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Otoko’s own story, it was something he had written. He had added imaginative and fictional touches of his own, and a certain idealization. Leaving that aside, who could say which was the real Otoko—the one he had described, or the one she might have created in telling her own story?
    Still, the girl in his novel was Otoko. The novel could not have existed without their love affair. And it was because of her that it continued to be so widely read. If he had never met her he would never have known such a love. To find a love like that, at thirty, might be taken as good luck or bad, he could not say which, but there was no doubt that it had given him a fortunate debut as an author.
    Oki had called his novel
A Girl of Sixteen.
It was an ordinary, straightforward title, but in those days people thought it shocking that a teen-age schoolgirl should take a lover, have a premature baby, suffer a lapse of sanity. To Oki, her lover, it had not seemed shocking. And of course he had not written about it in that spirit, nor had he regarded her as strange. Like the title, the author’s attitude was straightforward, and Otoko was depicted as a pure, ardent young girl. He had tried to bring to life his impression of her face, her figure, the way she moved. In short, he had poured all his fresh, youthful love into the book. Probably that was why it hadbeen so successful. It was the tragic love story of a very young girl and a man himself still young but with a wife and child: only the beauty of it had been heightened, to the point that it was unmarred by any moral questioning.
    In the days when he was secretly meeting Otoko, she once startled him by saying: “You’re the kind who’s always worrying about what other people think, aren’t you? You ought to be bolder.”
    “I thought I was shameless enough. How about right now?”
    “No, I’m not talking about us.” She paused. “It’s everything—you ought to be more yourself.”
    Oki reflected on himself, at a loss to reply. Long afterward her words stuck in his mind. He felt it was because she loved him that this child could see through his character and his life. He had gone on to indulge himself often enough, but whenever he began to worry about other people’s opinions he remembered her words. He remembered her as she said them.
    He had stopped caressing her for a moment. Otoko, perhaps thinking it was because of what she had said, nestled her face in the crook of his arm. Then she began to bite, harder and harder. Oki kept his arm still, bearing the pain. He could feel her tears on his skin.
    “You’re hurting me,” he said, grasping her by the hair and drawing her away. Blood was oozing from the teeth marks in his arm. Otoko licked the wound.
    “Hurt me too,” she said. Oki gazed at her arm—truly the arm of a young girl—and ran his hand up it from thefingertips to the shoulder. He kissed her shoulder. She squirmed with pleasure.
    It was not because she had said “You ought to be more yourself” that Oki wrote
A Girl of Sixteen
, but as he was writing it he remembered those words. Two years after he parted from her the novel was published. Otoko was living in Kyoto. Her mother must have left Tokyo because of his failure to respond to her appeal; probably she could no longer endure the sorrow that she shared with her daughter. What had they thought of his novel, of his winning success with a work that touched their lives so deeply? To be sure, no one brought up the question of the model for the heroine of the young author’s novel. Only after Oki was in his fifties, and people were beginning to investigate his career, had it become known that the character was based on Otoko. That was after her mother had died, and by then Otoko had made a name for herself as a painter, and photographs of her with the caption “the heroine of
A Girl of Sixteen
” had begun to appear in magazines. He imagined that the photographs were used without her consent. Naturally she