They had met on the platform at Shinbashi station. Utako had already
reached the top of the stairs when she saw that a man who resembled Jiro
was getting on the train, so she hurried towards the door he was stepping
through, they saw one another, and Jiro jumped down from the train just as
Utako went to climb aboard—and there in front of the door of the train
their bodies slammed together, just as the door slid shut.
The day they met they had arranged to meet again today.
“I’ve gotten skinny. Look at me.” Utako laid a hand on the bone above
her chest. “Even so, I look better than I did before I went back to my
parents’ house.”
“Really?”
Jiro felt the old tenderness welling up within him now that they were in
the water—the tenderness men feel toward women who have born their
children—yet at the same time it almost seemed that the skin he saw was
the skin of a new woman, and he felt confused.
“I lost a lot of weight after we split up, too— when the child died. But it
wasn’t like this. After all, I was young then.”
Jiro realized that he didn’t remember Utako’s body very clearly, though
he had always thought he did.
“I was young, and the way things were at the time it felt like I was the
only person doing anything wrong, like I’d sinned. That’s why I gave up
the idea of living with you. I really think that’s what it was. The war split
up a lot of lovers, a lot of husbands and wives.”
Utako had been conscripted to work in a factory making weapons. The
feeling that everyone was criticizing her, the humiliation she had felt going
into work pregnant day after day—it had all been so horrible she could
hardly believe it when she remembered it now.
