She nodded. I don’t know.
“But it’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “I wasn’t sleeping around. I can only have a sexual relationship with one man at a time. That’s why I stopped sleeping with you. Right?”
I nodded.
“I felt sorry for you, though.”
I nodded again.
“But I was careful to use protection with him. I didn’t want a child. You know how I felt. I was ultra-cautious about those things. And yet I got pregnant, just like that.”
“There can always be slipups, no matter how careful we try to be.”
“Women know when something like that happens,” Yuzu said, shaking her head. “We have a sixth sense that tells us. I don’t think men have it.”
Of course, I didn’t.
“At any rate, you’re planning to have the baby,” I said.
Yuzu nodded.
“But you never wanted one. At least as long as we were together.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I didn’t want one with you. I didn’t want one with anybody.”
“And yet now you’re going to go ahead and bring a child into the world without knowing who the father is. Why didn’t you have an abortion? You could have done so earlier.”
“I thought about it, of course. And part of me wanted one.”
“But you didn’t.”
“This is how I think these days,” Yuzu said. “This is my life, sure, but in the end almost all that happens in it may be decided arbitrarily, quite apart from me. In other words, although I may presume I have free will, in fact I may not be making any of the major decisions that affect me. I’ve come to think my pregnancy is an example of that.”
I listened to her without saying anything.
“I know this sounds fatalistic, but it’s what I have truly come to feel. Honestly and deeply. So then I thought, if that’s how things work, why not have the child and raise it on my own. See it through, and find out what happens. That’s come to seem terribly important.”
“There’s just one thing I need to ask,” I said, diving in.
“What is it?”
“It’s a simple question, one that requires a mere yes or no. I won’t say anything more.”
“No problem. Ask away.”
“Can I return to you—would you take me back?”
Her brow furrowed slightly. She looked me hard in the face for a moment. “Do you mean you wish to live once more as husband and wife?”
“If that’s possible.”
“I’d like that,” she said quietly. There was no hesitation in her voice. “You are still my husband, and your room is as you left it. You can come back anytime you wish.”
“Are you still seeing the other man?” I inquired.
Yuzu quietly shook her head. “No, that’s over.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to allow him parental rights—that’s the main reason.”
I said nothing.
“It seems to have come as a great shock to him. Only natural, I guess,” she said. She rubbed her cheeks with her hands.
“But you would allow me?”
She rested her hands on the table and once again looked at me closely.
“You’ve changed a little, haven’t you? Your features, or maybe your expression?”
“I don’t know how I look, but I have learned a few things, I think.”
“I may have learned a few things myself.”
I picked up my cup and drained what was left of my coffee.
“Masahiko’s father just passed away,” I said, “so he’s got a lot to deal with right now. When things have settled down for him, I’ll pack my bags and return to our apartment in Hiroo, probably sometime early in the New Year. Assuming that’s all right with you, of course.”
She studied my face. As if gazing at a landscape she had missed for a very long time. Finally, she reached across the table and gently covered my hand with hers.
“I’d like to give it another try,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been thinking that for a while.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I said.
“I don’t know if it will work out or not.”
“I don’t know either. But it’s worth a shot.”
“I’m about to have a baby without knowing who the father is. Is that going to be all right with you?”
“I don’t have a problem with that,” I said. “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but there’s a possibility that I could be the baby’s father—potentially. That’s my feeling, anyway. I could have somehow gotten you pregnant, mentally, from a distance. As a concept, using a special route.”
“As a concept?”
“That’s one hypothesis.”
Yuzu considered that for a minute. “If that’s true,” she said, “then that’s one heck of a hypothesis.”
“Perhaps nothing can be certain in this world,” I said. “But at least we can believe in something.”
She smiled. That was the end of our conversation that day. She took the subway home, while I climbed into my dusty old Toyota Corolla station wagon and drove back to my home on the mountain.
64
AS A FORM OF GRACE
It was several years after I moved back in with my wife that, on March 11, a huge earthquake devastated northeastern Japan. I sat in front of the television as, one after another, coastal villages and towns from Iwate all the way down to Miyagi were laid to waste before my eyes. That was the very same region I had driven through in my old Peugeot 205. I had encountered the man with the white Subaru Forester in one of those towns. Yet now all I could see were the remains of communities leveled by a tsunami that had fallen on them like some giant beast, leaving nothing in its wake but drowned wreckage. Try as I might, I could find no visible connection to that town. Since I couldn’t remember the name of the place, I had no way of learning how much damage it had suffered, or how it had been changed.
I couldn’t bring myself to do anything—I just sat staring at the TV screen for days on end in stunned silence. I was transfixed. I prayed to find something, anything, connected to my memories. If I failed, I feared, something stored within me, something very important, would be lost for good, carried off to some distant, unknown place. I wanted to hop in my car and drive to the stricken region. See for myself what had survived the disaster. That was out of the question, of course. The main roads had been torn to pieces, which meant that towns and villages were cut off from the world. Electricity, gas, water—all lifelines had been severed. Farther south, on the coast of Fukushima (where I had abandoned my Peugeot when it gave up the ghost), several nuclear reactors were in meltdown. It was impossible to venture into that part of the country.
I had not been a happy man when I had traveled there. It had been a lonely, painful, thoroughly wretched period in my life. I think I was lost in a number of ways. Nevertheless, the trip had allowed me to spend time among unfamiliar people, and witness their lives. I had not imagined then how valuable that would turn out to be. In the process—usually unconsciously—I had discarded some things and picked up others. By the time I passed through all those places I had become a somewhat different person.
I thought of The Man with the White Subaru Forester hidden in the attic of the Odawara house. Had that man—whether he belonged to the real world or not—still been living in the same town when disaster struck? What about the skinny young woman with whom I had spent that strange night. Had they and the other inhabitants been able to escape the earthquake and tsunami? Were they still alive? What was the fate of the love hotel and the roadside restaurant?
* * *
—