without drinking so much. We kissed once again and embraced.

* * *

“Yeah, Haru died.”

This half-expected answer came so smoothly it was shocking.

Mizuo had told me that a guy whom Haru and the man and I had all known was working at a certain all-night coffee shop now, and so I'd jumped in a taxi and rushed straight there, hoping he might be able to tell me something—I'd made a special trip, in fact—and this was the answer I got. If that was all he was going to say, I might as well just have called. I spent a few moments peering at his eyes and understood that he wasn't joking. He was standing behind the crowded shop's counter, dressed in his waiter's uniform, drying dishes. His eyes were grim.