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sun, she might very well disappear.
    “Starting next week I’d like you to come to my office three times a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can start at ten a.m., and you can leave at four. That way you’ll miss the rush hour. I can’t pay you much, but the work is easy, and you can read when there’s nothing to do. One condition is that you take private lessons in Italian twice a week. You already know Spanish, so it shouldn’t be so hard. And I’d like you to practice English conversation and driving whenever you have the time. Do you think you can do that?”
    “I think so,” Sumire replied. Her voice sounded like it was somebody else’s coming from another room. No matter what I’m asked to do, no matter what I’m ordered to do, all I can do is say yes, she realized. Miu gazed steadily at Sumire, still holding her hand. Sumire could make out clearly her own figure reflected deep inside Miu’s dark eyes. It looked to her like her own soul being sucked into the other side of a mirror. Sumire loved that vision, and at the same time it frightened her.
    Miu smiled, charming lines appearing at the corners of her eyes. “Let’s go to my place. There’s something I want to show you.”

CHAPTER 4
    T he summer vacation of my freshman year in college, I took a random trip by myself around the Hokuriku region, ran across a woman eight years older than me who was also traveling alone, and we spent one night together. It struck me, at the time, as something straight out of the opening of Soseki’s novel
Sanshiro.
    The woman worked in the foreign-exchange section of a bank in Tokyo. Whenever she had some time off, she’d grab a few books and set out on her own. “Much less tiring to travel alone,” she explained. She had a certain charm, which made it hard to figure out why she’d have any interest in someone like me—a quiet, skinny, eighteen-year-old college kid. Still, sitting across from me in the train, she seemed to enjoy our harmless banter. She laughed out loud a lot. And—atypically—I chattered away. We happened to get off at the same station, at Kanazawa. “Do you have a place to stay?” she asked me. No, I replied; I’d never made a hotel reservation in my life. I have a hotel room, she told me. You can stay if you’d like. “Don’t worry about it,” she went on, “it costs the same whether there’s one or two people.”
    I was nervous the first time we made love, which made things awkward. I apologized to her.
    “Aren’t we polite!” she said. “No need to apologize for every little thing.”
    After her shower she threw on a bathrobe, grabbed two cold beers from the fridge, and handed one to me.
    “Are you a good driver?” she asked.
    “I just got my license, so I wouldn’t say so. Just average.”
    She smiled. “Same with me. I think I’m pretty good, but my friends don’t agree. Which makes me average, too, I suppose. You must know a few people who think they’re great drivers, right?”
    “Yeah, I guess I do.”
    “And there must be some who aren’t very good.”
    I nodded. She took a quiet sip of beer and gave it some thought.
    “To a certain extent those kinds of things are inborn. Talent, you could call it. Some people are nimble; others are all thumbs. . . . Some people are quite attentive, and others aren’t. Right?”
    Again I nodded.
    “OK, consider this. Say you’re going to go on a long trip with someone by car. And the two of you will take turns driving. Which type of person would you choose? One who’s a good driver but inattentive, or an attentive person who’s not such a good driver?”
    “Probably the second one,” I said.
    “Me too,” she replied. “What we have here is very similar. Good or bad, nimble or clumsy—those aren’t important. What’s important is being attentive. Staying calm, being alert to things around you.”
    “Alert?” I asked.
    She just smiled and didn’t say anything.
    A while later we made love a second time,