after the quake

“It said that, too.”

“What? Your wife’s note?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No kidding,” Shimao said, lowering her head to Komura’s chest again. He felt her earring against his skin like a secret object.

“Come to think of it,” Komura said, “what’s the something inside that box I brought up here?”

“Is it bothering you?”

“It wasn’t bothering me before. But now, I don’t know, it’s starting to.”

“Since when?”

“Just now.”

“All of a sudden?”

“Yeah, once I started thinking about it, all of a sudden.”

“I wonder why it’s started to bother you now, all of a sudden?”

Komura glared at the ceiling for a minute to think. “I wonder.”

They listened to the moaning of the wind. The wind: it came from someplace unknown to Komura, and it blew past to someplace unknown to him.

“I’ll tell you why,” Shimao said in a low voice. “It’s because that box contains the something that was inside you. You didn’t know that when you carried it here and gave it to Keiko with your own hands. Now, you’ll never get it back.”

Komura lifted himself from the mattress and looked down at the woman. Tiny nose, moles on the earlobe. In the room’s deep silence, his heart beat with a loud, dry sound. His bones cracked as he leaned forward. For one split second, Komura realized that he was on the verge of committing an act of overwhelming violence.

“Just kidding,” Shimao said when she saw the look on his face. “I said the first thing that popped into my head. It was a lousy joke. I’m sorry. Try not to let it bother you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Komura forced himself to calm down and, after a glance around the room, sank his head into his pillow again. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The huge bed stretched out around him like a nocturnal sea. He heard the freezing wind. The fierce pounding of his heart shook his bones.

“Are you starting to feel a little as if you’ve come a long way?” Shimao asked.

“Hmm. Now I feel as if I’ve come a very long way,” Komura answered honestly.

Shimao traced a complicated design on Komura’s chest with her fingertip, as if casting a magic spell.

“But really,” she said, “you’re just at the beginning.”

landscape with flatiron

Junko was watching television when the phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Keisuke sat in the corner of the room wearing headphones, eyes half closed, head swinging back and forth as his long fingers flew over the strings of his electric guitar. He was practicing a fast passage and obviously had no idea the phone was ringing. Junko picked up the receiver.

“Did I wake you?” Miyake asked in his familiar muffled Osaka accent.

“Nah,” Junko said. “We’re still up.”

“I’m at the beach. You should see all this driftwood! We can make a big one this time. Can you come down?”

“Sure,” Junko said. “Let me change clothes. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She slipped on a pair of tights and then her jeans. On top she wore a turtleneck sweater, and she stuffed a pack of cigarettes into the pocket of her woolen coat. Purse, matches, key ring. She nudged Keisuke in the back with her foot. He tore off his headphones.

“I’m going for a bonfire on the beach,” she said.

“Miyake again?” Keisuke asked with a scowl. “You gotta be kidding. It’s February, ya know. Twelve o’clock at night! You’re gonna go make a bonfire now?”

“That’s OK, you don’t have to come. I’ll go by myself.”

Keisuke sighed. “Nah, I’ll come. Gimme a minute to change.”

He turned off his amp, and over his pajamas he put on pants, a sweater, and a down jacket which he zipped up to his chin. Junko wrapped a scarf around her neck and put on a knitted hat.

“You guys’re crazy,” Keisuke said as they took the path down to the beach. “What’s so great about bonfires?”

The night was cold, but there was no wind at all. Words left their mouths to hang frozen in midair.

“What’s so great about Pearl Jam?” Junko said. “Just a lot of noise.”

“Pearl Jam has ten million fans all over the world,” Keisuke said.

“Well, bonfires have had fans all over the world for fifty thousand years,” Junko said.

“You’ve got something there,” Keisuke said.

“People will be lighting fires long after Pearl Jam is gone.”

“You’ve got something there, too.” Keisuke pulled his right hand out of his pocket and put his arm around Junko’s shoulders. “The trouble is, I don’t have a damn thing to do with anything fifty thousand years ago—or fifty thousand years from now, either. Nothing. Zip. What’s important is now. Who knows when the world is gonna end? Who can think about the future? The only thing that matters is whether I can get my stomach full right now and get it up right now. Right?”

They climbed the steps to the top of the breakwater. Miyake was down in his usual spot on the beach, collecting driftwood of all shapes and sizes and making a neat pile. One huge log must have taken a major effort to drag to the spot.

The light of the moon transformed the shoreline into a sharpened sword blade. The winter waves were strangely hushed as they washed over the sand. Miyake was the only one on the beach.

“Pretty good, huh?” he said with a puff of white breath.

“Incredible!” Junko said.

“This happens every once in a while. You know, we had that stormy day with the big waves. Lately, I can tell from the sound, like, ‘Today some great firewood’s going to wash up.’ ”

“OK, OK, we know how good you are,” Keisuke said, rubbing his hands together. “Now let’s get warm. It’s so damn cold, it’s enough to shrivel your balls.”

“Hey, take it easy. There’s a right way to do this. First you’ve got to plan it. And when you’ve got it all arranged so it’ll work without a hitch, you light it slow- like. You can’t rush it. ‘The patient beggar earns his keep.’ ”

“Yeah,” Keisuke said. “Like the patient hooker earns her keep.”

Miyake shook his head. “You’re too young to be making such crummy jokes all the time,” he said.

Miyake had done a skillful job of interlacing the bigger logs and smaller scraps until his pile had come to resemble some kind of avant-garde sculpture. Stepping back a few paces, he would examine in detail the form he had constructed, adjust some of the pieces, then circle around to the other side for another look, repeating the process several times. As always. All he had to do was look at the way the pieces of wood were combined to begin having mental images of the subtlest movement of the rising flames, the way a sculptor can imagine the pose of a figure hidden in a lump of stone.

Miyake took his time, but once he had everything arranged to his satisfaction, he nodded as if to say to himself, That’s it: perfect. Next, he bunched up sheets of newspaper that he had brought along, slipped them through the gaps at the bottom of the pile, and lit them with a plastic cigarette lighter. Junko took her cigarettes from her pocket, put one in her mouth, and struck a match. Narrowing her eyes, she stared at Miyake’s hunched back and balding head. This was it: the one heart-stopping moment of the whole procedure. Would the fire catch? Would it erupt in giant flames?