They had a six-mat and a three-mat room. They carried the low dinner
table into the three-mat room, and as soon as the maid had finished
preparing their bedding they lay down. It was still early.
“Let’s talk until morning,” Utako whispered. “But I don’t want to talk
about some things, okay?”
Jiro put his arm around her and drew her closer to him.
“Are you able to sleep well these days?”
“Oh, I’m always so exhausted.... “
Jiro wasn’t sure whether she slept well because she was so exhausted, or
was so exhausted she couldn’t sleep.
“Hold me the way you used to,” Utako said, lying very still.
“Hmm—how was that?” Jiro felt slightly at a loss. Utako smiled. “I can’t
believe it—you’ve forgotten, haven’t you?”
“And you used to be so quiet.”
“Of course. I didn’t know anything then.”
Jiro closed his eyes, trying to call up images of Tokyo’s streets burning
in an air raid. He remembered the broken corpses. This was the method he
used to keep his desires in check.
He used the same method whenever his wife felt ill, and he’d found it
effective. Once, soon after the end of the war, Jiro had gone with a friend to
a disreputable place, and the woman there had started talking about how
she lost her family in an air raid. Jiro had paid no attention to her. The
woman saw that Jiro didn’t believe her, and began describing the corpses
over and over. Jiro didn’t doubt that she had seen the things she described,
but even so, the people hadn’t necessarily been related to her. Yet images of
corpses he had seen began to rise in his own head.
“What’s wrong?” the woman had said.
