Her talk of leaving again pained him despite his resolve to move on from her. “It’s not easy for me, either. Even now. Even after I’ve found someone else.”
“Do you love her? More than you loved me?”
“Don’t ask me that. There’s no point, is there?”
“There could be . . .”
They were silent for a long time. Finally Sedge realized he had nothing more to say. He pointed to the folder he’d given her. “There’s an address inside for you to send those papers to,” he said, overcome by an exhaustion he saw in Nozomi, too. “Don’t forget to take them with you and hanko them all. You can email me when you’re ready to return the rest of my money. I’ll tell you where and how to send it. It’s better if it’s not in person again.”
He lifted his backpack and stumbled through the other tables to the counter. As he pulled out his wallet to hand the waitress what they owed, he noticed that his hands had stopped shaking.
On his way to the exit, Nozomi hurried to him and held him by the arm.
“The registration desk is over there. Let me get us a room, then come upstairs with me. You can leave whenever you like. Just give me a chance to earn the smallest bit of your forgiveness. Maybe it will show us a way forward.”
She pulled him back from the door. He could see her trying to smile at him. She pulled his arm again and they began walking toward the registration desk.
When the staff there greeted them, Sedge stopped and shook his arm free. He had remembered their conversation in Hegurajima when she said she wished he had suffered more.
“Not after what you did. I’m not the same person I used to be. But you, I’ll never have a way to know.”
He glanced back at her before he left the hotel. As she watched him, and he observed again that face he’d once loved with all he could give, he wondered with both fear and sadness if it was ever possible to know what another person was capable of—for the love of another, or for the love of oneself.
20
Before coming to Kanazawa to meet Nozomi, Sedge had arranged to spend the weekend at the home of his friend, Shinji, who would be out of town. He had given Sedge permission to invite Mariko. Riku, who hadn’t seen his grandparents for several months, would visit them in Echizen at the same time. Mariko agreed that getting away for a couple of days would be healthy for all three of them. She planned to come to Kanazawa the day after Sedge met Nozomi.
Shinji lived beside the Asano River, between the Tenjin and Asanogawa bridges. The front of his tenth-floor apartment peered over a row of four-hundred-year-old black pine trees toward Mt. Utatsu, while from the bedroom in back one could see parts of Kanazawa Castle and Kenrokuen. The neighborhood was more residential and traditional than where Sedge and Nozomi had lived; from what he recalled, in the Edo period, before the West forced Japan to open, it had been home to Kanazawa’s “undesirables”: prostitutes, leather workers, handlers of the dead. Now, however, the area was desirable. He looked forward to staying here for two days and nights, away from the general bustle of Korinbō and far from where he had made most of his memories of Kanazawa.
Meeting with Nozomi had deeply unsettled him. He now wished they had communicated by writing rather than in person. They could have told each other the same things, and probably much more, and he could have received the money she’d returned through Takahashi. Yet he was grateful for having seen her again.
That afternoon, wishing Mariko were already with him, he strolled along the Asano River, finding it visited by fish and birds. He sat on the riverbank near Tokiwa Bridge, watching loaches dart through the shallow water; and the wagtails, thrushes, swallows, and kingfishers that flew down to its stony edges; and the osprey, kites, and herons that glided above the low mountains or circled overhead. Mariko would have been thrilled to see them all.
And what would Riku think of this place? Sedge imagined sitting here with him, just the two of them together birdwatching. As he imagined this, Nozomi’s accusation that he wasn’t sympathetic to other people’s suffering came to rest before this image of Riku. There was no denying that the boy had suffered more than most, but Sedge’s resistance to him wouldn’t accommodate any sympathy yet.
Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine the boy continuing to live with them. He had made sexual overtures toward Mariko and attacked Sedge after sleeping with her. For Sedge, this wasn’t a battle over who would be dominant between them. He was convinced Riku was trying to claim more than he had a natural right to. He couldn’t trust the boy around her now and wanted to find a way to put distance between them. How was he to be sympathetic to him now?
He still carried the backpack that he’d brought to the hotel, along with the envelopes inside. Their weight in a bottom pocket reassured him, bumping against his back as he walked. He was glad for the money and would be gladder for the rest; having it would rid him of an enormous obstruction in his life. And he would no longer have to rely on Mariko for a place to live, though he hoped he wouldn’t need to move out right away. This last thought made him question how selfish he’d been with her. But they weren’t becoming such significant parts of each other’s lives, and he hadn’t chosen to live with her, merely out of convenience. She had opened her life to him. She had taken more risks than he, and if one day their relationship ended, he knew the consequences for her would be worse.
Mariko arrived late the next morning. He’d been eager to see her since yesterday, and he hardly let her out of his sight after ushering her inside the apartment. She had brought groceries to cook for them, but Sedge wanted her to relax, to treat her time in Kanazawa as a vacation. He hadn’t told her about the money Nozomi returned, but he planned to spend more than usual of what he had on her. There was no reason for them to cook, he assured her.
“I was in too much of a hurry to eat breakfast,” she said. “Will we have lunch soon?”
“I made a reservation at Kenrokuen. I thought it would be nice to go back.”
Kenrokuen was only a fifteen-minute walk away, and after entering through Katsurazaka Gate they strolled along a wooded pathway, looping back to Hisagoike pond. Peeling away from the crowds, they crossed another path to Miyoshi-an, the restaurant where they would eat. It was perched on the pond’s northern edge, framed by a wooden trellis whose intertwined vines shaded the tables at the restaurant’s long window.
A waitress led them to a table near the back. After ordering, they gazed outside.
“Look at all the carp swimming past,” Mariko said, her face close to the glass.
They hadn’t talked about anything significant since she’d arrived, and he saw they were avoiding topics that if left unbroached would make their time together feel safer, less threatened by the outside world. Even now, they hadn’t spoken about Nozomi, nor about a job interview in Fukui next week that he wanted to cancel, nor about Riku’s departure. Although he wanted to unencumber Mariko of the deeper issues they faced, it might clear the air if they stopped being so careful with each other.
“Aren’t you wondering how my meeting with Nozomi went?” he said.
She tensed at his question. “Of course. But I didn’t want to bring it up in case it had upset you.”
“But it concerns you, doesn’t it?”
Smiling uncertainly, she looked again out the window, this time to where a small waterfall trickled down a narrow slope into the pond.
“Did your husband come back?” He was sure she would have told him if he did, but he had to ask, to introduce him into this conversation they needed to have.
“No. In the past, after an affair ended, he didn’t return right away, either. I only know he and your wife aren’t together anymore. Whatever else you tell me will be the first I’ve heard about it.”
“Then I guess we’re equally in the dark. I know no more than you do.”
He wondered if he had been wrong to ask Mariko what he did. But surely it wasn’t unexpected.
“I gave my wife the divorce papers to sign,” he said. “According to my lawyer, it shouldn’t take long to approve them. And she gave back some of the money she took. Hopefully she’ll return the rest later, though I’m not holding my breath.”
Despite saying before that she was hungry, Mariko took no notice of the food when it came. She continued to gaze out the window. “The money . . . was it enough?” she said.
He snapped apart the disposable chopsticks from his tray. She flinched at the sound. “It will be for some things,” he said. “And it’s more than I’ve had since she left.”
“How much was it?”
