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For a while she had just three problems. Two were solved in one night. After a great deal of thought,
having decided she didn't need love the way everybody else said they did, or thought they did, at least
not the sort that you couldn't get from a mother or a few close friends, or feel towards a piece of music,
or your homeland, she decided to be seduced, and to let agaijin do the seducing.
He was called Bertil and he was from Malmo in Sweden; two years older than her, spending a year at a
language college in Tokyo. He was blond which she loved and oddly funny, once you got past a layer of
half-hearted Scandinavian gloom. She was still plucking her eyebrows and shaving her legs and arms,
thinking them hairy and horrible, but when they got to the Love Hotel in Senzoku, and he undressed her
-- she'd told him she was a virgin, she hoped he wouldn't be put off by the way she trembled -- he
stroked her pubic hair (so that suddenly she thought,Oh no! The one place I didn't shave! -- and it's a
forest down there!) and said ... well, she was too flustered to remember the exact words, but they were
delighted, admiring words ... and the one word she didn't forget, the one that a quarter of a century later
she still could not hear without shivering; the word which had become almost synonymous with that
feeling of a soft, sensual stroking, was the English word -- how pleased he had sounded to think of it --
luxuriant ...
Bertil had to go back to Sweden a week later; the parting was excitingly bitter-sweet. She threw her
razor away.
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Which left just one problem; she hated the idea of flying. She traipsed out to Narita sometimes, to watch
the jets take off and land. She enjoyed that, it was no ordeal. But the idea of actually getting on to a plane
filled her with horror.
She auditioned for the NHK, the same orchestra she'd heard in Sapporo when she'd been a little girl and
decided she wanted a cello. That shewas nervous about.
But her fate was unstoppable now. She scraped through her last exams atTodai just as she'd scraped
through the rest, but it was still a pass, and she'd hardly finished celebrating when the letter came from the
NHK.
The day before her mother was due to arrive from Sapporo, she went back to the bald summit of the hill
north of the Fuji Five Lakes, and sat there cross-legged in her kagool, listening to the rain drip off the
trees and spatter on her hood, and watched the clouds trail like skirts round the base of Fuji. She took
the letter out a couple of times and reread it. It still said yes; she had the place; it was hers. She kept
thinking something was going to go wrong, and prayed her mother didn't change her mind at the last
moment and in a fit of extravagance fly down to Tokyo.
'In the Caribbean,' Mr Mandamus said in the midst of the storm, pronouncing the name of the sea in the
British manner, with the emphasis on the third syllable, 'if you are on a low-lying island or part of the
coast, you must beware of the slow-timed waves. The normal timing of waves hitting a shore is seven or
eight per minute, but if the frequency becomes four or five beats a minute, you must flee, or be prepared
to meet your maker. First of all, the sky will be cloudless and brassy, and the wind dies, leaving a leaden
heat. The sea goes strangely greasy-looking, becoming uniform and undisturbed except for the long,
ponderous waves; all lesser movements are smothered. The breakers hit the beach with a slow
monotony, regular and machine-like and mindless.
'Then, in the sky; streamers of high cloud like ragged rays of dark sunlight, seeming to imanate from one
place over the horizon. They spread over the head, while in the distance, beneath them, clouds form, and
the sun looks milky, and a halo the colour of ashes surrounds it, so that it begins to look like an eye.
'In time, the sun is put out by the clouds, and it begins to go gloomy; quick dark clouds fill the middle air
while on the horizon a wall of cloud starts to engulf the sky. It is the colour of copper at first. As it comes
closer and grows higher, it darkens, through brown to black, and half the sky is covered by it. It is like an
impossibly tall wave of darkness, tall like the night; the winds around you are still slight and uncertain, but
the surf is hammering the beach like thunder, slow and heavy, like the beat of a cruel god's mighty heart.
'The dark wave falls, the winds land like hammer blows; rain like an ocean falling from the sky; waves
like walls.
'When you think -- if you are still alive to think -- it can grow no worse, the sea retreats, sucked back
into the darkness, leaving the coast far below the lowest low tidemark draining away into a violent night.
Then the ocean returns, in a wave that dwarfs all previous waves; a cliff; a black mountain spilling over
the land like the end of the world.
'Perhaps you have seen satellite photographs of a hurricane; from space, the eye looks tiny and black in
the centre of the white featheriness of the storm. It looks too small and too perfectly round and black to
be natural; you think it is something lying on the film. The hurricanes look very like galaxies, which I hear
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also have black holes in their centres. The eye is maybe thirty kilometres across. The air pressure can be
so low sailors have said blood comes to the mouth and the eardrums ache. The water at the bottom of
the eye is sucked up three metres above the rest of the ocean. Seen from a ship which has survived the
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