“All night long I'm not allowed to sleep. I mean just imagine, what if the person next to me woke up in the middle of the night and I was sleeping, you know, just snoring away? My work wouldn't be worth very much then, it wouldn't be professional, see what I mean? Whatever happens I can't let the person feel lonely. Everyone who comes—and I only take people with references from others—is very respectable, very rich. They've all been hurt in unbelievably subtle ways, they're all exhausted. So exhausted they don't even realize they're exhausted. These people always wake up in the middle of the night, absolutely always. I'm not exaggerating when I say that. And it's really important that I smile at them then, in that pallid light. I hand them a glass of ice water. Sometimes they want some coffee or something, so I go right into the kitchen and make it for them. Most of the time, when you do that, they calm down and just fall asleep again. I think all these people, all they want is to have someone there, lying next to them. Some of them are women, some of them are foreigners. But I'm not very reliable, you know, sometimes I fall asleep. . . . Because when you're sleeping next to all these exhausted people, it's like you start matching your breath to theirs, slowly, those deep breaths . . . maybe you're breathing in the darkness they have inside them. Sometimes I'm thinking to myself You mustn't go to sleep even as I'm dozing off, having some terrible dream. All these surreal things. Dreams where I'm on a boat that's going under, dreams where I've lost some coins I was collecting, dreams where the dark comes in through the window and blocks up my throat—my heart is pounding, I'm so scared, and then I wake up. It's really frightening. The person beside me is still asleep, and I look at them and think, Yes, of course, what I've just seen is how this person feels inside, so lonely it hurts, such desolation. Yeah, it really scares me.”

Shiori was staring straight up through the moonlight. The whites of her eyes seemed to shine faintly, and it occurred to me that this was how she was feeling inside, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to say it. But I was sure it was true. I wanted to cry, I was so sure it was true.