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baseball. That was the only way this could make any sense to me—if he knew nothing about the game itself. But then he pulled the rug out again.
    “No-hit, no-run, eh? That takes me back. We were all boys in my family, a gang of brothers. I was the youngest, but all of us played baseball. We lived way out in the country, you understand, cornfields as far as the eye could see, and in summer we used to do nothing but play catch. There wasn’t much else to do, for one thing, and my father was a baseball fan too. I still remember the summer I was eight years old, when my second oldest brother pitched a no-hit, no-run game.”
    Just an hour earlier, Frank had told me he had two older sisters. These two sisters, I distinctly remembered him saying, used to imitate TV comedians. But now he came from a family of only boys who all played baseball. The weird thing was that there was no conceivable need for him to lie right now. It was odd that he didn’t know who Nomo was, but no reason to initiate a coverup. This wasn’t a conference room where vital business talks were taking place, it was the waiting room outside a peep show, and I wasn’t some important client or supplier but just a nightlife guide. If he had simply said, “Nomo, eh? Never heard of him,” I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
    “It was the middle of nowhere, but they made good beer there, and we used to all play baseball and then drink beer. I was just a kid but of course they made me drink too because you couldn’t call yourself a man if you couldn’t knock back a beer. That’s what it’s like in the countryside in America, cornfields stretching forever in every direction, the sky so blue it’s shocking, and unbelievably hot in summer. The sun is like a hammer pounding you down, and a weak man could pass out from just standing there. But the amazing thing was, when we were playing baseball the heat didn’t bother us at all, it didn’t even seem that hot. Even if the pitcher was getting bombed and we were stuck out in the field for a long time, even then we didn’t notice the heat.”
    Frank seemed excited by these memories, if that’s what they were, and was speaking much faster than normal. I tried to concentrate, to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but at some point I started remembering my own younger days. I played baseball in middle school. Our team wasn’t very good, but I’ve never forgotten those summer practice sessions or the games we played. What Frank had just said was true: even on days when it was so hot you could hardly bear to be outside, you forgot all about it once you started playing. For anybody who’s had the experience, those two words “summer” and “baseball” are bound to summon up the smells of grass and dirt and oiled leather. It made me so nostalgic I completely forgot that Frank was almost certainly lying.
    “I know,” I said. “When your team’s fielding, and you’re leading by a couple of runs, and it’s two outs bases loaded, you don’t notice how hot it is. But if you close your eyes for a second, suddenly you realize it’s like being inside an oven. In fact, that’s the hottest I’ve ever been. There’s no heat like the heat you experience playing baseball in summer. And there’s no memory more beautiful.”
    I had launched into this little soliloquy without even thinking. I was enjoying my own reminiscences, and it all came bubbling out fairly smoothly. I didn’t have to stop and think about present perfect or comparative degree or whatever.
    “So you played baseball too, Kenji?” Frank asked without much enthusiasm.
    “Yeah. Yes I did.”
    I was glad to be able to say that. And now that I thought about it, Frank had probably grown up in a complicated family situation, one that a Japanese like me would find difficult to comprehend. We often see magazine articles about the divorce rate in America being over fifty percent or something, but that doesn’t give us a real sense