Looking up, Sedge saw two crows chase a Japanese sparrowhawk across the sky. Trying to process what Mariko was telling him, he watched them disappear beyond a wall of faraway trees.
“Immediately after Kōichi left, a few men dropped by out of the blue. The last one was an older man from Komatsu City, a ceramicist like my husband. It was during the last big snowfall we had. Riku and I were struggling to shovel it all, and though we’d cleared some off the roof, we couldn’t reach every part of it. Kōichi’s friend realized this, and he pointed out a section, warning that it was on the verge of collapsing. I discouraged him from climbing to the roof, but when he took this as flirtation I got angry and let him go. He climbed our ladder and hadn’t walked ten steps along the roof before he slipped and slid right off it. He fell into my flowerbed; had there not been so much snow he would have broken his back, or maybe even died. I brought him inside and got him feeling well enough to go home. He came over again a week later, this time by taxi. He was drunk, and another incident ensued. A relatively small one, thankfully. The man didn’t know what Riku, who had a strong dislike for him, was capable of. I think he hurt the man worse than when he fell off the roof. When he stumbled away from our house a final time, he didn’t act at all angry with Riku. Instead, he cursed Kōichi.”
Sedge picked up a stone at his feet and bounced it down the steps to the river. “What made you think that marrying him would make you happy?” he asked.
“He was good to me at first, and no one before him had shown an interest in marrying me. Also, for some reason I was ready to trust him more after seeing all the beautiful things he made and noticing how people fussed over him. I was wrong to think his Kutani-ware reflected his soul, but I was younger then, less experienced, and that’s the kind of ridiculous idea I had.”
No one Sedge had met in the village ever mentioned Mariko’s husband to him. An outsider could be forgiven for thinking he never existed, except for these stories, and for the shadows he cast over Mariko and Riku’s lives—and Sedge’s, too. Something like a drill began to bore inside him as he reflected on what Mariko just told him. And from the hole it left, which pained him, what emerged was a question he needed her to answer.
“You asked before if I expected my wife to return. You should know that I’m trying to find out how to divorce her. What about you? Will you divorce your husband? What will you do if he returns?”
She lay down on the bench and draped her legs over Sedge’s thighs. A terrible sadness floated in her eyes, and he saw that mentioning this possibility was the worst thing he could have done. But he soon realized what her expression meant. “I won’t know until it happens,” she said.
Her words shocked him. He hadn’t believed Takahashi’s warning just before he’d left the ryokan, but hearing this threw everything into doubt. His old fear of Mariko abandoning him, of all they’d committed to each other amounting to nothing, reared its head again.
“Why would you want him again?”
She considered his question for a long time. Finally she sat back up and said, “It’s not that I think he’ll change. Or that he’ll ever be good to me the way you’ve been. But I’m not getting younger. And I don’t know who would want to marry me after him. Play around with me, sure, I’d have plenty of takers if that was all I wanted. But it would be worse for me if I did that. I guess I’ll have to wait and see what happens.”
Hearing this made his apprehensions mount. “But you know I’m not playing around with you, don’t you?”
They both looked toward the bridge they’d crossed earlier. Riku had charged across it back to the main street and, after a moment looking around, spotted them sitting by the river. He turned back and headed toward them.
“That’s what I want to think,” Mariko said, standing up. “And maybe you want to think that, too. But neither of us can say how things will turn out. We both know it’s impossible to predict the future. Don’t we?”
Riku hurried over to their bench and pointed to where he’d run off to. “I found a clearing behind those houses. A bunch of birds were flitting around, so I dumped all my breadcrumbs on the ground. I bet a ton of birds are there now. Come on, I’ll show you.” He was already walking backward, waiting for them to follow him.
Sedge felt Mariko looking at him, waiting for an answer. Was it really impossible to predict the future when they both wanted to do the best they could for each other?
“Let’s go,” Riku said. He stepped forward again, taking Mariko’s arm and pulling her away. Sedge trailed behind, rewinding through the conversation he and Mariko had just had.
That night, lying in his futon, Sedge gazed at a four-paneled screen across his room. Flowing down each panel was Buddhist calligraphy so old even Mariko couldn’t read it; the screen had originally belonged to her grandparents. Electric light from the street penetrated the shōji windows to his left, illuminating an alcove at the end of the room where a scroll of a woman chasing fireflies hung. To his right were the sliding doors that separated him from Mariko.
In the dim room, listening to the old wooden house creak in the wind, he waited for her to message him on his phone. Finally, it buzzed; on its screen were the words: “Come to my room now.”
He made his way quietly to her room and slid into her futon.
Mariko pushed her head into his chest and took a quick breath. Slowly she got up and stood over him, letting him gaze at her nakedness in the moonlight before kneeling beside him and peeling off his t-shirt, which she pressed into her face and inhaled. She dropped it beside the futon and her hands moved to his boxers, pulling them down his legs. When they were both naked, she curled up next to him. She breathed in as he entered her, reaching behind to pull him more tightly into her body. She climbed on top of him and, after finding her desired rhythm, soon gasped that she wanted to come. When she said this the same feeling welled inside of him. Afterward she fell forward on top of him and they held each other for a long moment.
The wall they faced glimmered with moonlight.
“Let me see you in the light again,” he said.
She stepped back into it and turned to face him. Her breasts, the tuft of hair between her legs, the hourglass of her body, her eyes smiling down at him. Suddenly her smile vanished and she glanced out the window.
The walls lit up from a light outside. Mariko jumped back to the futon. At first Sedge thought Riku had directed a powerful flashlight at the window, only to remember the motion detector behind the house. He told Mariko this, but it didn’t calm her down.
“Either way, I’m sure he saw me.”
“Riku? He probably just needed to use the bathroom downstairs. With the motion detector where it is, this might happen every night—at least until the kura has its own bathroom.”
Mariko went to put her ear against her bedroom door. “He never came inside. He must have been at the kura entrance when I stood up.”
“Anything could have turned it on. It might have been an animal. You’ve told me before about the neighborhood cats that wander around at night, and even the times you’ve seen stoats, and tanuki, even boar and their young, tearing apart your garden.”
But she wasn’t listening. The light outside had shut off again, and he could barely make out her putting her nightclothes back on.
“He must have heard us. Or he knew all along we do this sometimes.”
Sedge guessed it was one-thirty a.m., possibly even two.
He had followed Mariko into her room earlier that night, before either of them had gone to bed. It was only to see a book she wanted him to read, but he remembered looking out her window and spotting Riku kneeling at the kura entrance, staring up at him. Sedge had flinched at the sight of him, and never mentioned it to Mariko.
Had he been there ever since? Had he instinctively known Sedge would return?
Sedge stayed beside her until she fell asleep. When he was sure he wouldn’t wake her, he slipped out from under her blanket. At her window, the moon illuminated the kura. There was no sign of anyone outside. The only thing Sedge noticed was that the sliding door of the entrance was ajar. Through that space it was completely dark.
Before he crept toward his room, he saw that the moon was far above the kura’s roof, still shining in Mariko’s window.
17
Yuki called to tell Sedge that among the ryokan’s mail was a letter addressed to him. That she sounded breathless and had skipped a customary phone greeting could have meant anything—all the more so since her tone sounded friendly. “If you’re still in town, can you come and pick it up? Or would you like us to forward it to wherever you are now?”
He was surprised she didn’t offer to send it to him through Mariko. “Is it about a job?”
“No,” she said. “It’s from Nozomi.”
