whose eyes were beautiful in just this way—hadn’t I been left with a sense
of her charm, which was somehow like sadness and regret? Uryu’s eyes
were exactly like the eyes of a woman. They seemed moist with grief, but
were in fact blue-white and clear. It was as though there was a second pair
of eyes deep within the first. The feeling that I was being watched by that
other, deep-down pair of eyes was strangely unsettling.
“When I see all those ash-colored dots flying . . .” Uryu began again. “It
seems that it’s my own life up there—that it’s the world of my own heart
and mind. My own sin, my own disgrace has become an ash-colored dust
and filled the sky. . . .”
“Ah.” For a time I was unable to respond.
There was a pair of sunglasses with light peach colored celluloid frames
on top of Uryu’s desk.
“I’ve got muscae volitantes too, actually—though mine is a pretty mild
case,” I said. “Who knows, Kishiyama may have had it himself.”
“Mr. Kishiyama wrote in an essay that he saw something like soot or tiny
bits of thread, didn’t he? But it was dust in the lenses of his glasses, not
something that flew about. It moved when he moved his eyes.”
“Did he really?”
How old could Uryu be? The smoothness of his cheeks and neck made it
seem as though he night still be a young man. Deciding that he couldn’t yet
have turned thirty, I turned my eyes to the garden.
“To think that Kishiyama chose to look at a garden like this, rather than
at the sea. There’s nothing to look at.”
There was a second two-story guest house opposite from where we sat.
The garden between the two buildings was small and dark. The few trees in
it had been cut close to the ground, and the rocks were small. Azaleas are
fairly common in Yamagata, both as garden trees and as bonsai—I had seen
