now, when I’m having sex, and I start laughing.”
Komura gave a little laugh, too.
Shimao clapped her hands. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. “You can laugh after all!”
“Of course I can laugh,” Komura said, but come to think of it, this was the first time he had laughed in quite a while. When was the last time?
“Do you mind if I take a bath, too?” Shimao asked.
“Fine,” he said.
While she was bathing, Komura watched a variety show emceed by some comedian with a loud voice. He didn’t find it the least bit funny, but he couldn’t tell whether that was the show’s fault or his own. He drank a beer and opened a pack of nuts from the minibar. Shimao stayed in the bath for a very long time. Finally, she came out wearing nothing but a towel and sat on the edge of the bed. Dropping the towel, she slid in between the sheets like a cat and lay there looking straight at Komura.
“When was the last time you did it with your wife?” she asked.
“At the end of December, I think.”
“And nothing since?”
“Nothing.”
“Not with anybody?”
Komura closed his eyes and shook his head.
“You know what I think,” Shimao said. “You need to lighten up and learn to enjoy life a little more. I mean, think about it: tomorrow there could be an earthquake; you could be kidnapped by aliens; you could be eaten by a bear. Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” Komura echoed.
“Ding-a-ling,” Shimao said.
After several failed attempts to have sex with Shimao, Komura gave up. This had never happened to him before.
“You must have been thinking about your wife,” Shimao said.
“Yup,” Komura said, but in fact what he had been thinking about was the earthquake. Images of it had come to him one after another, as if in a slide show, flashing on the screen and fading away. Highways, flames, smoke, piles of rubble, cracks in streets. He couldn’t break the chain of silent images.
Shimao pressed her ear against his naked chest.
“These things happen,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“You shouldn’t let it bother you.”
“I’ll try not to,” Komura said.
“Men always let it bother them, though.”
Komura said nothing.
Shimao played with his nipple.
“You said your wife left a note, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“What did it say?”
“That living with me was like living with a chunk of air.”
“A chunk of air?” Shimao tilted her head back to look up at Komura. “What does that mean?”
“That there’s nothing inside me, I guess.”
“Is it true?”
“Could be,” Komura said. “I’m not sure, though. I may have nothing inside me, but what would something be?”
“Yeah, really, come to think of it. What would something be? My mother was crazy about salmon skin. She always used to wish there were a kind of salmon made of nothing but skin. So there may be some cases when it’s better to have nothing inside. Don’t you think?”
Komura tried to imagine what a salmon made of nothing but skin would be like. But even supposing there were such a thing, wouldn’t the skin itself be the something inside? Komura took a deep breath, raising and then lowering Shimao’s head on his chest.
“I’ll tell you this, though,” Shimao said, “I don’t know whether you’ve got nothing or something inside you, but I think you’re terrific. I’ll bet the world is full of women who would understand you and fall in love with you.”
“It said that, too.”
“What? Your wife’s note?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No kidding,” Shimao said, lowering her head to Komura’s chest again. He felt her earring against his skin like a secret object.
“Come to think of it,” Komura said, “what’s the something inside that box I brought up here?”
“Is it bothering you?”
“It wasn’t bothering me before. But now, I don’t know, it’s starting to.”
“Since when?”
“Just now.”
“All of a sudden?”
“Yeah, once I started thinking about it, all of a sudden.”
“I wonder why it’s started to bother you now, all of a sudden?”
Komura glared at the ceiling for a minute to think. “I wonder.”
They listened to the moaning of the wind. The wind: it came from someplace unknown to Komura, and it blew past to someplace unknown to him.
“I’ll tell you why,” Shimao said in a low voice. “It’s because that box contains the something that was inside you. You didn’t know that when you carried it here and gave it to Keiko with your own hands. Now, you’ll never get it back.”
Komura lifted himself from the mattress and looked down at the woman. Tiny nose, moles on the earlobe. In the room’s deep