three-foot hallway between the two rooms, so she and the person she was
talking to were separated by two layers of walls.
“They certainly pick awful words. Raindrops of all things. . . .” Numao
Shizu replied.
“It was really clever of Fumio, though. He’s still so little.”
“Of course Kaku, the boy from next door, he did say ‘drip drip drip.’ He
let Fumio get the answer. My little Fumio is still just a baby, so Kaku lets
him win.
He must have known it was raindrops if he said ‘drip drip drip.”’
“I don’t know. . . .You can’t tell whether it’s rain or raindrops just from
hearing that it’s water, and that it’s making noise right now.”
“If rain makes noise it’s raindrops.”
“That’s not true. The sound of rain and the sound of raindrops aren’t the
same.”
“Shinichi was the announcer just now, right? Well, that’s why it was
raindrops. Shinichi always picks unpleasant words like that. Kaku knew it
right away.”
Shizu spoke so decisively that Toshiko fell silent. There was no point in
arguing over something as trivial as the difference between raindrops and
rain. And the noise of the rain falling outside the children’s room was really
quite incredible. Water streamed down through a hole in the gutter—it was
hardly the gentle sound that words like “raindrops” and “drip drip drip”
described.
Toshiko had meant to be friendly when she spoke, and she thought now
with some irritation that Shizu certainly might have been friendlier herself.
Shizu, for her part, assumed that Toshiko was being sarcastic, commenting
wryly on the fact that she was unable to repair the gutter, or for that matter
