someone missing or wanted. Kozumi felt embarrassed and also slightly
worried at his own lack of memory.
The woman wore a black haori with her family crest embroidered on it in
places, and with this an unostentatious kimono and obi. Her clothes were
all Well-worn, but not enough to suggest that her family had fallen on hard
times. Her body was small, as was her face. She wore no rings on her short
fingers.
“Thirty years ago you came to the town of Yumiura—or perhaps you’ve
forgotten? You were kind enough to come by my room. It was the day of
the Harbor Festival, toward evening. . . .”
“Hmm . . .”
Hearing that he had gone to the young woman’s room—there was no
doubt that she had been beautiful—Kozumi tried once more to remember
her. Thirty years ago Kozumi had been twenty-four or twenty-fi.ve, and not
yet married.
“You were with Kida Hiroshi and Akiyama Hisaro. The three of you had
stopped at Nagasaki— you were traveling in Kyushu. We invited you to
attend a celebration that was being held in honor of the founding of a small
newspaper in Yumiura.”
Kida Hiroshi and Akiyama Hisaro were both dead, but in life they had
been novelists some ten years Kozumi’s senior—writers who had
befriended and encouraged him from the time he was twenty-two or
twenty-three. Thirty years ago they had been novelists of the first rank. It
was true that the two of them had spent some time in Nagasaki around then
—Kozumi remembered their diaries of those travels and anecdotes they had
told about them, diaries and anecdotes that were certainly known to the
literary public.
Kozumi wasn’t sure that he had been invited to go along on that trip to
Nagasaki—he had just been starting out in the world—but as he searched
