The housekeeper and the professor - By Yoko Ogawa Page 0,39

The announcer was coming through fitfully. "And the first for the Tigers ... in nineteen years, since Enatsu in 1973."

We weren't sure whether we were happy or not about Yufune's achievement. The Tigers had won, and it was a great feat to pitch a no-hitter. But somehow the achievement had left us depressed. The excitement pouring from the radio had brought back the game on June 2, and along with it the realization that the Professor, who had sat so happily in seat 714, was far away from us now. And I couldn't help feeling that the foul ball off the bat of that nameless pinch hitter in the ninth, the ball that had nearly hit Root, had been an ill omen.

"Okay, time for bed. You have school in the morning," I said. Root grunted and turned off the radio.

The foul ball foretold the end of Nakagomi's no-hitter. But more bad luck had followed close behind with the Professor's fever and then my dismissal. Of course, there was no way to know if it was all due to the curse of the foul, but to me it certainly felt that way—at that moment, everything had turned for the worse.

One day, at the bus stop on my way to work, a strange woman tricked me out of some money. She wasn't a pickpocket or a purse-snatcher. I willingly gave her the money, so I couldn't go to the police; if she was practicing some new sort of swindle, then it certainly was an effective one. She marched straight up to me, held out her hand, and without any preamble said just one word: "Money." She was a large, pale woman in her late thirties, and other than the fact that she was wearing a spring coat in summer, there was nothing odd about her appearance. She was too neatly dressed to be a vagrant, nor did she seem to be deranged. Her manner was as calm as if she were simply asking directions—in fact she behaved as though I had asked for directions from her.

"Money," she said again.

I took out a bill and laid it on her palm. I have no idea why I did it. Why would someone as poor as I am give money to a stranger, short of being threatened at gunpoint? But I did, and having slipped the bill into her pocket, she walked off as grandly as she'd come, just as the bus pulled up to the stop.

All the way to the tax consultants' house, I tried to imagine what my money would mean to this woman. Would it feed her hungry children? Or buy medicine for her ailing parents? Or was it just enough to keep her from going crazy, committing suicide and taking her whole family with her? But no matter how much I tried to convince myself that she really needed it, I couldn't get over my anger at what had happened. It wasn't the loss of the money that upset me; it was the miserable feeling that somehow I was the one who had received some sort of handout, not the other way around.

A few days later, Root and I went to tend my mother's grave on the anniversary of her death. In the thicket behind the gravestone, we discovered a dead fawn. The body was quite decayed, but strips of spotted fur clung to its back. Its legs were splayed out under it, as if it had struggled to stand up right to the end. The organs had liquefied, the eyes were black holes, its jaw was slightly parted, revealing little teeth.

Root found it. He gave a stifled cry, but then stood there frozen, no more able to open his mouth and call me than to look away.

It had probably come running down the mountain and crashed into the stone, dying on the spot. When we looked closer, we could see traces of blood and skin on the grave.

"What should we do?" Root asked.

"It's okay," I told him. "We should just leave it."

We prayed longer that day for the fawn than we did for my mother's soul. We prayed that the tiny life could go with her on her journey.

The next day, I found a picture of Root's father in the local paper. It seemed he had won a research prize given by some foundation. It was just a short article with a blurry picture of a man ten years older than when I had known him, but there was no