WHERE WE WORKED was a tiny, dark, small-time publisher’s warehouse in Bunkyo Ward, downtown Tokyo. A dirty little open sewer of a stream ran right beside it. The work was easy, boring, busy. I got order slips, which told us how many copies of what books to haul out to the entrance. She would bind these up with cord and check them off against the inventory record. That was the whole job. There was no heating in the place, so we had to hustle our buns off to keep from freezing to death. Sometimes it was so cold I thought we wouldn’t be any better off shoveling snow at the airport in Anchorage.

At lunchtime, we’d head out for something hot to eat, warming ourselves for the hour until our break was up. More than anything, the main objective was to thaw out. But from the time she had her panic, little by little we found ourselves on speaking terms. Her words came in bits and pieces, but after a while I got the picture. Her father ran a small import business in Yokohama, most of the merchandise he handled being bargain clothing from Hong Kong. Although Chinese, she herself was Japanese-born and had never once been to China or Hong Kong or Taiwan. Plus, she’d gone to Japanese schools, not Chinese. Hardly spoke a word of Chinese, but was strong in English. She was attending a private women’s university in the city and hoped to become an interpreter. Meanwhile, she was sharing her brother’s apartment in Komagome, or, to borrow her turn of phrase, she’d fallen in with him. Seemed she didn’t get along well with her father. And that’s the sum total of what I found out about her.

Those two weeks in March passed along with the sleet of the season. On the evening of our last day of work, after picking up my pay from accounting and after some hesitation, I decided to ask my Chinese co-worker out to a discotheque in Shinjuku. Not that I had any intention of making a pass at her. I already had a steady girlfriend since high school, though if the truth be told we were beginning to go our separate ways.

The Chinese girl thought it over a few seconds, then said, “But I’ve never been dancing.”

“There’s nothing to it,” I said. “It’s not ballroom dancing. All you have to do is move to the beat. Anyone can do it.”