Tokiko was a young woman, still unmarried, who worked at the same
company as Hidaka and Toshiko. Toshiko suspected that she was the
woman her husband was seeing, and that their affair was the reason Tokiko
no longer came to visit her in the room she and he rented.
Toshiko had been crying and complaining, whispering tearfully to her
husband when Shizu spoke that night. Hidaka seemed disturbed by Shizu’s
delusional nighttime mutterings—he used both his hands to push Toshiko’s
head from his chest. Toshiko lay still for some time.
“That’s a frightening voice, isn’t it?” said Hidaka.
“You can do whatever you like when I’m like Shizu—when I’ve got a
child in fifth grade. I swear I won’t care in the slightest. But now—now!—
it’s unbelievable! We haven’t even been married a year, and already. . . .
You realize, of course, that Miss Tokiko is having other affairs—she has to
be, with Shizu saying things like that.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re a suspicious devil just like Mrs. Numao. Just
remember that voice of hers.”
After that night Shizu never said anything about Tokiko again. Tokiko
sometimes dropped by to see Toshiko, and on those occasions she would
talk pleasantly with Numao as well. Surely Shizu didn’t suspect even then
—in broad daylight—that Tokiko and her husband were up to something?
“Better watch it—she’s in a dangerous mood,” Hidaka warned Toshiko
after the incident with the word “raindrops” in the game of twenty
questions. The four children were still playing the same game. Fumio—the
boy who had guessed the word raindrops—had to be given assistance when
it was his turn to be the announcer, since he was only in second grade.
The siren of an ambulance approached through the darkened streets. It
felt as though something awful was about to happen.
