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washing off the dirt, but abandoned the idea. Without realizing it, I’d lost the urge to keep myself clean. The trembling of my body mounted steadily. Something left a dark stain on the towel. I turned the light on and found my finger was bleeding where I’d torn off a nail in scrabbling at the earthen wall of the pit. It was too much trouble to look for disinfectant; I bound the towel round it and went shivering back to my own bedroom-study. The shivering wouldn’t stop, and before long I developed a fever. My whole body began to throb with a dull ache, separate from the sharp pain in my injured finger. It was a cruder version of the ache I always felt at dawn. My fingers, I realized now, had unconsciously been trying to dig out the pieces of broken brick and bring down the earthen wall to bury me alive. The shivering and the dull ache increased unbearably. And I understood a little of that daily experience on awakening, when at dawn I felt my body dismembered and aching dully in each of its several parts.

Family Reunion
    O N the afternoon of the day that a telegram came from my brother announcing the abrupt curtailment of his wanderings in America and his impending arrival at Haneda airport, my wife and I met my brother’s teen-age friends at the airport. There was a storm over the Pacific and the plane was late. We, the welcoming party for Takashi Nedokoro, took a room in a hotel at the airport to wait for the delayed plane. My wife, with her back to the window shaded by its plastic venetian blind (not that the blind completely shut out the light from outside, for a dim haze lingered in the room like smoke with no exit)—with her face, that is, shadowed so that no one should detect her expression—seated herself in a low armchair and silently began to drink whisky. A cut-glass tumbler was clasped in her left hand, which had a darkened appearance like the wet bough of a tree, and a whisky bottle and ice bucket stood next to the shoes beside her bare feet. She’d brought the whisky from home and ordered ice at the hotel.
    Takashi’s friends were sitting on the bed, which still had its cover on, huddled together like the young of an animal in their lair, and with knees drawn up to chin were watching a sports program on a transistor television set that hummed like a swarm of mosquitoes. I’d met Hoshio and Momoko twice before. Shortly after my brother had disappeared, allowing my friend to pay for his antibiotic capsules, they had come to see me, hoping to learn his latest whereabouts. By their next visit, a few months later, a picture postcard or the like must have come just for them from my brother, for they knew an address where he could be contacted, but they refused to tell me, merely demanding money so that they could send him a few necessities. Their personalities had made no particular mark either on my wife or myself, though we were mildly impressed by the way my brother’s absenceseemed to have left them at a loss, and by the devotion that this suggested.
    As I drank my beer, which looked black in the dim light of the room, I peered through the slats of the blind at the vast space in which ponderous jetliners and gallant propeller craft were landing and taking off without cease. The area between the runways and the room where we lurked behind our blind was traversed at eye level by a steel and concrete overpass. A party of schoolgirls doing the sights of the airport passed along it, all bent forward with a cautious air. As the flock of kids in their drab uniforms reached the bend in the overpass, they momentarily appeared to be rising up toward the cloudy sky like the aircraft on the runways. The effect was oddly unsettling. But what seemed at first sight to be the girls’ shoes falling away from their feet were in fact pigeons. A number of them swirled up into the air, and one came and alighted, with unnatural movements as though it had been shot down, on the narrow parapet spread with dry sand