At some point the young woman’s face had gone pale.
‘Ah, it must be the perfume making you sick. Should we move to another car?’
The young man put his arm around the young woman but then he turned back to Tokié.
‘Excuse us – she gets motion sickness. And those women’s perfume was awfully strong. We’re going to move to the next car.’
The housewives’ perfume still wafted, if only faintly, around the seats they had vacated but it did seem to have made the young woman ill.
‘No need to apologize, thank you again for your support despite your queasiness.’
The young woman raised her pale face. ‘No. To put it bluntly, I found those people terribly rude. But I was the meanie. What was I thinking, telling them they didn’t know how to apply perfume? I think I wanted to humiliate them.’
‘You’ve got guts,’ Tokié said. She decided against telling the young woman that she reminded Tokié of herself at that age.
‘Bye then.’
The young man gave a slight bow and kept his arm around the young woman as they walked towards the rear of the carriage.
Takarazuka-Minamiguchi Station
Masashi said goodbye to the rather unusual granny and her granddaughter and moved towards the nearby connecting door that led to the rear car of the train.
‘Are you all right, Yuki? Do you want to get off at Takarazuka and rest a bit?’
She shook her head as he helped her along.
‘No, now that the stink of perfume is gone, I’m fine.’
‘Do you want to sit?’
There were seats available here and there, although not two vacant seats next to each other.
‘I’m fine, it’s just one more station. I can stand with you.’
They had an unspoken rule for when the train passed over the iron bridge that spans the Mukogawa River – it didn’t matter whether they stood by a door or not, but they always faced the side of the train that looked out over the river.
The vast sandbank that was visible from there had gone back to being just a sandbank.
The first time they had ever talked to each other, there had been a giant kanji character assembled in stonework on that sandbank.
At the time, Masashi didn’t expect anything to come of their conversation on the train about the kanji character Yuki had spotted on the sandbank – the one that made her thirsty for a draught beer in a glass mug – and that most people paid no attention to. Masashi had seen Yuki, whose name he didn’t yet know, as a rival and assumed that she hadn’t noticed him. She was constantly snatching interesting books from under his nose at the library. Much to his chagrin, because she was definitely his type.
That day, as she was getting off the train at Sakasegawa Station she had said to him:
So it turned out that he wasn’t the only one to have noticed. She had locked onto him as well. And from the moment he became aware of this, he was a goner.
He leapt off the train to rush after her and to invite her, breathlessly, to go for a drink now rather than later. Luckily she was free and happily took him up on the offer. They had also exchanged phone numbers – this all progressed so easily that it made him doubt his own luck.
The start of their relationship was perhaps even more mannerly than that of a couple of high-school kids. On Saturdays when they could both go to the library, they would meet up at Sakasegawa Station. One way they differed from high-school students, though, is that sometimes on their way back they would have a meal together that included alcohol.
Whenever they went to the library, the two of them always gazed down at the sandbank from the train.
生
It appeared that someone was maintaining the kanji character: in summer, the grasses that would have overgrown it on the sandbank were weeded; sometimes if the stones had eroded and its outline had started to blur, it would be reassembled and fixed back up. It remained there, inconspicuously, for quite a long time.
But, after a typhoon and continuous rainy spells, the torrents caused the river to rise and cover the kanji character, so that now it again looked like any nondescript sandbank.
It might have been around the time of this exchange that they had started spending time at one another’s apartments.
Library dates, sometimes followed by a meal.