South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,13

really did like her, yet still something held me back.

I’d walked the road from the train station home a thousand times, but now it was like a foreign town. I couldn’t shake the image of Izumi’s naked body: her taut nipples, her wisp of pubic hair, her soft thighs. And eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer. I bought some cigarettes from a vending machine, went back to the park where we’d talked, and lit a cigarette to calm down.

If only my aunt hadn’t barged in on us, things might have worked out better. If nothing had disturbed us, we could have had a pleasanter goodbye. We would have been even happier. But if my aunt hadn’t come by, someday something similar was bound to happen. If not today, then tomorrow. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t convince her this was inevitable. Because I couldn’t convince myself.

As the sun set, the wind grew cold. Winter was fast approaching. And when the new year came, there would be college entrance exams and the beginning of a brand-new life. Uneasy though I was, I yearned for change. My heart and body both craved this unknown land, a blast of fresh air. That was the year Japanese universities were taken over by their students and Tokyo was engulfed in a storm of demonstrations. The world was transforming itself right before my eyes, and I was dying to catch that fever. Even if Izumi wanted me to stay and would have sex with me to ensure that, I knew my days in this sleepy town were numbered. If that meant the end of our relationship, so be it. If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.

Izumi could never understand my dream. She had her own dreams, a vision of a far different place, a world unlike my own.

But even before my new life began, a crisis came to rip our relationship to shreds.

4

The first girl I ever slept with was an only child. Like Izumi, she wasn’t exactly the type to turn any heads; most people would hardly notice her. Still the first time I laid eyes on her, it was as if I were walking down the road one afternoon and a silent bolt of lightning struck me smack on the head. No ifs, ands, or buts—I was hooked.

With a very few exceptions, your typical beautiful women don’t turn me on. Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street and a friend will nudge me and say, “Wow! Did you get a load of that girl?” But strangely enough, I can’t recall a thing about this supposed knockout. And gorgeous actresses or models don’t do a thing for me. I don’t know why, but there it is. For me the boundary dividing the real world and the world of dreams has always been vague, and whenever infatuation raised its almighty head, even during my early teens, a beautiful face wasn’t enough to get my engines started.

I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.

The closest comparison might be the power of perfume. Perhaps even the master blender himself can’t explain how a fragrance that has a special power is created. Science sure can’t explain it. Still, the fact remains that a certain combination of fragrances can captivate the opposite sex like the scent of an animal in heat. One kind of fragrance might attract fifty out of a hundred people. And another scent will attract the other fifty. But there also are scents that only one or two people will find wildly exciting. And I have the ability, from far away, to sniff out those special scents. When I do, I want to go up to the girl who radiates this aura and say, Hey, I picked it up, you know. No one else gets it, but I do.

From the first time I saw that girl, I knew I wanted to sleep with her. More accurately, I knew I had to sleep with her.