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  'Oh,' Kenji said, turning around at last. 'You haven't left yet?' He had apparently been in a fight, and there was blood oozing from a cut on his lip. Yayoi said nothing but stood rooted to the spot, trying to control the anger that was coursing through her. 'What's the matter?' Kenji muttered, apparently oblivious to her rage. 'Can't you be nice once in a while?'

  At that moment, her patience snapped. With lightning speed she slipped off her belt and wrapped it around his neck.

  Kenji made choking sounds, trying to look around at her, but Yayoi pulled up and back, tightening the belt in one motion. Gasping, he tried to get his fingers around the belt, but it had already dug into his neck. Yayoi watched intently as he scratched at the leather, and then yanked even harder. His neck bent back at an odd angle, and his fingers twitched meaninglessly in the air. He needs to suffer more, she thought. He's got no right to go on living like this! She planted her left foot on the floor, and with the right one she pushed against his back. A sound like a frog's croak escaped from somewhere in his throat. It feels so good, she told herself. Strange that she'd never known she had such cruelty inside. Still, she found this thrilling.

  Kenji had gone limp by now. He sat awkwardly on the step, shoes still on his feet. His torso bent over his knees while his neck arched back.

  'Not yet,' Yayoi murmured, continuing to pull on the belt. 'I still don't forgive you.' It wasn't so much that she wanted him to die like this, just that she wanted to be sure she would never have to see his face again, never have to hear his voice.

  How long had she stayed like that? He lay on his back now, completely still, so she reached down and felt for a pulse in his neck. Nothing. There was a small wet patch on the front of his pants. Realising that he must have pissed himself in the final seconds made her want to laugh.

  'Couldn't you have been nice once in a while?' she said aloud.

  She had no idea how much longer she stood there, but at last she came to her senses, realising that Milk was crying.

  'What are we going to do now, Milk?' she muttered. 'I've killed him.' The cat made a sound like a little shriek, and Yayoi gave the same in reply. She had done something that was irreversible, but she felt absolutely no regret. So be it, she whispered to herself. She'd had no other choice.

  Going back to the living room, she calmly looked at the clock on the wall. Just eleven. Almost time to leave for the factory. She phoned Masako's house.

  'Hello?' Fortunately, it was Masako who answered. Yayoi took a deep breath.

  'It's me, Yayoi,' she said.

  'Hi,' said Masako. 'What's up? Are you taking the night off?'

  'No, I just don't know what to do.'

  'About what?' She sounded genuinely concerned. 'Has something happened?'

  'It has.' She might as well get it over with. 'I've killed him.' There was a brief silence, and then Masako spoke again, her voice still calm.

  'Are you serious?'

  'Dead serious,' Yayoi said. 'I've strangled him.' There was another pause, this one perhaps half a minute long; but Yayoi knew somehow that it wasn't because Masako was shocked but rather because she was thinking over the situation. When she spoke again, Yayoi knew she'd been right.

  'But what do you want to do?' Masako said. Yayoi was quiet for a moment, not fully understanding what she was asking. 'I mean, tell me what you want to do about this. I'm willing to help.'

  'Me? I'd like things to go on just as they have been. My kids are still small, and . . .'As she spoke, tears welled up in her eyes and the horror of the situation finally hit her.

  'I understand,' Masako said. 'I'll be right over. Did anyone else see what happened?'

  'I don't know,' Yayoi said, looking around. Her eyes fell on Milk, who was cowering under the sofa. 'Just the cat,' she told her.

  'Okay,' Masako said, a hint of gentle laughter in her voice. 'Wait right there.'

  'Thank you,' Yayoi said, hanging up. As she crouched down to wait, her kneecap rubbed up against her stomach, but she no longer felt any pain.

  6

  When she hung up the phone, Masako noticed that the words on the calendar hanging right in front of her looked blurry. It was the first time she could remember being dizzy from shock. She had known something was wrong with Yayoi last night, but she didn't like to intrude in other people's lives. Still, here she was, getting involved. Was she just asking for trouble? She steadied herself against the wall and waited for her vision to return to normal, then suddenly remembered that her son, Nobuki, had been stretched out on the couch watching television. She spun around, but he was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone up to his room while she was talking to Yayoi. Her husband, Yoshiki, had had a drink after dinner and gone to bed early, so it seemed that no one in the house had heard what she'd said on the phone. Feeling slightly relieved, she began to think about what to do next. But she realised there was no time to think; she had to act. She would come up with some sort of plan in the car.

  Grabbing her keys, she yelled up the stairs, 'I'm leaving for work. Make sure you turn off the gas.' There was no answer. She knew that Nobuki had begun smoking and drinking recently while she was out of the house, but she also knew there was little she could do about it. He was heading into the summer of his seventeenth year, apparently without any idea what he wanted to do or be, without any hopes or passions.

  As a freshman at a public high school, the boy had been caught with some tickets to a rave that someone had forced on him. He was accused of trying to sell them and expelled from school. The harshness of the punishment was clearly meant as a warning to the other students, but, whatever the reason, the shock seemed to affect his nerves and he suddenly stopped talking. For a time, Masako searched desperately for a way to reach her son, but no one seemed to have the answer; and she suspected that Nobuki himself had become resigned to this state of affairs. At any rate, the time for searching for solutions had passed. It was enough, perhaps, that he went each day to his part-time job as a plasterer. When you had children, Masako believed, you couldn't just cut them off if things didn't go as planned.

  She stood in front of the small room off the entrance hall, listening to the faint sound of her husband snoring through the thin door. The room had originally been intended for storage, but at some point he had begun sleeping here. She lingered by the door for a moment, thinking. In actual fact, they had begun sleeping in separate rooms before they'd moved to this house, while Masako was still working in an office. She was used to it now, the three of them in different rooms, and she no longer thought of it as lonely or abnormal.

  Yoshiki worked for a construction company that was affiliated with one of the big real estate conglomerates. The name of the company sounded impressive enough, but he'd once said that when things got tough financially the parent company didn't treat them very well. Beyond that, though, he had never had much to say about work, and he disliked it when she brought up the subject. She had no idea what sort of businessman he was, what he was like at the office.

  He had been two years ahead of her in the high school where they'd met. She had been attracted to what seemed to be a personal integrity that kept him aloof from the world, but she had to admit that this same integrity, this unwillingness to deceive or embellish, made him uniquely unsuited to a competitive business like construction. And the proof was he had already strayed far off a successful career track. More than likely Yoshiki had his own path to follow, one that had very little to do with other people. It was his alone; no one else had made him follow it. Masako knew that there was more than a little resemblance between her husband, who hated the business world and spent his free time shut away in this little room like some mountain hermit, and her son who had given up communicating with the world altogether. For her part, she had decided that there was very little she could do or say to either of them.

  They were quite a trio: a son who had given up both education and conversation, a husband in the grips of a depression, and Masako who had opted for the night shift after b