suffered pangs of guilt.
Yet for all that, Kiriko’s earlobe had betrayed his expectations. It felt thin
and flimsy in his fingers. It lacked even the moisture and the silkiness of
most earlobes—it seemed crusty and dry. Junji was startled. He was so
confused it never even occurred to him that he might never feel the
excitement he had felt touching that prostitute’s earlobe again—that
touching even the loveliest earlobes might not revive that emotion.
Junji’s habit of kissing the various parts of Kiriko’s body started to form
the moment he took her ear in his mouth.
Until then things had been simple. He was still a beginner in the affairs
of love, and he had been completely overwhelmed by the surprise he felt on
discovering that he could satisfy the middle-aged Kiriko so completely. He
came to understand his own masculine charm for the first time through the
pleasure Kiriko took in him, and he drifted drunkenly in it.
Junji had believed that Kiriko’s body was entirely perfect, so he had to
distract himself instantly from what he felt in his fingers—the
impoverished flimsiness of her earlobes. He was also conscious of the fact
that the ecstatic joy Kiriko had experienced when she was with him at first
was growing less ecstatic of late. It was as though the attempt to rekindle
her passion had given him an excuse to touch her ear.
Then, during only the third or fourth of their rendezvous, Kiriko said
something unexpected.
“Sometimes I used to wonder if I could go to bed with a man without
having to worry about any of those difficult ties like marriage or love, you
know? I wanted to try sometime—just once. I used to daydream about it.”
It sounded to Junji as though that daydream had been realized through
him—no other interpretation seemed possible. He felt as though he had
been pushed off a cliff.
