The next morning at dawn without ceremony he took me.

That day I went to the restaurant with my boy as usual, acting as if nothing had happened. My husband was sitting at a table reading a newspaper, a glass of liquor beside him. I thought how pretty the morning sunshine looked, sparkling on the glass.

“Isn’t anybody here,” I asked. He looked up from his paper. “The boss hasn’t come back yet from marketing. The madam was in the kitchen just a minute ago. Isn’t she there now?”

“You didn’t come last night, did you?”

“I did come. It’s got so that I can’t get to sleep without a look at my favorite waitress’s face. I dropped in after ten but they said you had just left.”

“And then?”

“I spent the night here. It was raining so hard.”

“I may be sleeping here from now on.”

“That’s a good idea, I suppose.”

“Yes, that’s what I’ll do. There’s no sense in renting the house forever.”

My husband didn’t say anything but turned back to his paper. “Well, what do you know. They’re writing bad things about me again. They call me a fake aristocrat with Epicurean leanings. That’s not true. It would be more correct to refer to me as an Epicurean in terror of God. Look! It says here that I’m a monster. That’s not true, is it? It’s a little late, but I’ll tell you now why I took the 5,000 yen. It was so that I might give you and the boy the first happy New Year in a long time. That proves I’m not a monster, doesn’t it?”

His words didn’t make me especially glad. I said, “There’s nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive.”

TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE