It wasn't the first time he'd heard it. It was the same old quarrel repeated night after night, the same tired old taunts and complaints every time. Not only would she complain about having to look after her senile father-in-law and aphasic daughter, she would also accuse him of physical abuse and not caring for his family in the least. She claimed that she felt she was locked up in a prison cell. She bitterly lamented how deeply she hated her existence, how she couldn't take it anymore. He had but a single reply to all her complaints: month after month, he never brought home less than a million yen.
She had declared that she intended to leave him. He reacted with derision. Did she have anywhere to go? Who would have her? Had she forgotten how he'd taken her in and fed her? More than anything, how did she think she could make a living? She was incompetent and she'd end up dying in a ditch somewhere.
'I'm leaving' was just another tired old line paraded out again and again until it had completely lost any value it may once have had as a threat. She kept saying she would leave him, but she never even tried. She didn't have parents she could depend on, and she worried about her kids' future and her own job prospects.
But then Nanako said something she had never, ever said before. Exhausted from unleashing her torrent of grievances, she seemed almost to have shrunk. Her strength drained from her shoulders, she muttered as if to herself, 'It'd be awful if he turned out like you.'
This last remark pierced Hiroyuki's heart like a barbed fishing hook. What she meant was clear enough in light of her previous taunts. If she did leave him and desert the children, their motherless son would grow up and turn out like Hiroyuki. That was what Nanako saw as 'awful'.
It had been twenty years now since Hiroyuki's father had almost drowned at sea. Hiroyuki's mother had disappeared around the same time. He'd lost his mother when he was about Katsumi's age. His mother had deserted her family, running off with a younger man… At least, that was the account given him by his father. At the time, however, his father's senility had already been kicking in, making it difficult to gauge how much of what he said was true. For all that, there was no reason to believe that his mother had left for any other reason. As far as Hiroyuki could remember, his mother and father had done nothing but fight. It certainly seemed quite plausible that his mother, unable to endure his father's violence any longer, just left him and disappeared.
Hiroyuki had taken the news of having been abandoned by his mother without displaying any emotion, or so he believed. He could not remember having received much, if any, affection from his mother, and his only value had seemed to lie in deflecting his father's violence from her. As he grew older, however, the fact that his mother deserted him began to turn increasingly into a feeling that he was an unwanted presence in the world. Hiroyuki grew up feeling constantly resentful, and his self-confidence was always so fragile that it could be shattered with a single blow.
Perhaps that was why he'd gone to pieces that evening. Without understanding the cause of the blaze raging in him, Hiroyuki got to his feet, hit his head on a chest of drawers, and tottered across the room, coming down on top of his wife. It was as though flames erupted from every pore of his body. He was never one to waste time on words, but this assault was unlike previous ones, and his wife probably sensed what was coming. She did not attempt to cry out, but simply closed her eyes as if in resignation, and placed her hands on her husband's, which gripped her neck. It almost seemed as though she wanted him to squeeze harder, and Hiroyuki straddled her as she lay there, bringing the full weight of his body on his hands. When he gently removed them, Nanako was dead.
Hiroyuki got to his feet and for some reason switched off the fluorescent light. He turned on the small bedside lamp instead, shining it on his wife's face. She looked to be asleep. She was now released from her prison cell. She even looked content.
He strained his ears. There was not a sound to be heard. His father, his son, and his daughter were all asleep. The silence was so complete that he almost felt he could hear their breathing as they slept.
He already knew how to dispose of his wife's body. He would throw it into the sea. If he sank the body in the sea south of Breakwater No. 2, it would never be found.
He wrapped his wife's body in a fine nylon net and carried her over his shoulder onto his boat. He then dumped the body in the boat's well, there to stay until he could permanently dispose of it. That was all he could do then. The rest could wait until the day after next, when he'd sink the body while out fishing. Persuading himself thus, he put the planks back on the hold and went home.
He drank a glass or two of sake and went to sleep, and something happened in his mind that was very much like throwing his wife's body down a well and putting a lid on it. His brain cells confined the memory of his deed to its deepest recesses and capped it with a lid - one that was destined to be reopened soon enough.