“I really thought it was strange, to tell the truth. We didn’t run into one
another once the whole time I was with Someya, and then the moment he
and I split up we run into one another like this. I started wondering if this
sort of thing really happens in the world. I started thinking that it must have
been divinely arranged,” she said brightly. “I mean, you were living in
Tokyo too, right? And however huge Tokyo is, in seven or eight years
you’d think we’d meet somewhere.”
“But who knows? Maybe we passed one another on opposite sides of the
street and just didn’t notice, or something like that. Or maybe one person
did notice but pretended not to, just kept walking, or maybe turned off onto
a side street or something. . . .”
“What? What do you mean ‘one person’? You mean you? Me?”
“I’m not saying it was like that with us.”
“Well anyway—I almost never went out. Or rather, as a woman with
small children I couldn’t go out,” Utako corrected herself.
She remembered worrying when she married Someya that she would run
into Jiro somewhere, and wondering what she would do if she did.
Jiro remembered seeing women in the crowded trams and buses at the
end of the war, packed in among those fleeing the air raids, whose profiles
or whose figures seen from behind looked just like Utako’s, and feeling as
though a needle had been pushed through his heart. He couldn’t say how
many times this had happened, though he had known all along that Utako’s
family had been forced to evacuate and was living in the country.
“When you meet people, you always meet them in the most ordinary
places. I kept thinking that if I met you it would be in some really
wonderful location. But everyone who saw us was laughing, right?—
because we crashed into one another. I doubt it looked very much like a
meeting between people who hadn’t seen each other for seven or eight
years.” Utako laughed.
