your house, you know—secretly.”
“What?”
“I mean—1 think it’s best if I get a look at him.” “No! You can’t do that!
Look—why don’t we just stop seeing one another” Kiriko’s voice shook,
and she spoke quickly. “Have I really made you so sick?”
“Sick? . . .”
“Yes. I knew that I’d been hurt, but I really didn’t think that you had—at
least not so badly. I’m only telling you this because you raised the subject,
but my relationship with my husband . . .” She hesitated. “Your relationship
is what?”
“It’s not like it used to be. As you said before, my mind and the way I
live. . . . My husband doesn’t seem to have noticed at all, but I’ve changed.
We women are no good.”
“What do you mean no good? What do you mean you’ve changed?”
Kiriko couldn’t answer his questions. Junji continued to kiss her body
everywhere, in various ways, but Kiriko was still holding back. Her
restraint filled Junji with a frantic emptiness.
And once this emptiness set in, he had even less of a choice—he had to
telephone Kiriko.
She would be coming by the next train on the Yokosuka line. Junji kept
imagining her, drawing her inside his head—he kept thinking through the
sequence of kisses he would give her, imagining the methods he would use
—and he was startled to find that he seemed to have more fun doing this
than he did when he was actually with her. He began to wonder if he might
not really be sick, just as Kiriko had said. He began to be suspicious of
himself.
That night too, Junji began with her ears. He had yet to find anything
wrong with her body in places other than her ears. He was still moving
