the fruits of the season started appearing in large quantities in the stores,
she would buy them according to her color preferences. She liked the color
of red apples, for instance, but disliked the color of tangerines. She ate
tangerines, and in seasons when they were scarce—when she only saw a
few at a time—these preferences seemed not to come into play. But she felt
slightly uneasy when cucumbers and other vegetables were heaped up in
the stores and often didn’t buy them. Then too, there were times when she
revealed an unexpected fastidiousness. It had happened more than fifteen
years ago, but Soeda still couldn’t forget the occasion when Ikuko had
discovered a single scrap of toenail that had fallen onto the tatami—this
despite the fact that he had cut his nails over a sheet of newspaper— and
had picked it up, disgusted.
Soeda had gotten angry too. “I really can’t understand it!” he’d said. “A
piece of a person’s body gets separated from his body, and all of a sudden
you think it’s dirty! You don’t notice when you’re kissing, but if someone
told you to exchange saliva with someone else, you’d find the idea
disgusting even if that someone else was a lover, wouldn’t you?” The
example had been rather unfortunate, admittedly, but Ikuko had been
unable to forget those words for almost two months, and Soeda hadn’t
known what to do.
Perhaps that aspect of Ikuko’s character had been passed on to their son,
Shinichi? Shinichi was stubborn, it was true, but Soeda didn’t think he was
afraid of heaped-up cucumbers. And there was certainly nothing like that in
Yoko. Suddenly an image of Yuko rose up in Soeda’s mind, quite unrelated
to what he had been thinking. It was Yuko as a junior high school student.
She and a friend had been painting pictures, but now they had stopped, and
they were coating each other’s fingernails with red paint. Soeda tried to
sketch in the details of this picture in his mind, to focus on it, and was soon
oblivious even to the sound of the wind.
“What are you thinking about?” said Ikuko. “You can’t sleep either?”
