I was feeling fine. The Kobe was still there and the lighting was as it had been when I had gone there and it was the only Japanese restaurant on the street. There were others now as there were all sorts of little foreign restaurants that had not been there years ago. Some things hadn’t, after all, been “alterated.” It was reassuring. I had had a few drinks at the Pine Room and we had the rice wine at the Kobe and I was feeling expansive. The misery had retreated, withdrawn, the kids seemed pleased with the restaurant. So I began to tell them about Japan. I told them about a little inn I had stayed at in a mineral-spring resort down the coast. I told them about the carp pool in the courtyard and the sound of the carp leaping in the pool at night and of the huge scalding mineral pool in the inn and how one night, being lonely, I had asked the maid to send a girl to me from one of the geisha houses and how when she came to the inn she had turned out to be possibly the ugliest geisha in Japan and then I couldn’t get rid of her and she sat on the double mattresses on the floor looking reproachfully at me and eating all the hard candies out of a bag of candy I had bought. I told them about the little dwarf who had been the handyman at the inn and about the houses in the bazaar where the girls sat with their lacquered hair and about the hurricanes that blew in from the sea. I told them about a club called the Tennessee Club and about a girl there named Akiko in her sleazy silk dress and about the thick green tea and the fish-houses where they killed the lobster in front of you and sliced it raw and about how when I left the inn everybody went to the railroad station with me and smiled and bowed their formal farewells and I made an awful mistake, I kissed Akiko on the cheek goodbye in public, which no one ever did. As I spoke, Aurora and the boy watching me, and the little cups of rice wine emptying and being filled again, I was surprised to find myself feeling that I actually had been someplace and that my life really wasn’t quite the blank it seemed so much of the time to me. Of course, I’d been in Japan alone and whatever memories there were that were pleasant now to go back to or to talk to others about were those associated, it seemed, with the times I had been alone. Well, I was alone again. Of course, I knew I was trying to make myself interesting. To both of them. Asher, square or hexagonal, had not always been a dull boy. Things had happened to Asher. I could feel myself all warmed by the rice wine. I was drunk. Not very drunk. Pleasantly drunk. And they were both young. The sukiyaki was gone. The pale tea consumed. Michael was smoking a cigarette. It was almost ten o’clock. I did not want the evening to end. I did not want to go back to the hotel. I had begun to have a peculiar insomnia: at about four o’clock in the morning I would find myself awake. Anything would be better than going back to the hotel.