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immediately beyond the blind. Taking a more careful look, I saw that it was lame. It was obviously too fat, presumably through lack of exercise, and couldn’t manage a smooth landing. From its swelling neck and on down its belly lay a dark shadow like the skin of my wife’s hand. Then without warning the fat pigeon took off (the space beyond the soundproof window must have been full of explosive noises which would startle a pigeon, but since none of them reached this side, all occurrences outside seemed to lack continuity), stopped quite still about seven inches in front of my eyes like a black blot in a Rorschach test, and flew off briskly out of sight.
    Startled, I drew my head back. I turned and saw that my sudden movement had obviously surprised both my wife, who nonetheless still grasped the tumbler in her hand, and my brother’s young friends, though they were still staring at the television.
    “The storm must be pretty bad for the plane to be as late as this,” I said to cover my embarrassment.
    “There’s no telling just how big a storm it is.”
    “If the plane’s thrown around a lot, Takashi’ll be terribly scared. The idea of dying with a lot of physical pain scares him twice as much as most people.”
    “They say you don’t suffer much in a plane crash. It’s all over in a second.”
    “Takashi’s not the type to be scared,” Hoshio broke in in a tensevoice as though he could keep quiet no longer. The statement interested me, being the first words, apart from perfunctory greetings, that he’d uttered that afternoon.
    “He gets scared all right,” I said. “If anything, he’s the type that’s always been prey to some fear or other. Once, when he was still a kid, he got a tiny cut in the pad of his finger and about a hundredth of a milligram of blood oozed out. He spewed his guts up and passed out.”
    The blood in question had welled from a wound made when I pricked the ball of my brother’s right middle finger with the point of a knife. He’d boasted to me that he could slash his own palm open without turning a hair. So I gave him the fright he deserved. He’d often insisted to me that he felt fear neither of violence, nor of any form of pain, nor of death itself, and each time I contradicted him flatly. The result had been my little game. Takashi too had been keen to be tested and prove himself.
    “A drop of blood oozed gently out of a tiny wound at the tip of his middle finger,” I said, rubbing in the details in order to make fun of my brother’s devoted bodyguard. “It looked like the eye of a young eel. We were both looking at it when Takashi suddenly puked and fainted.”
    “You can’t scare Taka, I saw how cool he was in the June demonstrations—he just wasn’t scared.”
    I found myself more and more intrigued by the naive, stubborn antagonism shown by my brother’s friends. My wife was listening too, her eyes on Hoshio. I took another look at the young man, who now sat upright on the bed, steadily returning my gaze. He had the air of someone straight off the farm, of a young migrant come to town. His roughly hewn features, though not ugly when considered individually, were out of balance, as if they’d decided to ignore each other, so that the total effect was comic. The characteristic air of dim-wittedness, a compound of the sullen and the easygoing, that lay over his face like a transparent net was absolutely typical of a peasant boy. His woolen jacket striped with light and dark brown was worn with an air of reverent care, though the odds were that it would soon deteriorate into a crumpled, baggy heap more like a large dead cat.
    “Admittedly, Takashi dearly wanted to become the brutal type for whom violent behavior is the norm, but even when he happened to succeed he still gave the impression of being an amateur at it. Isn’t that a little different from courage?” I was still uninterested in convincing him but hoped to put an end to the argument with this