It was the last weekend before he left Tokyo. He was doing his packing, in his two-room apartment in Inokashira. He had packed in a big case all his envelopes and yellow boxes of photographs, and put beside it the black metal boxes of equipment. His camera was still out, and his few clothes, which he could stuff into a rucksack later. There really weren’t many clothes, she was always trying to take him shopping to buy him more – just a few T-shirts and jeans, and two pairs of shoes, one to wear and one to pack. His nice leather jacket, that he had bought when he first came to Japan, he would wear. Come and see me in England. Please say that you’ll come soon. Come in the spring. But she had said that she couldn’t get a holiday in the spring, not long enough to go to England. In the summer I’ll try, she said. She had been thinking only of a holiday then, not thinking then that she might quit her job and go for longer. And then he told her. He’d never told anyone else, he said, but he needed to tell her. He needed to speak the words. For himself.

He said that his father had killed himself. That no one said that, openly. It was said that it was a shooting accident. Except it wasn’t easy to accidentally shoot yourself dead with a shotgun. And in England it was a crime then. Suicide was a crime in those days, a shame, unspeakable. Maybe that was why people didn’t say, or maybe they didn’t say out of kindness, but they did say things about how his father was moody, how he had never been quite the same since he had come back from the war, though the war had been a long time earlier. They didn’t say it, but he knew what they thought.

How do you know it wasn’t an accident?

I know because I saw.

You saw him do it?

I was there just after. Where he was. I woke up early and saw him go out with his gun. And I thought I’d go out too, and I found him.

When he said that she couldn’t touch him. He was standing across the room, just looking and not seeing her, as if he was in a different place. And then he turned round, mechanically as if he had switched himself on again, and slid back the doors of the high cupboard behind him, reaching in to get something out of the back of it. She loved him very much just then. She wanted to go across and touch him but she couldn’t. He was so determinedly looking away. That was how he was. When he was in pain no one could touch him.