the time. Do you think you can do that?”
“I think so,” Sumire replied. Her voice sounded like it was somebody else’s coming from another room. No matter what I’m asked to do, no matter what I’m ordered to do, all I can do is say yes, she realized. Miu gazed steadily at Sumire, still holding her hand. Sumire could make out clearly her own figure reflected deep inside Miu’s dark eyes. It looked to her like her own soul being sucked into the other side of a mirror. Sumire loved that vision, and at the same time it frightened her.
Miu smiled, charming lines appearing at the corners of her eyes. “Let’s go to my place. There’s something I want to show you.”
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4
The summer holiday of my first year in college I took a random trip by myself around the Hokuriku region, came across a woman eight years older than me who was also travelling alone, and we spent one night together. It struck me, at the time, as something straight out of the opening of Soseki’s novel
The woman worked in the foreign exchange section of a bank in Tokyo. Whenever she had some time off, she’d grab a few books and set out on her own. “Much less tiring to travel alone,” she explained. She had a certain charm, which made it hard to work out why she’d have any interest in someone like me—a quiet, skinny 18-year-old college kid. Still, sitting across from me in the train, she seemed to enjoy our harmless banter. She laughed out loud a lot. And—unusually—I chattered away. We happened to get off at the same station at Kanazawa.
“Do you have a place to stay?” she asked.
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“No,” I replied. I’d never made a hotel reservation in my life.
“I have a hotel room,” she told me. “You can stay if you like. Don’t worry about it,” she went on, “it costs the same whether there’s one or two people staying.”
I was nervous the first time we made love, which made things awkward. I apologized to her.
“Aren’t we polite!” she said. “No need to apologize for every little thing.”
After her shower she threw on a dressing gown, grabbed two cold beers from the fridge, and handed one to me.
“Are you a good driver?” she asked.
“I just got my licence, so I wouldn’t say so. Just average.”
She smiled. “Same with me. I think I’m pretty good, but my friends don’t agree. Which makes me average, too, I suppose. You must know a few people who think they’re great drivers, right?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“And there must be some who aren’t very good.”
I nodded. She took a quiet sip of beer and gave it some thought.
“To a certain extent those kinds of things are inborn. Talent, you could call it. Some people are nimble; others are all thumbs
… Some people are quite attentive, and others aren’t. Right?”
Again I nodded.
“Okay, consider this. Say you’re going to go on a long journey with someone by car. And the two of you will take turns driving. Which type of person would you choose? One who’s a good driver, but inattentive, or an attentive person who’s not such a good driver?”
“Probably the second one,” I said.
“Me, too,” she replied. “What we have here is very similar.
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Good or bad, nimble or clumsy—those aren’t important. What’s important is being attentive. Staying calm, being alert to things around you.”
“Alert?” I asked.
She just smiled and didn’t say anything.
A while later we made love a second time, and this time it was a smooth, congenial ride.
The next morning after we ate breakfast together, we went our separate ways. She continued her trip, and I continued mine. As she left she told me she was getting married in two months to a man from work. “He’s a very nice guy,” she said cheerily. “We’ve been going out for five years, and we’re finally going to make it official. Which means I probably won’t be making any trips by myself any more. This is it.”
I was still young, certain that this kind of thrilling event happened all the time. Later in life I realized how wrong I was.
*
I told Sumire this story a long time ago. I can’t remember why it came up. It might have been when we were talking about sexual desire.
“So what’s the point of your story?” she asked me.
“The part about being alert,” I replied. “Not prejudging things, listening to what’s going on, keeping your ears, heart, and mind open.”
“Hmm,” Sumire replied. She seemed to be mulling over my paltry sexual affair, perhaps wondering whether she could incorporate it into one of her novels.
“Anyway, you certainly have a lot of experiences, don’t you?”
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“I wouldn’t say a
