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distance a signal fire burns; make for it straightaway. After that, Bird and the

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girl Himiko from the island of Kyushu had become friends.
There were very few girls at Bird’s university, only a handful in the liberal
arts who had come to Tokyo from the provinces; and all of those, as far as Bird
knew, had undergone a transmutation into peculiar and unclassifiable monsters
shortly after they had graduated. A certain percentage of their body cells slowly
overdeveloped, clustered and knotted until the girls were moving sluggishly and
looking dull and melancholic. In the end, they became fatally unfit for everyday,
postgraduate life. If they got married, they were divorced; if they went to work,
they were fired; and those who did nothing but travel met with ludicrous and
gruesome auto accidents. Himiko, shortly after graduation, had married a
graduate student, and she hadn’t been divorced. Worse, a year after the marriage,
her husband had committed suicide. Himiko’s father-in-law had made her a
present of the house the couple had been living in, and he still provided her
every month with money for living expenses. He hoped that Himiko would
remarry, but at present she devoted her days to contemplation and cruised the
city in a sports car every night.
Bird had heard open rumors that Himiko was a sexual adventuress who had
broken out of conventional orbit. Even rumors that related her husband’s suicide
to her deviate tastes. Bird had slept with the girl just once, but both of them had
been terribly drunk and he wasn’t even certain coitus had been achieved. That
was long before Himiko’s unfortunate marriage, and though she had been driven
by keen desire and had pursued her pleasure actively, Himiko had been nothing
more in those days than an inexperienced college girl.
Bird got out of the cab at the entrance to the alley where Himiko lived.
Quickly, he calculated the money remaining in his wallet; he shouldn’t have any
trouble getting an advance on this month’s salary after class tomorrow.
Bird twisted the bottle of Johnnie Walker into his jacket pocket and hurried
down the alley, covering the neck of the bottle with his hand. Since the
neighborhood knew all about Himiko’s eccentric life, it was impossible not to
suspect that visitors were observed discreetly from windows here and there.
Bird pushed the buzzer in the vestibule. There was no response. He rattled the
door a few times and softly called Himiko’s name. This was just a formality.
Bird walked around toward the back of the house and saw that a dusty,
secondhand MG was parked beneath Himiko’s bedroom window. With its empty
seats exposed, the scarlet MG seemed to have been abandoned here for a long
time. But it was proof that Himiko was at home. Bird propped a muddy shoe on
the badly dented bumper and brought his weight to bear. The MG rocked gently,

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like a boat. Bird called Himiko’s name again, looking up at the curtained
bedroom window. Inside the room, the curtains were lifted slightly where they
met and a single eye looked down at Bird through the narrow peephole. Bird
stopped rocking the MG and smiled: he could always behave freely and naturally
in front of this girl.
“Hey! Bird—” Her voice impeded by the curtain and by the window glass,
sounded like a feeble, silly sigh.
Bird knew he had discovered the ideal spot for beginning a bottle of Johnnie
Walker in the middle of the day. Feeling as though he had entered just one more
plus on the psychological balance sheet for the day, he walked back to the front
of the house.

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4
I
HOPE
you weren’t asleep,” Bird said as Himiko opened the door for him.
“Asleep? At this hour?” the girl teased. Himiko held up one hand against the
midday sun but it didn’t help; the light at Bird’s back descended roughly on her
neck and shoulders, bare where her violet terrycloth bathrobe fell away.
Himiko’s grandfather was a Kyushu fisherman who had taken as a wife,
abducted really, a Russian girl from Vladivostok. That explained the whiteness
of Himiko’s skin; you could see the web of capillary vessels just beneath the
surface. In the way she moved, too, was something to suggest the confusion of
the immigrant who is never quite at ease in his new country.
Wincing in the rush of light, Himiko stepped back into the shadow of the
open door with the ruffled haste of a mother hen. She was in that meager stage
of womanhood between the vulnerable beauty of a young girl, which she had
lost, and the mature woman’s fullness still to come. Himiko was probably the
type of woman who would have to spend a particularly long time in this tenuous
state.
Quickly, in order to protect his friend from the revealing light, Bird stepped
inside and closed the door. For an instant the cramped space of the vestibule felt
like the inside of a hooded cage. Bird blinked rapidly while he took off his
shoes, trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness. Himiko hovered in the
darkness behind him, watching.
“I hate to disturb people when they’re sleeping,” Bird offered.
“You’re so timid today, Bird. Anyway, I wasn’t asleep; if I nap during the
day I can never get to sleep at night. I was thinking about the pluralistic
universe.”
Pluralistic universe? Good enough, Bird thought, we can discuss it over
whisky. Glancing around him like a hunting dog nosing for a spoor, Bird
followed Himiko inside. In the living room it might have been evening, and the
gloom was dark and stagnant like a bed of straw for sick livestock. Bird squinted
down at the old but sturdy rattan chair he always sat in and carefully lowered
himself into it after removing some magazines. Until Himiko had showered and
dressed and put on some make-up, she wouldn’t turn on the lights, much less
open the curtains. Company had to wait patiently in the dark. During his last
visit here a year ago, Bird had stepped on a glass and had cut the base of his big

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toe. Recalling the pain and the panic, he shivered.
It was hard to decide where to put the bottle of whisky: an elaborate
confusion of books and magazines, empty boxes and bottles, shells, knives,
scissors, withered flowers collected in winter woods, insect specimens, and old
and new letters covered not only the entire floor and the table, but even the low
bookcase along the window, the record player, and the television set. Bird
hesitated, then shuffled a small space on the floor with his feet and wedged the
bottle of Johnnie Walker between his ankles. Watching from the door, Himiko
said as though in greeting, “I still haven’t learned to be neat. Bird, was it like this
the last time you were here?”
“Damn right it was; I cut my big toe!”
“Of course, the floor around the chair there was all bloody, wasn’t it,”
Himiko reminisced. “It’s been ages, Bird. But everything’s the same around
here. How about you?”
“As matter of fact, I had a kind of accident.”
“Accident?”
Bird hesitated; he hadn’t planned to start right in with all his troubles. “We
had a child but it died right away,” he simplified.
“No! Really? The same thing happened to friends of mine—two friends! That
makes three people I know. Don’t you think fallout in the rain has something to
do with it?”
Bird tried comparing his child who seemed to have two heads with pictures
he had seen of mutations caused by radioactivity. But he had only to think to
himself about the baby’s abnormality and a sense of extremely personal shame
hotly rose into his throat. How could he discuss the misfortune with other
people; it was inherent in himself! He had the feeling this would never be a
problem he could share with the rest of mankind.
“In my son’s case, it was apparently just an accident.”
“What an awful experience for you, Bird,” Himiko said, and she looked at
him quietly with an expression in her eyes that seemed to cloud her lids with ink.
Bird didn’t trouble himself with the message in Himiko’s eyes; instead, he
lifted the bottle of Johnnie Walker. “I wanted somewhere to drink and I knew
you wouldn’t mind even if it was the middle of the day. Have a drink with me?”
Bird sensed himself wheedling the girl, like any brazen young gigolo. But
that was the way men whom Himiko knew generally behaved toward her. The

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that was the way men whom Himiko knew generally behaved toward her. The
man she had married, more openly than Bird or any of her other friends, had
played up to her as though he were a younger brother. And suddenly one
morning he had hanged himself.
“I can see the baby’s death is still close to you, Bird. You haven’t recovered
yet. Well, I’m not going to ask you anything more about it.”
“That would probably be best. There’s almost nothing to tell anyway.”
“Shall we have a drink?”
“Good.”
“I want to take a shower, but you start. Bird! There are glasses and a pitcher
in the kitchen.”
Himiko disappeared into the bedroom and Bird stood up. The kitchen and the
bathroom shared the twisted space at the end of the hall that amounted to the tail
of the little house. Bird jumped over a cat crouching on the floor, the bathrobe
and underclothes Himiko had just thrown off, and went into the kitchen. On his
way back with a pitcher of water, glasses and cups he had washed himself, two
in each pocket, he happened to glance past the open glass door and saw Himiko
showering at the back of the bathroom, where it was even darker than the hall.
With her left hand upheld as if to check the black water pouring out of the
darkness above her head and her right hand resting on her belly, Himiko was
looking down over her right shoulder at her buttocks and slightly arched right
calf. Bird saw back and buttocks and legs, and the sight filled him with a disgust
he couldn’t repress; his flesh turned to goosepimples. Bird rose on his toes as if
to flee a darkness alive with ghosts: and then he was running, trembling, past the
bedroom and back to the familiar rattan chair. He had conquered it once, he
couldn’t say when, and now it had reawakened in him: the juvenile’s disgust,
anxiety ridden, for the naked body. Bird sensed that the octopus of disgust would
extend its tentacles even when he turned to his wife, who now lay in a hospital
bed thinking about the baby who had gone with its father to another hospital