the various other parts of the house that needed fixing. Her fifth-grade son’s
choice of that wretched word, “raindrops,” had put Shizu in a bad mood.
Toshiko and Hidaka were a young couple, so recently married that they
hadn’t yet been registered as a family. They rented the six-mat room on the
second floor of the Numaos’ house, and they both worked. The first floor
of the Numaos’ house was a stationery store. It had managed to remain in
business because the elementary school was nearby, but Shizu had stopped
bothering with inventory ever since Numao started staying away from
home, and she’d developed a habit of speaking curtly to children when they
came in to buy things, and sales were falling off as a result. Shizu had the
impression that the young Mr. and Mrs. Hidaka were on good terms—that
they were an example of that modern rarity, a friendly couple—and so she
behaved toward them with a mixture of goodwill and envy. She was jealous
on some occasions, and on some occasions she was downright mean—her
moods varied. In the past Numao had slept by himself in the eight-mat
room on the second floor, and Shizu had slept downstairs with the two
boys, in the six-mat room at the back of the store. The children’s room was
an addition—a narrow room with a floor made of planks, into which the
two boys’ desks just barely fi.t. When Numao didn’t return home for
several nights in a row, Shizu started sleeping in the eight-mat room on the
second floor. The children still slept downstairs. Numao’s loud snores had
always made the Hidakas feel more comfortable somehow, more secure.
Shizu, on the other hand, often startled
Toshiko by speaking to her from the far side of the paper-paneled walls
at times when Toshiko felt sure she must already have gone to sleep.
“Toshiko? Toshiko?” she once said. “You know, I’ve been thinking. I bet
the woman Numao is seeing, I bet it’s that Tokiko, the one who used to
come talk with you in your room all the time. She hasn’t been around at all
lately, has she?”
