There were times when I was with Shiori when it would occur to me that I really liked women a whole lot more than I liked men. I don't mean this in a lesbian sense, but it's something I felt very strongly. That's how good a person she was, and how much fun it was living with her. She was fair and slightly plump, her eyes were very narrow, her chest was large. You certainly couldn't have called her a beauty, and her manner was so mild that you couldn't help thinking of someone's mother when you saw her—she was the type of person who completely lacked what's generally known as sex appeal. She spoke very little; she was precisely what a woman is supposed to be. When I thought of her it was always the soft shadow of her presence that came to me, not her appearance: the sense of how I felt when she was there. Sometimes, back when she was still living with me, I'd look at her smile—which somehow seemed to cast only the very palest of shadows, to be always on the verge of vanishing forever—or at the deep wrinkles that gathered around the corners of her eyes, and I'd feel an inexplicable yearning to bury my head in her giant breasts and sob and sob and tell her absolutely everything. The bad things, the lies I'd told, things about the future, how tired I felt, all the things I'd put up with, the darkness of night, my uneasiness—everything. And then I'd want to turn my thoughts back, to linger over memories of my mother and father, of the moon above the town where I grew up, of the color of the winds that moved over the fields.

That's the sort of person Shiori was.

Though it was a very brief encounter, that meeting with my old friend left my head in a state of chaos. Somehow I made my way alone through sunlight that made me feel faint, and arrived at my apartment. My apartment gets a lot of sun in the afternoon. I stood in the dazzling light, my mind blank, taking the laundry off the line. A pleasant, just-washed scent drifted up from the white sheets as they brushed my cheek.

I started feeling sleepy. Light came streaming down over my back like water in a shower while I folded the clothes, and at the same time the cold air from the air conditioner blew over me. I started to doze off. Naps that begin this way feel terrific. You feel as if you're about to have a dream all in gold. I slipped out of my skirt and slid into bed. Lately I hadn't been dreaming at all. Soon everything would go black.

Suddenly the ringing of the phone came spiraling into my sleep, and I was jolted back into consciousness. That's him calling, I thought, then sat up in bed and glanced over at the clock. Not even ten minutes had passed since I'd fallen asleep. Somehow I never even noticed when calls came from other people, I just went on sleeping. If things as minor as this came under the heading of ESP, I guess I'd have fairly impressive super-natural powers.