After the quake: stories Page 0,46

get it. Not really. ’Cause you’re so damned stupid. That’s OK, though. I don’t care if you’re stupid. You’re not such a bad guy. I mean, look, you’re the guy that gave my daughter her name.”

“Yeah, OK, OK,” Junpei said, “but I still don’t get it when it comes to anything important.”

“Exactly. When it comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.”

“Anyhow, now there’s four of us,” Takatsuki said with a kind of sigh. “I wonder, though. Four of us. Four. Can that number be right?”

2

Junpei learned just before Sala’s second birthday that Takatsuki and Sayoko were on the verge of breaking up. Sayoko seemed somewhat apologetic when she divulged the news to him. Takatsuki had had a lover since the time of Sayoko’s pregnancy, she said, and he hardly ever came home anymore. It was someone he knew from work.

Junpei could not grasp what he was hearing, no matter how many details Sayoko was able to give him. Why did Takatsuki have to find himself another woman? He had declared Sayoko to be the greatest woman in the world the night Sala was born, and those words had come from deep in his gut. Besides, he was crazy about Sala. Why, in spite of that, did he have to abandon his family?

“I mean, I’m over at your house all the time, eating dinner with you guys, right? But I never sensed a thing. You were happiness itself—the perfect family.”

“It’s true,” Sayoko said with a gentle smile. “We weren’t lying to you or putting on an act. But quite separately from that, he got himself a girlfriend, and we can never go back to what we had. So we decided to split up. Don’t let it bother you too much. I’m sure things will work out better now, in a lot of different ways.”

“In a lot of different ways,” she had said. The world is full of incomprehensible words, thought Junpei.

Sayoko and Takatsuki were divorced some months later. They concluded agreements on several specific issues without the slightest hang-up: no recriminations, no disputed claims. Takatsuki went to live with his girlfriend; he came to visit Sala once a week, and they all agreed that Junpei would try to be present at those times. “It would make things easier for both of us,” Sayoko told Junpei. Easier? Junpei felt as if he had grown much older all of a sudden, though he had just turned thirty-three.

Sala called Takatsuki “Papa” and Junpei “Jun.” The four of them were an odd pseudo-family. Whenever they got together, Takatsuki would be his usual talkative self, and Sayoko’s behavior was perfectly natural, as though nothing had happened. If anything, she seemed even more natural than before in Junpei’s eyes. Sala had no idea her parents were divorced. Junpei played his assigned role perfectly without the slightest objection. The three joked around as always and talked about the old days. The only thing that Junpei understood about all this was that it was something the three of them needed.

“Hey, Junpei, tell me,” Takatsuki said one January night when the two of them were walking home, breath white in the chill air. “Do you have somebody you’re planning to marry?”

“Not at the moment,” Junpei said.

“No girlfriend?”

“Nope, guess not.”

“Why don’t you and Sayoko get together?”

Junpei squinted at Takatsuki as if at some too-bright object. “Why?” he asked.

“ ‘Why’?! Whaddya mean ‘why’? It’s so obvious! If nothing else, you’re the only man I’d want to be a father to Sala.”

“Is that the only reason you think I ought to marry Sayoko?”

Takatsuki sighed and draped his thick arm around Junpei’s shoulders.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like the idea of marrying Sayoko? Or is it the thought of stepping in after me?”

“That’s not the problem. I just wonder if you can make, like, some kind of deal. It’s a question of decency.”

“This is no deal,” Takatsuki said. “And it’s got nothing to do with decency. You love Sayoko, right? You love Sala, too, right? That’s the most important thing. I know you’ve got your own special hang-ups. Fine. I grant you that. But to me, it looks like you’re trying to pull off your shorts without taking off your pants.”

Junpei said nothing, and Takatsuki fell into an unusually long silence. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked down the road to the station, heaving white breath into the night.

“In any case,” Junpei said,