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too much. Naoko was the girlfriend of my best (and only) friend, Kizuki. The two of them had been close almost from birth, their houses not two hundred yards apart.
    As with most couples who have been together since childhood, there was a casual openness about the relationship of Kizuki and Naoko and little sense that they wanted to be alone together. They were always visiting each other’s homes and eating or playing mah-jongg with each other’s families. I double-dated with them any number of times. Naoko would bring a classmate for me and the four of us would go to the zoo or the pool or a movie. The girls she brought were always pretty, but a little too refined for my taste. I got along better with the somewhat cruder girls from my own public high school who were easier to talk to. I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn’t understand me, either.
    After a while, Kizuki gave up trying to arrange dates for me, and instead the three of us would do things together. Kizuki and Naoko and I: odd, but that was the most comfortable combination. Introducing a fourth person into the mix would always make things a little awkward. We were like a TV talk show, with me the guest, Kizuki the talented host, and Naoko his assistant. He was good at occupying that central position. True, he had a sarcastic side that often impressed people as arrogant, but in fact he was a considerate and fair-minded person. He would distribute his remarksand jokes fairly to Naoko and to me, taking care to see that neither of us felt left out. If one or the other stayed quiet too long, he would steer his conversation in that direction and get the person to talk. It probably looked harder than it was: he knew how to monitor and adjust the air around him on a second-by-second basis. In addition, he had a rare talent for finding the interesting parts of someone’s generally uninteresting comments so that, when speaking to him, you felt that you were an exceptionally interesting person with an exceptionally interesting life.
    And yet he was not the least bit sociable. I was his only real friend at school. I could never understand why such a smart and capable talker did not turn his talents to the broader world around him but remained satisfied to concentrate on our little trio. Nor could I understand why he picked me to be his friend. I was just an ordinary kid who liked to read books and listen to music and didn’t stand out in any way that would prompt someone like Kizuki to pay attention to me. We hit it off right away, though. His father was a dentist, known for his professional skill and his high fees.
    “Wanna double-date Sunday?” he asked me just after we met. “My girlfriend goes to a girls’ school, and she’ll bring along a cute one for you.”
    “Sure,” I said, and that was how I met Naoko.
    The three of us spent a lot of time together, but whenever Kizuki left the room, Naoko and I had trouble talking to each other. We never knew what to talk
about
. And in fact there was no topic of conversation that we held in common. Instead of talking, we’d drink water or toy with something on the table and wait for Kizuki to come back and start the conversation up again. Naoko was not particularly talkative, and I was more of a listener than a talker, so I felt uncomfortable when I was left alone with her. Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
    Naoko and I saw each other exactly once after Kizuki’s funeral. Two weeks after the event, we met at a coffee house to take care of some minor matter, and when that was finished we had nothing more to say. I tried raising several different topics, but none of them led anywhere. And when Naoko did talk, there was a certain edge to her voice. She seemed angry with me, but I had no idea why. We never saw each other again until that day we happened to meet on the Chuo Line in Tokyo a year later.
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