“You told me about the children earlier.” Jiro had been looking at the
snow on Mount Fuji, but now he looked back at Utako’s face. “And since
you’ve mentioned children—your children now, it looks like they’ll grow
up even if you’re not there with them, doesn’t it? But when you and I split
up— because we split up—we killed that child.” He spat these words out
and then wished he hadn’t said them.
Utako’s lower eyelids and cheeks quivered. Even the tips of her fingers
trembled.
“At that time—1 didn’t know anything about children then either.”
Jiro saw that Utako’s eyes had filled with tears.
“Yes, I guess that’s true. More than anything else, the war was to blame.
I really believe that,” he said.
Utako shook her head.
“Getting pregnant made me get all confused. I got all confused—it got so
I didn’t understand anything.”
Her eyes filled with tears again.
But Utako couldn’t remember the child she had had with Jiro, the dead
child. She could only remember the two children she had left at Someya’s
house.
“I agree that you were confused, that’s true. Somehow—it was strange,
but somehow your getting pregnant ended up splitting us apart,” Jiro said.
Utako tried to forget her children with Someya for a few minutes, in
order to remember her child with Jiro. But the baby had been taken from
her soon after it was born, and she hadn’t been able to ask where it had
gone.
It was the year the war would end. Utako’s parents guessed somehow
that she was pregnant, then found out about her relationship with Jiro.
