Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,148

surgeon lover. “I can’t see you anymore,” she tells him. “Can’t we at least talk this over?” he asks. “No,” she tells him firmly, “that is impossible.” On her next free day she boards a Tokyo Harbor ferry, and from the deck she throws the kidney-shaped stone into the sea. The stone sinks down to the bottom of the deep, dark ocean toward the core of the earth. She resolves to start her life over. Having cast away the stone, she feels a new sense of lightness.

The next day, however, when she goes to the hospital, the stone is on her desk, waiting for her. It sits exactly where it is supposed to be, as dark and kidney-shaped as ever.

As soon as he finished writing the story, Junpei telephoned Kirie. She would probably want to read the finished work, which she, in a sense, had inspired him to write. His call, however, did not go through. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed,” said a recorded voice. “Please check the number and try again.” Junpei tried it again—and again. But the result was always the same. She was probably having some kind of technical problem with her phone, he thought.

Junpei stuck close to home, waiting for word from Kirie, but nothing ever came. A month went by. One month became two, and two became three. The season changed to winter, and a new year began. His story came out in the February issue of a literary magazine. A newspaper ad for the magazine listed Junpei’s name and the title, “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day.” Kirie might see the ad, buy the magazine, read the story, and call him to share her impressions—or so he hoped. But all that reached him were new layers of silence.

The pain Junpei felt when Kirie vanished from his life was far more intense than he had imagined. She left behind a void that truly shook him. In the course of a day he would think to himself any number of times, “If only she were here!” He missed her smile, he missed the words shaped by her lips, he missed the touch of her skin as they held each other close. He gained no comfort from his favorite music or from the arrival of new books by authors that he liked. Everything felt distant, divorced from him. Kirie may have been woman number two, Junpei thought.

Junpei’s next encounter with Kirie occurred after noon one day in early spring—though you couldn’t really call it an “encounter.” He heard her voice.

He was in a taxi stuck in traffic. The young driver was listening to an FM broadcast. Kirie’s voice emerged from the radio. Junpei was not sure at first that he was hearing Kirie. He simply thought the voice was similar to hers. The more he listened, though, the more it sounded like Kirie, her manner of speaking—the same smooth intonation, the same relaxed style, the special way she had of pausing now and then.

Junpei asked the driver to turn up the volume.

“Sure thing,” the driver said.

It was an interview being held at the broadcast studio. The female announcer was asking her a question: “—and so you liked high places from the time you were a little girl?”

“That is true,” answered Kirie—or a woman with exactly the same voice. “Ever since I can remember, I liked going up high. The higher I went, the more peaceful I felt. I was always nagging my parents to take me to tall buildings. I was a very strange little creature,” the voice said with a laugh.

“Which is how you got started in your present line of work, I suppose.”

“First I worked as an analyst at a securities firm. But I knew right away it wasn’t right for me. I left the company after three years, and the first thing I did was get a job washing windows in tall buildings. What I really wanted to be was a steeplejack, but that’s such a macho world, they don’t let women in very easily. So for the time being, I took part-time work as a window washer.”

“From securities analyst to window washer—that’s quite a change!”

“To tell you the truth, washing windows was much less stressful for me: if anything falls, it’s just you, not stock prices.” Again the laugh.

“Now, by ‘window washer’ you mean one of those people who get lowered down the side of a building on a platform.”

“Right. Of course, they give you a lifeline, but some spots