“Punish him?”

“Make him pay for what he did. My plan was to put him off his guard by pretending to be his friend, find his fatal flaw, and use it to torture him.”

“What kind of fatal flaw?” Misaki asked, knitting her brow in thought.

“I didn’t think that far ahead. He was a guy who let his defenses down when he drank, so I was sure something would turn up sooner or later. I could use whatever it was to cause a scandal—create a situation that would destroy his reputation. I figured it would be a piece of cake. Then when he went through his divorce arbitration, he’d probably lose the right to see his son, which would have been a terrible blow. I doubted he could recover from that.”

“That’s pretty dark.”

“Yeah, it’s dark for sure.”

“And it was all to take revenge on him for sleeping with your wife?”

“It was slightly different from revenge,” Kafuku said. “I wasn’t able to forget what had taken place between them. I tried really hard. But I failed. The image of her in another man’s arms was stuck in my mind, as real as life. As if there was a demon with nowhere else to go clinging to a corner of the ceiling, eyes fastened on me. After my wife’s death, I expected the demon would disappear if I just waited long enough. But it didn’t. Instead its presence grew even stronger. I had to get rid of it. To do that I had to let go of my rage.”

Kafuku wondered why he was telling all this to a young woman from Junitakicho in Hokkaido, a girl young enough to be his daughter. Yet once he started, he found he couldn’t stop.

“So you thought you’d try to punish him,” the girl said.

“Yes, that’s true.”

“But you didn’t, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Kafuku said.

Misaki looked relieved to hear that. She gave a small sigh and flicked her lit cigarette onto the road. He guessed that was what people did in Junitakicho.

“I can’t explain it very well, but at a certain point a lot of things didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Like the demon had left me all of a sudden,” Kafuku said. “The rage vanished. Or maybe it was never rage in the first place.”

“Whatever it was, I’m glad for your sake that it left. That you never seriously hurt anyone.”

“I think so too.”

“But you never did figure out why your wife slept with that guy, why it had to be him, did you?”

“No, I never grasped that. It’s still a big question mark for me. He was a nice, uncomplicated guy. And I think he truly loved my wife. It wasn’t just a romp in the hay for him. Her death hit him hard. So did being turned away from her sickbed at the end. But I couldn’t help liking the guy, even thought we could become friends.”