Her involvement with Fujiki had been a “mistake,” she thought, as if she
had been caught up suddenly in a whirlwind, lost control, and Takako
regretted that it had happened. At the time she had felt that she was
betraying Hirata, yet even then, in the very depths of that feeling, lurked a
sense that she had betrayed Chiba. Takako found this strange, but somehow
the very strangeness of it set fires burning within her.
Takako looked away from Ricky, and he pulled his head back through
the hole in the fence.
The curtains of the Chibas’ second-floor bedroom were closed.
Takako walked in the direction the dog had gone. Peering through a gap
in the fence, she could see that the well-trimmed hedge of sasanqua that
separated the front door from the side door of the Chibas’ house was
covered with blossoms. The blooms were past their prime, and some had
dropped—they formed a layer on the ground.
In one part of the garden, over on the other side of the hedge, cosmos
and yellow and white chrysanthemums and some variety of purple flower
were blooming riotously, like a clump of weeds. The roots and seeds from
last year or the year before must have sent out shoots, shoots which now
blossomed at random, uncontrolled. It looked as if the soil had originally
been built up into a neat circular mound, but now the various flowers had
grown randomly in all directions, drooping over, so that the outline of the
flower bed had disappeared. The leaves of several of the flowers were
starting to wither.
Still, Takako had never seen such a fantastic variety of different flowers
in the Chibas’ garden, blooming the way they were now. Her heart
fluttered.
With Chiba and Ichiko both away from home, it seemed impossible,
somehow, that the flowers should be standing so still in the autumn sun.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
