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also the breathing profile of the boy asleep beside me, turning and looking deep into his armpit, for his arm was flung about my neck. And I shut my eyes again, not wanting to move, to wake up. I shut my eyes as one pulls the covers over one's head, unwilling to rise.
    What had terrified me now consoled me. How secure, how safe, how warm, those bodies molding mine, those several near, those hundreds farther off. This was as it should have been. Like cells we were within a single form, all breathing, all feeling together. And now it was being alone I dreaded—once more, exposed.
    Yet, one by one, all of us were waking up. And those at the farthest ends, whole miles away it seemed, were now stumbling off; slowly the pressure was growing less. I was standing on the ground, the earth strange against my soles, and shortly I could turn and even stoop to retrieve parts of my trampled clothing, the jeep keys still there in the pocket, safe.
    The man in front whose back I knew so well stirred and turned. The man behind released me, his flesh becoming separate. The boy whose armpit I had studied was now a plain farmhand who gave a sleepy smile, turned to look for his lost loincloth, searched, gave up.
    Then, completely naked, or with dirty loincloths newly tied, or, in my case, the rags of a shirt and most of a pair of trousers, we moved slowly away from each other and out into the brightening day.
    We walked, stumbled, streaked with sweat, with dirt, as though newborn and unsure on our feet, as though our eyes, blinded by the dark so long, were not fully open. There was no smell—except for that of urine, pungent, but not unclean. And now I could see, revealed in the gaps in the thinning crowd, that we were making for the font, the great stone urn in front of every shrine, where we could drink.
    When my turn came I pushed my whole head into that cold, holy water, taking great gulps as though I were breathing it. I came up dripping and the farmboy led me off to a veranda.
    There, on the edge of this large but ordinary shrine, we sat, uncovered in the morning light, and watched the others, our comrades, ourselves, vanish into the empty streets, each alone, silent, surrounded now only by space.
    I felt lost, as though my family were deserting me, as though the world were ending, and when an old priest in his high lacquered hat came by, saw the white foreigner, stopped, surprised, then smiled, I asked: And is the kami happy?
    He nodded, affirmed. The kami was happy.
    It did not occur to me to ask, as it certainly would have twelve hours before, just what this ceremony was all about anyway and why we should stand there all night and why nothing had happened, or had it?
    And so we sat there, recovering, and the priest with his little acolytes, either up early or up all night, brought us small cups of milky ceremonial saké; and the farmer's son, whose raw young body I knew as well as I knew my own, turned with a smile, not at all surprised that I spoke, and asked me my name.
    I told him, then asked his. He told me. What was it? Tadao ... Tadashi? Nakajima ... Nakamura?
    But before long the sun was up, the streets were emptying. Cleansed, tired, staggering, satisfied young men were going off by the hundred, their shadows long behind them. And I found the jeep just as I had left it, and was surprised that the engine turned over—that the gasoline had not evaporated during my century asleep—and drove back to Tokyo, disheveled, content, at peace.
    Over the following year I often thought of this experience. And of the single person it had somehow become: Tadashi Nakajima ... was that his name? Somehow it now seemed to belong to the whole experience, it was the name of everything, of everybody.
    And a year later I went back, not because of young Tadashi, whose face I had quite forgotten, whose very name was blurred. No, because of this experience and what it had meant to me.
    But now it was 1947, and already the local