“That’s fine. I’ve been ready to teach since I came here.”
“Good. How are you doing, by the way? Is this arrangement working out so far?”
“I’m hanging in there. And yes, the arrangement couldn’t be better. Though I’ve run into obstacles looking for work.” He paused, embarrassed to ask for more help. “I’ve been meaning to ask if any of your friends in town have mentioned wanting me to help in their shops, even part-time. It doesn’t have to be ceramics.”
“Yuki and I frequently ask around. But at the moment no one has any need. You’d hardly earn anything, either, which might become frustrating. But I’m sure your luck will change.” Takahashi knitted his brow as if preparing to say something difficult. “The other day when Yuki and I were talking about you, she asked if it had taken you seven weeks to recover from the worst of the hurt Nozomi caused. I told her I didn’t know and asked her why. She’s been studying Buddhism lately, and something she came across explained that this was how long the initial mourning period in Buddhism lasts. She also heard that modern psychology says one needs fifty days to accept the loss of a loved one. Of course, she knows you haven’t fully recovered. Sometimes people in your situation never do.”
Sedge was surprised by Takahashi and Yuki’s references to death. When he answered, he couldn’t keep his disapproval from entering his voice. “Seven weeks? As you said, it’s been nine months since she left.”
“I shouldn’t have told you what Yuki asked. It was a stupid question.”
“Anyway, I hope I’m over the worst of it. It took me well over fifty days to get there, though.”
“It was just so unlike her to run away. There must have been a strong trigger for her leaving how she did.”
His tone conveyed that he could hardly believe Sedge didn’t know the reason himself, that he must be hiding something from everyone. Sedge said nothing.
“She became someone else,” Takahashi went on. “Like a member of a cult.”
“Cults normally have more than two members. I already looked into that.”
“But how else could she have done this?” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “It’s late. Why don’t you come by in the morning and I’ll show you where you’ll teach?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“One last thing. Yuki said we should keep you here for as long as possible in case Nozomi comes back.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you agreed to move here, you said you might take her back if she could make you forgive her. If there were compelling reasons.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. You don’t remember?”
He supposed he might have said such a thing. But it was foolish to think there had a been a good reason for her to throw away their marriage and business and run away with Mariko’s husband. “I used to think all kinds of things about Nozomi. Now, I can’t imagine that scenario.”
“But it’s one reason Yuki and I stepped in to help you. Of course, we don’t want to raise false hopes.” When Sedge didn’t reply, Takahashi added: “Give it a little more time. The money she took can always be paid back.” He waved goodnight and walked away.
In the window overlooking the ryokan’s dark pond and garden, Takahashi’s reflection receded. And though he left Sedge alone in the tea lounge, their conversation about Nozomi didn’t disappear with him. Sedge could hardly believe he’d promised to take Nozomi back if she returned, or that Takahashi, at this point in her absence, would hold him to it. Before he’d moved to the ryokan it still seemed possible that she’d come back, but after leaving Kanazawa, maintaining that hope felt absurd.
One place he suspected she and Kōichi might have run away to was Hegurajima, an island off the coast of Wajima, nearly two hours north of Kanazawa. The Noto Peninsula’s remoteness had always appealed to her. Also, Kōichi could make a living in Wajima, even as a ceramicist in a town famous for its lacquerware.
Hegurajima was one of Sedge and Nozomi’s favorite places in Japan, full of rare birds stopping over on their migrations from China, Russia, and Southeast Asia. They had most recently visited last year, as the island’s spring migration was winding down. With summer bird species settling in, they had been excited to spot Oriental cuckoos, dollarbirds, streaked shearwaters, Kamchatka leaf warblers, and even a few red-necked phalaropes. Nozomi had told him afterward that the trip was one of the highlights of their travels together. A few weeks later she left him.
His phone still contained photos of the trip, not only of the island’s birdlife, but also of the ninety-minute ferry ride from Wajima Port, during which birds flocked overhead and dolphins raced alongside them. There were photos, too, of Shinto shrines overlooking the island; of female ama divers, old women mostly, hauling abalone to the surface of the sea; of other ama pushing their abalone carts into what passed for a town, while still others returned to the sea to toss back the part of their catches too young to have reproduced; of the small inn where they stayed in simple tatami-floored rooms, the sound of the ocean at night strange but exciting to them.
As he searched through the photos, a conversation they’d had beside a small shrine on the island’s Lake of the Living God came back to him. In addition to discussing the death of her first boyfriend, she had suggested for the first time—though it hardly seemed that she’d only just thought of it—that Sedge had never suffered.
She had complained of a headache that day, and her criticisms had been mounting since breakfast. Sedge found her attitude unwarranted and encouraged her to try harder to enjoy their trip.
“I am enjoying it,” she said. A wind blew her long hair over her face, obscuring her still-youthful features, and her shoulders appeared narrower where she held herself tightly like she was cold.
“In that case, what exactly is upsetting you?”
She looked at him irritably, hesitating before speaking. “You’re one of the most stable people I know,” she said, making him recall a story she’d told at breakfast about a college friend who’d lost his business and marriage after gambling away all their money. “Certain people or situations might annoy you, but you never lose your cool. You just sail along and the waters beneath you never swell. You’ve never even grieved before. You’ve never experienced real suffering.”
“Are you saying you want me to?”
“I’m sorry if it sounds bad. But I wish you had suffered in the past. Your life now . . . you’d feel deeper about everything.”
“I feel like I’ve been lucky not to have suffered greatly until now. And I don’t think that’s prevented me from experiencing my life deeply.”
She frowned and looked away. “Sometimes I think I’ve had a bad effect on you.”
Unsure if she was continuing their conversation or changing the subject, he waited for her to go on.
“I realized recently that I make people behave in ways they shouldn’t. Because of things I say or do. It’s always been like that.”
Was this another way of criticizing him? If so, he didn’t know what she might be referring to. “What people are you talking about?”
They were standing beside a short wall of piled rocks surrounding the shrine, facing the placid water that birds occasionally skimmed. He turned sideways to see her. “The most obvious example is Tetsuya. My first boyfriend. The one who killed himself.”
She almost never raised the subject, and he never did, either, in order to protect her from that time in her life. He knew little about the suicide, only that Tetsuya had taken his life after she’d cheated on him. “You can’t blame yourself for what he did.”
“But I hurt him. I saw other guys behind his back, some of whom were his friends, and rejected him in the worst possible way. He learned about it a week before he jumped off the rocks at Tōjinbō.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” Sedge said quickly. “It’s unfortunate, but people are unfaithful all the time. Hardly anyone takes their life as a result, no matter how much pain it causes them. And you were only fifteen. Do you really think what you did was unexpected? I’m sure that fifteen-year-olds do that kind of thing all the time.”
