South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,25

the small office I rented nearby, I’d play for a while with my younger daughter. In the summer, we’d spend weekends at our cottage in Hakone, watching the fireworks, boating around the lake, and strolling in the hills.

While my wife was pregnant I’d had a few flings, but nothing serious. I never slept with any one woman more than once or twice. Okay, three times, tops. I never felt I was having an affair with a capital A. I just wanted someone to sleep with, the same thing my partners were after. Avoiding entanglements, I chose my bedmates with care. Maybe I was testing something by sleeping with them. Trying to see what I could find in them, and what they could find in me.

Shortly after our first child was born, a postcard came, forwarded to me from my parents’ home. It was a notice of a funeral, with a woman’s name on it. She’d died when she was thirty-six. But I couldn’t place the name. The card was postmarked Nagoya. I didn’t know a soul in Nagoya. After a while, though, I realized who the woman was: Izumi’s cousin who used to live in Kyoto. I’d completely forgotten her name. Her parents’ home, it turned out, was in Nagoya.

It didn’t take much to figure out that Izumi herself had sent the card to me. No one else would have. At first, though, her reason was a mystery. But after reading it over several times, I could sense the unforgiving coldness that had gone into it. Izumi never forgot what I had done, and never forgave me. She must have been living a miserable life—a contented woman would never have sent that card. Or if she did, she would have written a word or two of explanation.

The cousin and everything about her came rushing back to me. Her room, her body, the passionate sex we shared. But the total clarity these memories once had for me was gone, like smoke blown away on the wind. I couldn’t imagine why she had died. Thirty-six is such an unnatural age to die. Her last name was the same as before, which meant she never married—or had and divorced.

I found out more about Izumi and her whereabouts from an old high school classmate of mine. He’d read a “Tokyo Bar Guide” feature in the magazine Brutus, seen my photo in the spread, and learned that I was running the two bars in Aoyama. One evening he came over to where I was sitting at the counter and said, Hey, man, how’s it going? No implication that he’d gone out of his way to see me. He just happened to be drinking with some of his buddies and came over to say hi.

“I’ve been to this bar many times,” he said. “It’s near my office. But I had no idea you were the owner. What a small world.”

In high school I was sort of the outsider, but he had good grades, played sports, and was the type you’d find in student government. He was a pleasant sort, never pushy. An altogether nice guy. He was on the soccer team and had been big to begin with, but now he’d put on a bit of a spread: a double chin, his three-piece suit straining at the seams. All due to entertaining clients all the time, he explained. Big companies are hell on wheels, he said. You’ve got overtime, entertaining clients, job transfers; do a bad job and they kick your butt, meet your quota and they’ll up and raise it. Not the kind of thing decent people should be into. His office, it turned out, was in Aoyama 1-chome, just down the street.

We talked about things you’d expect classmates to talk about when they hadn’t seen each other for eighteen years—our jobs, marriage, how many kids we had, mutual acquaintances we’d run into. That’s when he mentioned Izumi.

“There was a girl you were going out with then. You were always together. Something-or-other Ohara.”

“Izumi Ohara,” I said.

“Right, right,” he said. “Izumi Ohara. You know, I ran into her not long ago.”

“In Tokyo?” I asked, startled.

“No, not in Tokyo. In Toyohashi.”

“Toyohashi?” I said, even more surprised. “You mean Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t get it. Why did you meet Izumi in Toyohashi? What in the world would she be doing there?”

It seemed he caught something hard and unyielding in my voice. “I don’t know why,” he ventured. “I just saw her there. But there’s not much