I return home and am putting the groceries away in the refrigerator when the telephone rings. It sounds positively irritated, the way it rings. I leave a half-opened plastic tub of tofu on the table, head into the living room, and pick up the receiver.

“Finished with your spaghetti?” It’s that woman again.

“Yeah, I’m done,” I say. “But now I have to go out looking for the cat.”

“Can’t that wait ten minutes? Looking for the cat!”

“Well, ten minutes, maybe.”

What the hell am I doing?, I think. Why am I obliged to spend ten minutes passing the time of day with some strange woman?

“Now, then, perhaps we can come to an understanding,” says the woman, nice and quiet. From the sound of it, this woman—whoever she is—is settling back into a chair there on the other end of the line, crossing her legs.

“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” I say. “Some people, ten years together and they still can’t understand each other.”

“Care to try?” the woman teases.

I undo my wristwatch and switch on the stopwatch mode, then press the timer’s start button.

“Why me?” I ask. “Why not ring up somebody else?”

“I have my reasons,” the woman enunciates slowly, as if measuredly masticating a morsel of food. “I’ve heard all about you.”

“When? Where?”

“Sometime, somewhere,” the woman says. “But what does that matter? The important thing is now. Right? What’s more, talking about it only loses us time. It’s not as if I had all the time in the world, you know.”

“Give me some proof, then. Proof that you know me.”

“For instance.”

“How about my age?”

“Thirty,” the woman answers on the spot. “Thirty and two months. Good enough?”

That shuts me up. The woman really does know me. Yet no matter how I rack my brains, I can’t place her voice. I simply couldn’t have forgotten or confused someone’s voice. Faces, names—maybe—but voices, never.

“Well, now, it’s your turn to see what you can tell about me,” she says suggestively. “What do you imagine from my voice? What kind of woman am I? Can you picture me? This sort of thing’s your forte, isn’t it?”

“You got me,” I say.

“Go ahead, try,” the woman insists.

I glance at my watch. Not quite a minute and a half so far. I heave a sigh of resignation. Seems I’ve already taken her up, and once the challenge is on, there’s no turning back. I used to have a knack for guessing games.

“Late twenties, university graduate, native Tokyoite, upper-middle-class upbringing,” I fire away.

“Amazing,” says the woman, flicking a cigarette lighter by the receiver. A Cartier, by the sound of it. “Keep going.”

“Fairly good-looking. At least, you yourself think so. But you’ve got a complex. You’re too short or your breasts are too small or something like that.”

“Pretty close,” the woman giggles.

“You’re married. But all’s not as smooth as it could be. There are problems. No woman without her share of problems would call up a man and not give her name. Yet I don’t know you. At least I’ve never talked with you before. This much imagined, I still can’t picture you.”