Kafuku gave up trying to sleep. “The last time I became friends with someone was nearly ten years ago,” he said, opening his eyes. “Perhaps ‘someone like a friend’ would be more accurate. He was six or seven years younger than me, a heck of a nice guy. He liked to drink, so we drank and talked about all kinds of things.”

Misaki nodded and waited for him to continue. Kafuku hesitated for a moment before plunging in.

“To tell you the truth, he was one of my wife’s lovers. He didn’t know that I knew, though.”

It took Misaki a long moment to get her head around what she had just heard. “You mean he was having sex with your wife?” she said at last.

“That’s right. I think he was having sex with my wife on a regular basis for three or four months.”

“How did you know?”

“She hid it from me, of course, but I could tell. It would take too long to explain how. But there was no question. My imagination wasn’t playing tricks on me.”

When they stopped for a moment, Misaki reached up with both hands to adjust the rearview mirror. “Didn’t that get in the way of your friendship?”

“Quite the opposite,” Kafuku said. “I made him my friend precisely because he had slept with my wife.”

Misaki didn’t say anything. She waited for him to go on.

“How can I put this…I wanted to understand. Why she slept with him, why he was the one she wanted. At least that was my motive in the beginning.”

Misaki took a long, deep breath. Her chest rose beneath her jacket, then sank back. “But wasn’t that awfully painful? Drinking and talking with a man you knew had slept with your wife?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Kafuku said. “It made me think things I would prefer to have ignored. Remember things I would rather have forgotten. But I was acting. That is my profession, after all.”

“Becoming somebody different,” Misaki said.

“That’s right.”

“And then going back to who you are.”

“That’s right,” Kafuku said. “Whether you want to or not. But the place you return to is always slightly different from the place you left. That’s the rule. It can never be exactly the same.”

A fine rain began to fall. Misaki turned on the wipers. “So then did you figure it out? Why your wife slept with him?”

“No.” Kafuku said, shaking his head. “I never understood. He had some qualities that I lacked. All right, a lot of qualities, I guess. But I could never figure out which of those had caught her fancy. Our actions aren’t based on specifics like that—we can’t pinpoint why we do what we do. Relationships between people, especially between men and women, operate on—what should I say—a more general level. More vague, more self-centered, more pathetic.”

Misaki thought for a moment. “But still,” she said, “you stayed friends with him even though you didn’t understand, right?”