When she heard that, she grabbed the telephone book that was sitting on the table and heaved it at me with all her might.

“What are you doing snooping in my bag!”

She always threw things when she got mad. Which is why I didn’t go on to tell her that I had never looked in her bag.

In any case, it worked. She stopped crying, and I was able to get some sleep.

Our life-style stayed exactly the same, even after she graduated from college and took a job with a travel agency. She worked a standard nine-to-five day, while my schedule became, if anything, looser. I’d show up at the office some time before noon, read the newspaper at my desk, eat lunch, and finally get serious about doing a little something around two in the afternoon. Later, I’d make arrangements with the guys from the ad agency, and we’d go out drinking till after midnight.

For her first summer vacation, my sister went to California with a couple of friends on a package tour put together by her agency. One of the members of the tour group was a computer engineer a year her senior, and she started dating him when they came back to Japan. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it’s not for me. First of all, I hate package tours, and the thought of getting serious about somebody you meet in a group like that makes me sick.

After she started seeing this computer engineer, though, my sister began to glow. She paid a lot more attention to appearances, both the apartment’s and her own. Until then, she had gone just about everywhere in a work shirt and faded jeans and sneakers. Thanks to her new interest in clothing, the front closet filled up with her shoes, and all the other closets were overflowing with wire hangers from the cleaner’s. She was constantly doing laundry and ironing clothes (instead of leaving them to pile up in the bathroom like an Amazonian ants’ nest), always cooking and cleaning. These were dangerous symptoms, I seemed to recall from my own experience. When a woman starts acting like this, a man has only one choice: to clear out fast or marry her.

Then she showed me his picture. She had never done anything like that before. Another dangerous symptom.

Actually, she showed me two pictures. One had been taken on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. It showed my sister and the computer engineer standing in front of a swordfish and wearing big smiles on their faces.

“Nice swordfish,” I said.

“Stop joking. I’m serious.”

“So what should I say?”

“Don’t say anything. This is him.”