at Hirata’s house. Yet Ichiko put no distance between them, and never
seemed embarrassed.
For example, Ichiko thought nothing of it if Takako saw her when she
was changing clothes upstairs. Sometimes she would walk to the window,
still naked, and start talking to Takako.
The living room downstairs and the bedroom on the second floor of the
Chibas’ house were furnished western-style. The bedroom seemed
originally to have been a Japanese-style room with a tatami floor, which
they had redecorated as a western room. The chest of drawers where Chiba
and Ichiko kept their clothes was built into the wall of their bedroom.
Takako was careless enough to look, she could see both the Chibas
changing clothes from inside her own house. The Chibas’ bedroom was at
the back of the house, nearly hidden, but occasionally in summer Takako
could see through the window that Chiba had put a large board on top of
the double bed and spread blueprints out across it.
Takako sometimes wondered, somewhat strangely, if the fact that Chiba
used the double bed as a desk meant that he was satisfied with Ichiko’s
body. She herself had never been in a double bed. What was it like in a
double bed, she wondered, in that other country.
Hirata and Fujiki were also as different as this country and that country.
Hirata disliked it when Takako moved—with Fujiki, though, she had been
the one to move from the beginning. Of course this might have been due to
the fact that Fujiki was still a student, so much younger than she.
“I feel so humiliated. I’m such an animal.” Takako often said such things
when they were finished, covering her face, her wide-open eyes. And Fujiki
would rejoice in the knowledge that Takako felt so passionately toward
him.
Takako thrashed madly in bed to paralyze her sinful thoughts.
