8



Kano's Long Story

*

An Inquiry into the Nature of Pain



"I was born on May twenty- ninth," Kano began her story, "and the night of my
twentieth birthday, I resolved to take my own life."
I put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. She added cream and gave it a languid stir.
No sugar. I drank my coffee black, as always. The clock on the shelf continued its dry
rapping on the walls of time.
Kano looked hard at me and said, "I wonder if I should begin at the beginning- where
I was born, family life, that kind of thing."
"Whatever you like. It's up to you. Whatever you find most comfortable," I said.
"I was the third of three children," she said. "Malta and I have an older brother. My
father ran his own clinic in Kanagawa Prefecture. The family had nothing you could call
domestic problems. I grew up in an ordinary home, the kind you can find anywhere. My
parents were very serious peo ple who believed strongly in the value of hard work. They
were rather strict with us, but it seems to me they also gave us a fair amount of autonomy
where little things were concerned. We were well off, but my parents did not believe in
giving their children extra money for frills. I suppose I had a rather frugal upbringing.
"Malta was five years older than I. There had been something different about her
from the beginning. She was able to guess things. She'd know that the patient in room so-
and- so had just died, or exactly where they could find a lost wallet, or w hatever.
Everybody enjoyed this, at first, and often found it useful, but soon it began to bother my
parents. They ordered her never to talk about 'things that did not have a clear basis in
fact' in the presence of other people. My father had his position as head of the hospital to
think about. He didn't want people hearing that his daughter had supernatural powers.
Malta put a lock on her mouth after that. Not only did she stop talking about 'things that
did not have a clear basis in fact,' but she rarely joined in even the most ordinary
conversations.
"To me, though, she opened her heart. We grew up very close. She would say, 'Don't
ever tell anybody I told you this,' and then she'd say something like, There's going to be
a fire down the street' or 'Auntie So-and-so in Setagaya is going to get worse.' And she
was always right. I was still just a little girl, so I thought it was great fun. It never
occurred to me to be frightened or to find it eerie. Ever since I can remember, I would al-
ways follow my big sister around and expect to hear her 'messages.'
"These special powers of hers grew stronger as she grew older, but she did not know

how to use or nurture them, and this caused her a great deal of anguish. There was no one
she could go to for advice, no one she could look up to for guidance. This made her a
very lonely teenager. She had to solve everything by herself. She had to find all the
answers herself. In our home, she was unhappy. There was never a time when she could
find peace in her heart. She had to suppress her own powers and keep them hidden. It was
like growing a large, powerful plant in a little pot. It was unnatural. It was wrong. All she
knew was that she had to get out of there as soon as possible. She believed that
somewhere there was a world that was right for her, a way of life that was right for her.
Until she grad uated from high school, though, she had to keep herself in check.
"She was determined not to go to college, but rather to go abroad after graduating
from high school. My parents had lived a very ordinary life, of course, and they were not
prepared to let her do this. So my sister worked hard to raise the money she would need,
and then she ran away. The first place she went to was Hawaii. She lived on Kauai for
two years. She had read somewhere that Kauai's north shore had an area with springs that
produced marvelous water. Already, back then, my sister had a profound interest in
water. She believed that human existence was largely controlled by the elements of
water. Which is why she went to live on Kauai. At the time, there was still a hippie
commune in the interior of the island.
She lived as a member of the commune. The water there had a great in fluence on her
spiritual powers. By taking that water into her body, she was able to attain a 'greater
harmony' between her powers and her physical being. She wrote to me, telling me how
wonderful this was, and her letters made me very happy. But soon the area could no
longer satisfy her. True, it was a beautiful, peaceful land, and the people there sought
only spiritual peace, free of material desires, but they were too dependent on sex and
drugs. My sister did not need these things. After two years on Kauai, she left.
"From there she went to Canada, and after traveling around the northern United
States, she continued on to Europe. She sampled the water everywhere she went and
succeeded in finding marvelous water in several places, but none of it was the perfect
water. So she kept traveling. Whenever she ran out of money, she would do something
like fortune -telling. People would reward her for helping them find lost things or missing
persons. She would have preferred not to take the money. Powers bestowed by heaven
should not be exchanged for worldly goods. At the time, though, it was the only way she
could keep herself alive. People heard about her divination everywhere she went. It was
easy for her to make money. She even helped the police with an investigation in England.
A little girl was missing, and she found where the body had been hidden. She also found
the murderer's glove nearby. The man was arrested and confessed. It was in all the
papers. I'll show you the clippings sometime. Anyhow, she went on wandering through
Europe like this until she ended up in Malta. Close to five years had gone by since her de-
parture from Japan, and this place turned out to be her destination in her search for water.
I suppose she must have told you about this herself?"
I nodded.
"All the time she was wandering through the world, Malta would send me letters. Of
course, there were times when she couldn't manage to write, but almost every week I
would receive a long letter from her about where she was and what she was doing. We
were still very close. Even over long distances, we were able to share our feelings with
each other through her letters. And what wonderful letters they were! If you could read

them, you'd see what a wonderful person she is. Through her let ters, I was able to
encounter so many different worlds, so many interesting people! Her letters gave me such
encouragement! They helped me grow. For that, I will always be deeply grateful to my
sister. I don't negate what she did for me in any way. But finally, letters are just letters.
When I was in my most difficult teenage years, when I needed my sister more than ever,
she was always somewhere far away. I could not stretch out my hand and find her there
next to me. In our family, I was all alone. Isolated. My teen years were filled with pain-
and later I will tell you more about that pain. There was no one I could go to for advice.
In that sense, I was just as lonely as Malta had been. If she had been near me then, my
life would have been different from what it is today. She would have given me words of
advice and encouragement and salvation. But what's the point of bringing such things up
now? Just as Malta had to find her own way by herself, I had to find my own way by
myself. And when I turned twenty, I decided to kill myself. "
Creta Kano took her cup and drank her remaining coffee. "What delicious coffee!"
she said.
"Thanks," I said, as casually as possible. "Can I offer you something to eat? I boiled
some eggs a little while ago."
After some hesitation, she said she would have one. I brought eggs and salt from the
kitchen and poured her more coffee. With no sense of urgency, Kano and I set about
peeling and eating our eggs and drinking coffee. While we were doing this, the phone
rang, but I didn't answer it. After fifteen or sixteen rings, it stopped. All that time, Kano
seemed unaware of the ringing.
When she finished her egg, Kano took a small handkerchief from her white patent-
leather bag and wiped her mouth. Then she tugged at the hem of her skirt.
"Once I had decided to kill myself, I wanted to leave a note behind. I sat at my desk
for an hour, trying to write down my reasons for dying. I wanted to make it clear that no
one else was to blame, that the reasons were all inside me. I didn't want my family
feeling responsibl
e for something that was not their fault.
"But I could not finish the note. I tried over and over, but each new version seemed
worse than the last. When I read what I had written, it sounded foolish, even comical. The
more serious I tried to make it, the more ridiculous it came out. In the end, I decided not
to write anything at all.
"It was a very simple matter, I felt. I was disappointed with my life. I could no longer
endure the many kinds of pain that my life continued to cause me. I had endured the pain
for twenty years. My life had been nothing but an unremitting source of pain. But I had
tried to bear it as best I could. I have absolute confidence in the validity of my efforts to
bear the pain. I can declare here with genuine pride that my efforts were second to none. I
was not giving up without a fight. But the day I turned twenty, I reached a simple
conclusion: life was not worth it. Life was not worth continuing such a struggle."
She stopped speaking and spent some time aligning the corners of the white
handkerchief on her lap. When she looked down, her long false eyelashes cast gentle
shadows on her face.
I cleared my throat, I felt I ought to say something, but I didn't know what to say, and
so I kept silent. In the distance, I heard the wind- up bird cry.
"The pain was what caused me to decide to die," said Kano. "And when I say 'pain,'
that is exactly what I mean. Nothing mental or metaphorical, but physical pain, pure and

simple. Plain, ordinary, direct, physical- and, for that reason, all the more intense- pain:
headache, toothache, menstrual cramps, lower back pain, stiff shoulders, fever, muscle
ache, burns, frostbite, sprains, fractures, blows to the body. All my life I have
experienced physical pain with far greater frequency and in tensity than others. Take my
teeth, for example. They seemed to have some inborn defect. They would give me pain
from one end of the year to the other. No matter how carefully I brushed, or how many
times a day, or how strictly I avoided sweets, it did no good. All my efforts ended in
cavities. To make matters worse, anesthetics seemed to have no effect on me. Going to
the dentist was always a nightmare. The pain was beyond describing. It scared me to
death. And then my terrible periods began. They were incredibly heavy. For a week at a
time, I would be in such pain, it was as if someone were twisting a drill inside me. My
head would throb. You probably can't imagine what it was like, Mr. Okada, but the pain
would bring tears to my eyes. For a week out of every month, I would be tortured by this
unbearable pain.
"If I boarded a plane, my head would feel as if it were splitting open from the changes
in air pressure. The doctor said it had something to do with the structure of my ears, that
this sort of thing happens if the inner ear has a shape that is sensitive to pressure changes.
The same thing often happened to me on elevators. I can't take elevators in tall buildings.
The pain is so intense, it feels as if my head is going to split open in several places and
the b lood gush out. And then there was my stomach. At least once a week it would give
me such sharp, piercing pain that I couldn't get up in the morning. The doctors could
never find a cause. Some suggested it was mental. But even if it was, the pain still hurt.
As much as I was suffering, though, I could not stay home from school. If I had skipped
school every time something hurt me, I would never have gone at all.
"Whenever I bumped into something, it would leave a bruise on my body. Looking at
myself in the bathroom mirror always made me want to cry. My body was covered with
so many dark bruises I looked like a rotten apple. I hated to let anyone see me in a
bathing suit. Ever since I can remember, I've hardly ever gone swimming for that reason.
Another problem I had was the difference in the size of my feet. Whenever I bought new
shoes, the larger foot would be in terrible pain until the shoe was broken in.
"Because of all these problems, I almost never did sports. In junior high school, my
friends once dragged me to an ice-skating rink. I fell and hurt my hip so badly that
afterward I would get a terrible ache there every winter. It felt as if I had been jabbed
with a big, thick needle. Any number of times, I fell over trying to get up from a chair.
"I suffered from constipation as well. A bowel movement every few days would be
nothing but pain for me. And my shoulders would stiffen up terribly. The muscles would
tighten until they were literally as hard as a rock. It was so painful, I couldn't stand up,
but lying down was no help, either. I imagined that my suffering must be much like that
of a Chinese punishment I had read about. They would stuff the person in a box for
several years. When my shoulders were at their worst, I could hardly breathe.
"I could go on and on listing all the various pains I have suffered in my life, but it
would only bore you, Mr. Okada, so I will just leave it at this. What I want to convey to
you is the fact that my body was a virtual sample book of pain. I experienced every pain
imaginable. I began to think I had been cursed, that life was so unfair. I might have been
able to go on bearing the pain if the other people in the world had had to live the way I
did, but they didn't, and I couldn't. Pain was not something that was dealt out fairly. I

tried asking people about pain, but nobody knew what real pain was. The majority of
people in the world live without feeling much pain- at least on a daily basis. When this
finally hit me (I had just entered junior high school at the time), it made me so sad I
couldn't stop crying. Why me? Why did I have to be the one to bear such a terrible
burden? I wanted to die right then and there.
"But at the same time, another thought came to me. This could not go on forever. One
morning I would wake up and the pain would have disappeared-suddenly, with no
explanation-and a whole new and peaceful life without pain would open up for me. It was
not a thought in which I could place a great deal of faith, however.
"And so I revealed these thoughts o f mine to my sister. I told her that I didn't want to
go on living in such pain: what was I to do? After she thought about it for a while, she
said this: There is definitely something wrong with you, I'm sure. But I don't know what
it is. And I don't know what you should do about it. I don't have the power yet to make
such judgments. All I know is that you should at least wait until you're twenty. Bear it
until you turn twenty, and then make your decision. That would be the best thing.'
"This was how I decided to go on living until I was twenty. But no matter how much
time went by, the situation did not improve. Far from it. The pain became even more
intense. This taught me only one thing: As the body develops, the volume of pain
increases proportionately.' I endured the pain, however, for eight years. I went on living
all that time, trying to see only the good side of life. I didn't complain to anyone. I strove
to keep on smiling, even when the pain was at its worst. I disciplined myself always to
present an exterior of calm when the pain was so intense that I could hardly go on
standing. Crying and complaining could not reduce the pain; it could only make me more
miserable than ever. As a result of my efforts, people loved me. They saw me as a quiet,
good- natured girl. I had the confidence of grown- ups and the friendship of people my
own age. I might have had a perfect life, a perfect adolescence, if it hadn't been for the
pain. But it was always there. It was like my shadow. If I forgot about it for an instant,
the pain would attack yet another part of my body.
"In college, I found a boyfriend, and in the summer of my freshman year I lost my
virginity. Even this- as I could have predicted-gave me only pain. An experienced
girlfriend of mine assured me that it would stop hurting when I got used to it, but it never
did. Whenever I slept with him, the pain would bring tears to my eyes. One day I told my
boyfriend that I didn't want to have sex anymore. I told him, 'I love you, but I never want
to experience this pain again.' He said he had never heard anything so ridiculous.
'You've got an emotional problem,' he said. 'Just relax and it'll stop hurting. It'll even
feel good. Everybody else does it, so you can too. You're just not trying hard enough.
You're babying yourself. You're using this "pain" thing to cover up your problems. Stop
complaining; it won't do you any good.'
"When I heard this, after all I had endured over the years, I exploded. 'What do you
know about pain?' I shouted at him. The pain I feel is no ordinary pain. I know what pain
is like. I've had them all. When I say something hurts, it really hurts!' I tried to explain
by listing every single pain I had ever experienced, but he didn't understand a thing. It's
impossible to understand real pain unless you've experienced it yourself. So that was the
end of our relationship.
"My twentieth birthday came soon after that. For twenty long years I had endured the
pain, hoping there would be some bright turning point, but it had never happened. I felt

ut terly defeated. I wished I had died sooner. My long detour had only stretched out the
pain."
At this point, Creta Kano took a single deep breath. On the table in front of her sat the
dish with eggshells and her empty coffee cup. On her lap lay the handkerc hief that she
had folded with such care. As if recalling the time, she glanced at the clock on the shelf.
"I'm very sorry," she said in a dry little voice. "I hadn't intended to talk so long. I've
taken far too much of your time as it is. I won't impose on you any longer. I don't know
how to apologize for having bored you at such length."
She grasped the strap of her white patent- leather bag and stood up from the sofa.
This took me off guard. "Just a minute, please," I said, flustered. I didn't want her to
end her story in the middle. "If you're worried about taking my time, then don't worry.
I'm free all afternoon. As long as you've told me this much, why not go to the end?
There's more to your story, I'm sure."
"Of course there is," she said, looking down at me, both hands in a tight grip on the
strap of her bag. "What I've told you so far is more like an introduction."
I asked her to wait a moment and went to the kitchen. Standing in front of the sink, I
gave myself time for two deep breaths. Then I took two glasses from the cabinet, put ice
in them, and filled them with orange juice from the refrigerator. Placing the glasses on a
small tray, I brought them into the living room. I had gone through these motions with
delib erate slowness, but I found her standing as I had left her. When I set the glasses of
juice on the table, though, she seemed to have second thoughts. She settled onto the sofa
again and placed her bag at her side.
"You want me to tell my story to the very end?" she asked. "Are you sure?"
"Quite sure," I said.
She drank half her orange juice and went on with her story.
"I failed to kill myself, of course. If I had succeeded, I wouldn't be here now,
drinking orange juice with you, Mr. Okada." She looked into my eyes, and I gave her a
little smile of agreement. "If I had died according to plan, it would have been the final
solution for me. Dying would have meant the end of consciousness, and I would never
have had to feel pain again. Which is exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, however, I
chose the wrong method to die.
"At nine o'clock on the night of May twenty- ninth, I went to my brother's room and
asked to borrow his car. It was a shiny new Toyota MR2, and the thought of letting me
take it made him look very unhappy. But I didn't care. He couldn't refuse, because I had
lent him money to help him buy it. I took the key and drove it for half an hour. The car
still had barely a thousand miles on it. A touch of the gas pedal could make it fly. It was
the perfect car for my purposes. I drove as far as the Tama River on the outskirts of the
city, and there I found a massive stone wall of the kind I had in mind. It was the outer
wall of a big condominium building, and it stood at the far end of a dead-end street. I
gave myself plenty of room to accelerate, and then I pressed the accelerator to the floor. I
must have been doing close to a hundred miles an hour when I slammed into the wall and
lost consciousness.
"Unfortunately for me, however, the wall turned out to be far less solid than it had
appeared. To save money, they had not anchored it properly. The wall simply crumbled,
and the front end of the car was crushed flat. That's all that happened. Because it was so
soft, the wall absorbed the impact. As if that weren't bad enough, in my confusion I had

forgotten to undo my seat belt.
"And so I escaped death. I was hardly even injured. And strangest of all, I felt almost
no pain. It was the weirdest thing. They took me to the hospital and patched up my one
broken rib. The police came to investigate, but I told them I didn't remember a thing. I
said I had probably mixed up the gas and the brake. And they believed me. I had just
turned twenty, and it had been only six months since I got my license. Besides, I just
didn't look like the suicidal type. Who would try to kill herself with her seat belt
fastened?
"Once I was out of the hospital, I had several difficult problems to face. First I had to
pay off the outstanding loan on the MR2 that I had turned into scrap metal. Through
some error with the insurance company, the car had not been covered.
"Now that it was too late, I realized that to do myself in, I should have rented a car
with the proper insurance. At the time, of course, insurance was the last thing on my
mind. It never occurred to me that my brother's car wouldn't have enough insurance on it
or that I would fail to kill my self. I ran into a stone wall at a hundred miles an hour: it
was amazing that I survived.
"A short time later, I received a bill from the condominium association for repair of
the wall. They were demanding 1,364,294 yen from me. Immediately. In cash. All I could
do was borrow it from my father. He was willing to give it to me in the form of a loan,
but he insisted that I pay him back. My father was very proper when it came to matters of
money. He said it was my responsibility for having caused the accident, and he expected
me to pay him back in full and on schedule. In fact, at the time, he had very little money
to spare. He was in the process of expanding his clinic and was having trouble raising the
money for the project.
"I thought again about killing myself. This time I would do a proper job. I would
jump from the fifteenth floor of the university administration building. There would be no
slip- ups that way. I would die for sure. I made several trial runs. I picked the best window
for the job. I was on the verge of jumping.
"But something held me back. There was something wrong, some thing nagging at
me. At the last second, that 'something' almost literally pulled me back from the edge. A
good deal of time went by, though, before I realized what that 'something' was.
"I didn't have any pain.
"I had felt hardly any pain since the accident. What with one thing coming up after
another, I hadn't had a moment to notice, but pain had disappeared from my body. My
bowel movements were normal. My menstrual cramps were gone. No more headaches or
stomachaches. Even my broken rib caused me hardly any pain. I had no idea why such a
thing had happened. But suddenly I was free of pain.
"I decided to go on living for the time being. If only for a little while, I wanted to find
out what it meant to live life without pain. I could die whenever I wanted to.
"But to go on living meant for me to pay back my debt. Altogether, I owed more than
three million yen. In order to pay it back, I became a prostitute."
"A prostitute?!"
"That's right," said Kano, as if it were nothing at all. "I needed money over the short
term. I wanted to pay off my debts as quickly as possible, and that was the only way I
knew of to raise the money. I didn't have the slightest hesitation. I had seriously intended
to die. And I still intended to die, sooner or later. The curiosity I felt about a life without

pain was keeping me alive, but strictly on a temporary basis. And compared with death, it
would be nothing at all for me to sell my body."
"I see what you mean," I said.
The ice in her orange juice had melted, and Kano stirred it with her straw before
taking a sip.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question?" I asked.
"No, not at all. Please."
"Didn't you consult with your sister about this?"
"She was practicing her austerities on Malta at the time. As long as that went on, she
refused to send me her address. She didn't want me to disrupt her concentration. It was
virtually impossible for me to write to her during the entire three years she lived on
Malta."
"I see," I said. "Would you like some more coffee?"
"Yes, please," said Kano.
I went to the kitchen and warmed the coffee. While I waited, I stared at the exhaust
fan and took several deep breaths. When it was ready, I poured the coffee into fresh cups
and brought it to the living room on a tray, together with a plate of chocolate cookies. We
ate and drank for a while.
"How long ago did you try to kill yourself?" I asked.
"I was twenty at the time. That was six years ago, in May of 1978."
May of 1978 was the month that Kumiko and I had married. So, then, the very month
we were married, Kano had tried to kill herself and Malta Kano was practicing her
austerities in Malta.
"I went to a neighborhood that had lots of bars, approached the first likely- looking
man I saw, negotiated a price, went to a hotel, and slept with him," said Kano. "Sex no
longer gave me any physical pain at all. Nor any pleasure, either. It was just a physical
movement. Neither did I feel guilt at doing sex for money. I was enveloped in numbness,
an absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.
"I made very good money this way-close to a million yen in the first month alone. At
that rate, I could easily repay what I owed in three or four months. I would come home
from campus, go out in the evening, and get home from work by ten at the latest. I told
my parents I was wait ing on tables, and no one suspected the truth. Of course, they would
have thought it strange if I returned so much money all at once, so I decided to give my
father 100,000 yen a month and save the rest.
"But then one night, when I was propositioning men by the station, two men grabbed
me from behind. At first I thought it was the police, but then I realized that they were
gangsters. They dragged me into a back street, showed me some kind of knife, and took
me to their local head quarters. They shoved me into a back room, stripped my clothes off,
strung me up by the wrists, and proceeded to rape me over and over in front of a video
camera. I kept my eyes closed the entire time and tried not to think. Which was not
difficult for me, because I felt neither pain nor pleasure.
"Afterward, they showed me the video and told me that if I didn't want anyone to see
it, I should join their organization and work for them. They took my student ID from my
purse. If I refused to do what they wanted, they said, they would send a copy of the tape
to my parents and blackmail them for all the money they were worth. I had no choice. I
told them I would do as they said, that it didn't matter to me. And it really didn't matter.

Nothing mattered to me then. They pointed out that my income would go down if I joined
their organization, because they would take seventy percent, but that I would no longer
have to go to the trouble of finding customers by myself or worry about the police. They
would send me high-quality customers. If I went on propositioning men indis criminately,
I would end up strangled to death in some hotel room.
"After that, I didn't have to stand on street corners anymore. All I had to do was show
up at their office in the evening, and they would tell me which hotel to go to. They sent
me good customers, as they had promised. I'm not sure why, but I received special
treatment. Maybe it was because I looked so innocent. I had an air of breeding about me
that the other girls lacked. There were probably a lot of customers who wanted this not-
so-professional type. The other girls had three or more customers a day, but I could get
away with seeing only one or, at most, two. The other girls carried beepers with them and
had to hurry to some run-down hotel when the office called them to sleep with men of
uncertain background. In my case, though, I always had a proper appointment in a proper
first-class hotel- or sometimes even a condo. My customers were usually older men, rarely
young ones.
"The office paid me once a week-not as much as I used to make on my own, but not a
bad amount including individual tips from customers. Some customers wanted me to do
some pretty weird things for them, of course, but I didn't mind. The weirder the request,
the bigger the tip. A few of the men started asking for me on a regular basis. These
tended to be good tippers. I saved my money in several different accounts. But actually,
by then, the money didn't matter to me. It was just rows of figures, I was living for one
thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.
"I would wake up in the morning and lie there, checking to see that my body was not
sensing anything that could be called pain. I would open my eyes, slowly collect my
thoughts, and then, one part at a time, check the feeling I had in my body from head to
foot. I had no pain at all. Did this mean that there was nothing hurting me or that, even
though there was pain, I was not feeling it? I couldn't tell the difference. Either way, it
didn't hurt. In fact, I had no sensations at all. After this procedure, I would get out of bed,
go to the bathroom, and brush my teeth. Then I would strip off my pajamas and take a hot
shower. There was a terrible lightness to my body. It was so light and airy, it didn't feel
like my body. I felt as if my spirit had taken up residence inside a body that was not my
own. I looked at it in the mirror, but between myself and the body I saw there, I felt a
long, terrible distance.
"A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I
had it, I couldn't find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and
this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to the world -this world
that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its
unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world had
ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.
"I began to cry a lot. In the afternoons I would go to a park-the Shin-juku Imperial
Gardens or Yoyogi Park- to sit on the grass and cry. Sometimes I would cry for an hour or
two at a time, sobbing out loud. Passersby would stare at me, but I didn't care. I wished
that I had died that time, that I had ended my life on the night of May twenty-ninth. How
much better off I would be! But now I could not even die. In my numb ness, I lacked the
strength to kill myself. I felt nothing: no pain, no joy. All feeling was gone. And I was not

even me."
Creta Kano took a deep breath and held it. Then she picked up her cof fee cup, stared
into it for a while, gave her head a little shake, and put the cup back on the saucer.
"It was around that time that I met Noboru Wataya."
"Noboru Wataya?! As a customer?!"
Creta Kano nodded in silence.
"But- " I began, then stopped to consider my words for a time. "I'm having a little
trouble with this. Your sister told me the other day that Noboru Wataya raped you. Was
that something separate from what you're telling me now?"
Creta Kano took the handkerchief from her lap and dabbed at her mouth again. Then
she looked directly at me. Something about her eyes stirred my heart in a way I found
unsettling.
"I'm sorry to bother you," she said, "but I wonder if I might have another cup of
coffee."
"Of course," I said. I transferred her cup from the table to the tray and carried it into
the kitchen. Waiting for the coffee to boil, I leaned against the drainboard, with my hands
thrust in my pockets. When I carried the coffee back into the living room, Creta Kano had
vanished from the sofa. Her bag, her handkerchief, every visible sign of her, was gone. I
went to the front entrance, from which her shoes were gone as well.
Terrific.