“Never mind,” I say. Then I step into the kitchen, panfry a piece of fish in butter, and prepare a salad and miso soup. Meanwhile, my wife reads the evening paper at the kitchen table.

“Say, weren’t you home at five-thirty?” she asks. “I tried calling to tell you I’d be a little late.”

“I ran out of butter and went out to buy some,” I lie.

“Did you remember to go to the bank?”

“Natch,” I reply.

“How about the cat?”

“Not a trace.”

“Oh,” says my wife.

I EMERGE from an after-dinner bath to find my wife sitting all alone in the darkened living room. I throw on a gray shirt and fumble through the dark to reach where she’s been dumped like a piece of luggage. She looks so utterly forsaken. If only they’d left her in another spot, she might have seemed a little happier.

Drying my hair with a bath towel, I take a seat on the sofa opposite her.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“The cat’s dead, I just know it,” my wife says.

“Oh c’mon,” I protest. “He’s just off exploring. Soon enough he’ll get hungry and head on back. The same thing happened once before, remember? That time when we were still living in Koenji—”

“This time it’s different. I can feel it. The cat’s dead and rotting away in the weeds. Did you search the grass in the yard of the vacant house?”

“Hey now, stop it. It may be a vacant house, but it’s somebody else’s house. I’m not about to go trespassing.”

“You killed it!” my wife accuses.

I heave a sigh and give my head another once-over with the towel.

“You killed it with that look of yours!” she repeats from the darkness.

“How does that follow?” I say. “The cat disappeared of its own doing. It’s not my fault. That much you’ve got to see.”

“You! You never liked that cat, anyway!”

“Okay, maybe so,” I admit. “At least I wasn’t as crazy about the cat as you were. Still, I never mistreated it. I fed it every day. Just because I wasn’t enthralled with the little bugger doesn’t mean I killed it. Start saying things like that and I end up having killed half the people on earth.”

“Well, that’s you all over,” my wife delivers her verdict. “That’s just so you. Always, always that way. You kill everything without ever playing a hand.”

I’m about to counter when she bursts into tears. I can the speech and toss the towel into the bathroom basket, go to the kitchen, take a beer out of the refrigerator, and chug. What an impossible day it’s been! One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.

Noboru Watanabe, where have you gone?, I think. Didn’t the wind-up bird wind your spring?

A regular poem that is:

Noboru Watanabe
Where have you gone?
Didn’t the wind-up bird
Wind your spring?

I’ve not finished half my beer when the telephone begins to ring.