An unbearable sadness had just started to wind itself around me when the phone rang. I knew it wasn't my boyfriend, but I figured that since I was up I might as well answer it anyway. And so I did.

It was a friend of mine from college. She was calling to ask if I'd be interested in doing a little work. The company she worked for was having a trade show the following week, would I like to be a hostess? All kinds of people were always calling me up with offers like this.

I was on the verge of declining the offer—the refusal had made it as far as the base of my throat—when for some reason I blurted out, “Sure.” Maybe I'd been scared by the coincidence of her calling so soon after the incident in the park, I don't know. I regretted having agreed as soon as I spoke, regretted it ferociously, but there was nothing I could do. My friend was delighted, and she'd already started rattling on, telling me where she thought we should meet and what sort of work I'd be doing. I gave up whatever hope I'd had of resisting and started jotting down what she said.

I was still just as sleepy as I'd been before.

Get up early in the morning, get myself ready, leave the apartment. It should have been perfectly simple, but I'd been holed up inside for so long just waiting for the telephone to ring that it was actually extremely grueling. There were only three days of training and then three days of actual work, but it was so hard I could barely stand it. I felt sleepy no matter what I was doing, so sleepy that I always felt like I was on the verge of disintegrating. I was mixed in with a bunch of other young women my age, and I had to remember all kinds of things at once; I had to memorize the blurbs explaining the products, and I spent the whole time on my feet—and every bit of this weighed down on me so much that it felt like a bad dream. I didn't even have time to think. Yes, I regretted agreeing to do that work more than I can say.

But even in that very brief period of time I was made abundantly aware of the extent to which various things inside me had degenerated without my even knowing it. I'd always hated working, and I'd never cared much about the kinds of jobs I took or whether I had one or not or anything like that, and none of that had changed at all, it wasn't that . . . it was something like guts, the ability to move on to the next thing when I had to, it was something like hope, like anticipation. . . . I can't explain it very well. But I feel sure that this something I'd unknowingly cast aside was the same thing that Shiori had lost, was what she'd cast aside herself, also without noticing. Maybe if she'd been lucky she could have gone on living anyway, just as she was. But she was too weak, she couldn't endure a life like that. The flow was so strong that it swallowed her whole.