South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,15

anything because we didn’t see the point. If we’d had enough energy to talk, we’d have used it for another round between the sheets.

In the normal course of events we would have been wrapped up in our relationship, without pausing to come up for air, for a few months, and then one of us would have drifted away. The reason being that what we were doing was a necessary, natural act one allowing no room for doubt. From the first, there was no possibility that love, guilt, or thoughts of the future would enter in.

So if the relationship hadn’t been discovered (not to have been found out seems pretty unrealistic, so totally wrapped up was I in having sex with her), Izumi and I might have continued for some time as we had, boyfriend and girlfriend. Whenever summer vacation rolled around, we’d have gone on dates. Who knows how long the friendship would have lasted. But after a few years, one of us would have shifted away from the other. We were too different, and time would only have magnified our differences. Looking back on it now, it all seems so obvious. Yet even if we had to go our separate ways, if I hadn’t slept with her cousin we might have said goodbye as friends and moved on to the next stage of life in one piece.

As it turned out, we couldn’t do this.

In truth, I damaged Izumi beyond repair. It didn’t take much to realize how hurt she was. With her grades, she should have breezed into a top university, but she failed the entrance exam and ended up attending a small, third-rate girls’ college. After my relationship with her cousin came to light, I saw Izumi only once. We talked for a long time in a coffee shop that had been one of our hangouts. I tried to explain things to her as honestly as I could, selecting my words carefully, straining to convey my feelings. This thing between me and your cousin wasn’t planned, I said; it was a physical force that swept us off our feet. It didn’t even leave me with the sense of guilt about betraying you that you’d expect me to have. It has nothing to do with us.

Of course, Izumi couldn’t understand what I meant. And she called me a dirty liar. She was right on target. Without a word, I’d slept with her cousin behind her back. Not just once or twice, but ten, twenty times. I betrayed her from the word go. If my actions had been proper, after all, why the need for deception? I wanted to tell Izumi this: I wanted to sleep with your cousin; I wanted to screw her till my brains fried—a thousand times, in every position imaginable. It has nothing to do with you, I should have insisted from the start. But in reality I couldn’t say these kinds of things. That’s why I lied—repeatedly. I’d make up some excuse to break a date with her, then zip on down to Kyoto to ball her cousin. There was no getting around it—I was the one to blame.

Izumi found out about us near the end of January, not long after my eighteenth birthday. In February I sailed through all the college entrance exams and was slated to move to Tokyo at the end of March. Before I left town, I called her, over and over. But she wouldn’t come to the phone. I wrote her long letters, waiting in vain for a reply. I can’t just leave like this, I thought I can’t just leave her here. But there was nothing I could do. Izumi wanted nothing to do with me.

On the bullet train to Tokyo, I gazed listlessly at the scenery outside and thought about myself—who I was. I looked down at my hands on my lap and at my face reflected in the window. Who the hell am I? I wondered. For the first time in my life, a fierce self-hatred welled up in me. How could I have done something like this? But I knew why. Put in the same position, I would do the same thing all over again. Even if I had to lie to Izumi, I would sleep with her cousin again. No matter how much it might hurt her. Recognizing this was painful. But it was the truth.

Izumi wasn’t the only one who got hurt. I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea