bookshelf and brought it back into the sitting room. He had the three
visitors search for him, but neither he nor any of them was able to find a
town by the name of Yumiura anywhere in Kyushu.
“It’s very strange,” Kozumi said, looking up. Then he closed his eyes
and thought. “I don’t remember ever having gone to Kyushu before the
war. No, I’m sure I didn’t go. That’s right—I was sent on an airplane to a
base the Special Attack Forces had in Shikaya during the battle in Okinawa
—I went as a reporter for the navy—that was the first time I went to
Kyushu. The next time was when I went to see Nagasaki just after the atom
bomb was dropped. That was when I heard the stories about Mr. Kida and
Mr. Akiyama—about their having come there thirty years earlier, from
people in Nagasaki.”
The three guests put forward a number of opinions about the woman’s
fantasies or delusions, laughing all the while. The conclusion was, of
course, that the woman was crazy. But Kozumi couldn’t help thinking that
he was crazy, too. He had sat listening to the woman’s story, half believing
and half doubting that what she said was true, searching his memory. It
happened that in this case there wasn’t even a town called Yumiura, but
who could say how much of Kozumi’s past others remembered, though
Kozumi had forgotten it himself——though it no longer existed within
him. The woman who had come that day would almost certainly go on
believing even after Kozumi died that he had proposed to her in Yumiura.
Either way it was the same.
