I HAD STARTED living with my sister five years earlier, in the spring, when I was twenty-two and she was eighteen. I had just graduated from college and taken my first job, and she had just graduated from high school and entered college. Our parents had allowed her to go to school in Tokyo on the condition that she live with me, a condition we were both glad to accept. They found us a nice, big two-bedroom apartment, and I paid half the rent.

The thought of living with my sister was an almost painless proposition. Not only did we get along well, as I mentioned earlier, but our schedules matched well, too. Working for the PR section of an appliance manufacturer, I would leave the house fairly late in the morning and come back late at night. She used to go out early and come home as the sun was going down. In other words, she was usually gone when I woke up and asleep by the time I came back. And since my weekends were mostly taken up with dates, I didn’t really talk to my sister more than once or twice a week. We wouldn’t have had time to fight even if we had wanted to, and we didn’t invade each other’s privacy.

I assumed she had her own things going, but I felt it was not my place to say anything. She was eighteen, after all. What business was it of mine who she slept with?

One time, though, I held her hand for a couple of hours—from one to three in the morning, to be exact. I found her at the kitchen table, crying, when I got home from work. Narrow-minded and selfish as I am, I was smart enough to realize that if she was crying at the kitchen table and not in her room she wanted some comforting from me.

So I sat next to her and held her hand—probably for the first time since elementary school, when we went out hunting dragonflies. Her hand was much bigger and stronger than I remembered. Obviously.

She cried for two hours straight, never moving. I could hardly believe the body was capable of producing such quantities of tears. Two minutes of crying was all it took to dry me out.

By the time 3:00 a.m. rolled around, though, I had had it. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Now it was my turn, as the elder brother, to say something, though giving advice was definitely not my line.

“I don’t want to interfere with the way you live your life,” I began. “It’s your life, and you should live it as you please.”

She nodded.

“But I do want to give you one word of advice. Don’t carry condoms in your purse. They’ll think you’re a whore.”