Whether or not my wife was actually aware of any of this, she never seemed in the least bit perturbed. Aside from the fact that she deliberately continued to avoid sleeping with me—she’d even taken to sleeping in trousers—on the surface we were still a regular married couple. The only thing that had changed was that in the early hours of the morning, when I groped for my alarm clock, turned it off and sat up, she would be lying there ramrod straight, her eyes gazing upward in the darkness. After the meal at the restaurant, other people in the company had been noticeably cool toward me, but once the project I’d pushed through began to yield some far-from-negligible profits, all that unpleasantness appeared to have been entirely forgotten.

I sometimes told myself that even though the woman I was living with was a little odd, nothing particularly bad would come of it. I thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her as a stranger, or no, as a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order. But it was no easy thing for a man in the prime of his life, for whom married life had always gone entirely without a hitch, to have his physical needs go unsatisfied for such a long period of time. So yes, one night when I returned home late and somewhat inebriated after a meal with colleagues, I grabbed hold of my wife and pushed her to the floor. Pinning down her struggling arms and tugging off her trousers, I became unexpectedly aroused. She put up a surprisingly strong resistance and, spitting out vulgar curses all the while, it took me three attempts before I managed to insert myself successfully. Once that had happened, she lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, her face blank, as though she were a “comfort woman” dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services. As soon as I finished, she rolled over and buried her face in the quilt. I went to have a shower, and by the time I returned to bed she was lying there with her eyes closed as if nothing had happened, or as though everything had somehow sorted itself out during the time I’d spent washing myself.

After this first time, it was easier for me to do it again, but each time, I would be seized by strange, ominous premonitions. I was thick-skinned by nature, and certainly wasn’t in the habit of entertaining outlandish notions, but the darkness and silence of the living room would strike a chill through me all the same. The following morning, sitting with my wife at the breakfast table—her lips pressed firmly closed as per usual, clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything I might be saying—I would be unable to conceal a feeling of abhorrence when I looked across at her. I couldn’t stand the way her expression, which made it seem as though she were a woman of bitter experience, who had suffered many hardships, niggled at my conscience.