It was a rather gloomy house. The gate had already halfway fallen apart and was very narrow due to the overgrown vegetation. The stepping stones were covered in moss, making the entranceway even gloomier and darker. There was no nameplate.
The woman who came out of the house was around forty years old and dressed in typical housewife attire: a sweater, skirt, and white socks.
Iwako asked her for Oba.
“Come in,” said the woman. “He’s waiting for ya.”
She spoke casually and made no attempt at faking a smile, but her expression was friendly. She seemed very accustomed to welcoming and entertaining guests.
The house was bitterly cold and dank. It must have been quite old. The hallway was dim, and the rooms with sliding doors appeared to be empty. The hallway floor was hair-raisingly chilly.
The woman suddenly took a left at the end of the hallway.
“Here we are…” She got on her knees and called out to the person in the room, “Your guest has arrived.”
She carefully opened the darkened sliding door with both hands.
Oba was sitting next to the window. After the woman left, Iwako took off her coat and said, “Sorry I’m late… Were you waiting long?”
Iwako always spoke quietly. People often told her so at the fabric shop where she worked in Azuchimachi, Osaka. Nevertheless, her voice was perfectly audible, so nobody found it particularly bothersome. Her already quiet voice became even quieter when she spoke to Oba.
“No, not at all. Don’t worry about it,” he calmly assured her, although Iwako still thought he’d probably been waiting a while.
“It’s quite dark in here…”
“Yeah, but they feed you well. This is my second time, so trust me. I’ll make sure you’re satisfied.”
Oba was a fifty-one-year-old man, but his voice was strong and full of life. Maybe it was from all the Noh chanting he did. Iwako was invited to a Noh meetup once before, but…
“Please. Anything but that,” she’d declined. Oba had apparently been learning tea ceremony with his wife, but Iwako didn’t do that, either.
“Sorry I’m so uncultured,” she once told him.
“Liking tea ceremony doesn’t make you cultured. Truly refined women like to have fun—like you,” Oba joked. “In fact, it’s not just women. Having the leeway to take the time to enjoy yourself is what makes anyone refined.”
“Well, I’m already forty-six. I’m sure all people are like this when they’re this old.”
“Not at all. You would think that, but it’s actually quite unusual. If you go to the red-light district, it becomes all about money, and amateurs are bound by the shackles of convention…”
“Ha-ha-ha.”
“So no, Iwako, you’re one in a million. There’s no one else like you.”
Iwako had been spending time with Oba for the past year, but her heart still hadn’t stopped racing whenever she was around him. Every time she saw him, she would be too shy to meet his eyes for the first few minutes. Whenever Oba looked at her fondly, she’d stare at the ground as tears began to well in her eyes. It was happiness mixed with bashfulness. She got so excited that she could hardly breathe and so nervous that she would start feeling dizzy. Iwako would even start regretting coming over to see him. That’s how much of a mess she became around him. Her skin would slowly flush crimson as well.
Iwako looked slender because she knew how to dress and carry herself, yet she was actually a heavy woman. Her smooth, luscious skin, white as porcelain, glowed coyly whenever she was around Oba.
Oba pulled her closer.
“…But what about that woman?” Iwako whispered.
“Don’t worry about her. She’s very slow. Everything here is done in slow motion,” he replied with a laugh. “Anyway, I need to warm you up before you get colder.”
There was a single small portable heater in the room and nothing else. It was a very traditional house in that way.
Oba’s lean, muscular body didn’t have an ounce of fat on it. He was quite tall and brawny for a man his age. “I always used to be bigger than the others, but kids nowadays are all really tall,” he once told Iwako.
How does he always make me feel this way? Iwako wondered in admiration as she leaned into Oba’s tight embrace. The way he held her and the soft lips that fell upon her like warm snow were perfect. She fit perfectly, and that didn’t just mean physically. Oba seemed to fit into the framework of her life like a missing puzzle piece. His body was hard, but his arms, tongue, and lips always felt so soft to her. It didn’t feel like the body of a man—more like the steaming warmth of life. Iwako thought of his body as a sigh of satisfaction gently wrapping around her.
No other man had ever made her feel this way. Before she met Oba, she was with a thirty-eight or thirty-nine-year-old named Kuno.
Iwako had been doing accounting work for her fabric shop for over a decade. Around thirty to forty people worked there, and while the pay wasn’t great, it was a very homey establishment. Everyone thought that Iwako, who looked very plain and reserved, was just a bland middle-aged woman. Even her older sister probably thought she was this gloomy spinster who had lost her chance of ever getting married.
And yet Iwako had this innate quality that only certain highly skilled men could somehow sense. That was how the playboy named Kuno came into her life.
Iwako was fastidious about dating these men who noticed this quality of hers and approached her—and no one else. She had zero interest in ever getting married; simply fooling around with men was very fulfilling.
I want to keep dating until I’m seventy or eighty…
Iwako was happy to pursue romantic endeavors even in old age. Men were something of a hobby of hers.
“I knew it… You’re exactly how I imagined you’d be,” Kuno whispered with deep satisfaction after the first time they’d slept together.
“Oh? And what do you mean by that?”
“Your skin. The first time we met, I thought your skin was so beautiful. Plus, there’s the sounds you make.”
“Sounds?”
“Yeah, the way you moan is so dirty.”
“…Nobody’s ever told me that before.”
“That’s ’cause they’re a bunch of naive fools. You gotta be smart to pick up on how you sound when you moan.”
“I wasn’t trying to sound dirty…”
“It’s a good thing. Your voice really makes the imagination run wild… You’re not like other women. Something about you really stirs a man’s carnal desires. All men have filthy minds deep down…”
“I’ve never been especially popular, though…”
“Psh, don’t lie to me. You’re too much of a freak in bed for me to believe that. Your kinkiness has flavor, like it’s been simmering in a pot for a long time.”
Kuno was a genuine idiot, but Iwako kind of liked that he could smell the freak on her and how he used the phrase carnal desires. Nonetheless, he was a player and quite shallow, so Iwako almost instantly got bored with him. He lacked flavor. She wanted to tell him to come back after he simmered in the pot a little longer.
“Some people can’t see the forest for the trees,” as the saying goes. Too much fooling around would become a drag and eventually cause Iwako to lose sight of her womanly desires—although perhaps that was simply the natural way of things (something that became clear to her when she compared other men with Oba).
Talking to Kuno had bored Iwako out of her skull. He didn’t have a single good trait outside of the sack; he was just a fidgety guy who worked at a small print and copy shop in town.