“Same for me,” I said. “It seemed like I should see you.”

“Because I was calling you, kiddo. I'd been hanging around for a while, you know, down where you were,” Haru said.

She seemed much more grown up than the Haru I'd known.

“Why did you call me?” I asked.

“I don't really know. Maybe because I never felt lonely when we were together. I mean I wasn't ever truly lonely, but whenever I think about you I get this feeling that I was least lonely when I was with you. And I get the feeling that on the day of that storm, you know, I wanted to kiss you.”

There was no expression on Haru's face.

“I'm happy to hear that,” I said.

But I felt unbearably sad. The ashy gray outside was so heavy that I felt how great a distance separates us from the past when I looked at Haru's tangled hair whipping in the wind. It was a distance greater than that between life and death, wider than the unfillable chasm that separates us all from one another.

I called her name. “Haru!”

Haru gave a little smile and fixed her hair, took hold of the door with a movement that seemed perfectly natural, said good-bye and touched my hand, then vanished into the space beyond the door. I was thinking: Yeah, come to think of it, I guess the only time we ever talked to each other like this was that day, that was the only time. . . .

The bang of the door and the coldness of her hand lingered on.

“Welcome back!” shouted Tanaka.

Glancing quickly around, I realized that I was back in the shop.

“Wow! That was awesome! What's the trick?” I said.

I was trying to hide my confusion, but I was also genuinely impressed.

“That's a nice thing to say! It's the real thing, kid.” Tanaka sounded slightly pissed off.

“Basically, Tanaka here is like that animal the Chinese thought up that eats people's bad dreams, see? Think of it that way,” Mizuo said.

“Right, that's a good way to put it,” Tanaka said.

“Yeah, I guess so. It made me really happy to see her. I don't know, it's like some poison has been sucked out of my chest,” I said.

I felt myself gradually returning to reality—I checked to make sure that my mind and body were still as they should be. My breath, and everything I saw, was so sharp and clear it seemed like some mist dissolving.

“You feel like you do after you get a lot of exercise, right?” Tanaka said, plonking a glass of ice water down on the counter in front of me. “That's because you've just been someplace very far away.”

Yes—that stormy day.

Early autumn and a typhoon had blown up.

The situation between Haru and me had been steadily getting more and more dangerous, and we'd been quarreling the entire week. Our love for the man was starting to wear thin, and there was nothing we could do to turn things around, so we were constantly irritated and always anxious. The man almost never came by the house anymore, but neither of us cared much about that.