He scoffed at this. She had thrown away him and their marriage to try to absolve herself of a tragedy she wasn’t responsible for. She had set out with an impossible goal to attain. It still made no sense to him.
Her plan to suffer with Kōichi recalled sordid tales of lover’s suicides—a staple in old Japanese movies and novels, yet not unheard of today—and group suicide pacts and online suicide clubs headlining the news in more recent times. Of course, these phenomena didn’t only exist in Japan, but they seemed to find particularly fertile ground here. “Were you two planning to die together?”
She shook her head vehemently. “I never wanted to end my life and I’m sure Kōichi didn’t either. We never discussed it.”
This, at least, relieved Sedge.
In an almost defensive voice she said, “No, I only wanted to suffer. I wanted to see how far I could push myself, to learn what I was capable of bearing up against. I wanted to be deprived of everything I loved, everything that mattered to me, every comfort and joy—so I could get closer to what Kōichi and I thought Tetsuya had felt. Because those were the things I’d taken away from him.” She paused, looking up at the ceiling and closing her eyes. A moment later she looked back at him, her eyes shining with tears. “I could never have done that with you, Sedge. But with Kōichi, it was easy. The problem was I couldn’t rely on him. Too many times he . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head miserably. “Anyway, in the end, when I had nothing, and when I thought my life might be in jeopardy, my mother and Takahashi promised to help me. I became afraid, Sedge . . .”
He stifled the question he wanted to ask: Why didn’t you come to me? Instead he said, “What do you mean?”
“When I demanded that we move again, he turned violent. It wasn’t just his words this time.”
To hear her talk about how she had suffered, despite what she’d done to him, confused him. An unexpected tenderness washed over him, and the hurt in her eyes made him want to forgive her. It would be so much easier than continuing to hate her. She smiled as if embarrassed by what she’d told him.
Sedge’s hands had started shaking again and he dropped them to his lap. He glanced at the backpack beside his chair and at the folder he could see through the open zipper at the top.
“You can’t understand it, can you, Sedge?”
“No. I can’t.”
“You would if you had suffered more.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve suffered plenty since you left me. For a long time, pain was all I knew.”
She shook her head even before he’d finished speaking. “I don’t want you to think I’m diminishing your grief. But that’s not what I’m talking about. At bottom, you see, what you just described is selfish. You’ve never suffered because of the pain another person has gone through or what they’ve lost. You’ve never suffered from guilt. Not the way I have, anyway. We’ve talked about this before.”
“I know we have.”
“And you never sympathized with me. In all the years you knew me, and knew about Tetsuya, you never understood me from that perspective. The perspective of my suffering. So no, I can see you don’t understand me. You’re too wrapped up in what I did to you. Which is fair. Your suffering is entirely my fault. And I’m sorry for that.”
Again he found himself confused. “So the only way I could sympathize with you is if I did something that resulted in someone’s suicide?”
“Are you making a tasteless joke or are you really so unimaginative?”
Nozomi had always been more direct with Sedge than other Japanese people he knew. But today, in the context of their discussion, it made it more difficult to understand her.
“I’m having a hard time with this is all. Kōichi clearly brainwashed you, but that couldn’t be all there was to it because he left his whole life behind, too. And he had a reasonably good life, from what I’ve pieced together.”
She shook her head slowly but didn’t contradict this.
“Maybe you’re right and it’s impossible for me to understand your reasons,” he said. “But why did you do it the way you did?”
“I’m not really sure. I know I didn’t want to draw it out. I thought it would be better if we just woke up one day and saw that the other was no longer there.”
“Why did you need to run away with him?”
“I told you. Because I thought he could help me. He was the connection to Tetsuya I needed. It couldn’t have been you or anyone else.”
Hearing this sickened him.
She continued. “He made me believe that his helping me, and my trusting him to, was the foundation we needed to start a new life. But I was foolish to believe him. Even what I set out to do, though at the time I embraced it with almost religious fervor, I now see was utterly wasteful. Utterly mistaken. For a time I must have lost my mind.”
She reached again for both his hands where they now rested on the table and dropped her head in a half-bow, almost violently. He detected something broken in the gesture. Or was it something inside her? He hoped that there was, for what was broken could perhaps finally heal.
The people on either side of them had stopped talking. From the corner of his eye he saw them watching Nozomi.
“You never answered my question,” Sedge said when she looked out the window again. “Where exactly did you run off to?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? I’m not going back.”
“Tell me anyway. I’m trying to piece all of this together.”
“In the end we went to Fukushima.”
“Fukushima? Why?”
“After the nuclear meltdown, the population in many places bottomed out. We thought it would be easy to start over there, without anyone looking at us strangely or getting into our business. If that didn’t work out, we talked about Okinawa, or even somewhere overseas where it was easy to get a visa and stay for as long as we wanted. But in Fukushima it fell apart quickly and—”
“I don’t want to hear the rest. I just wanted to know where you thought would be better than here.”
“I wasn’t looking for better. You were that all along.”
Sedge stared at her, not knowing what to say.
“Takahashi said you contacted the police about the money,” she said.
“It was preliminary paperwork; I’ve waited all this time to avoid submitting it. I’m willing to let it go as soon as you return what you took.”
