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wanted to sleep to my heart’s content. So of course that’s when the phone rang.
    W ere you asleep?” Sumire asked probingly.
    “Um,” I groaned, and instinctively glanced at the alarm clock beside my bed. The clock had huge fluorescent hands, but I couldn’t read the time. The image projected on my retina and the part of my brain that processed it were out of sync, like an old lady struggling, unsuccessfully, to thread a needle. What I could understand was that it was dark all around and close to Fitzgerald’s “Dark Night of the Soul.”
    “It’ll be dawn pretty soon.”
    “Um,” I murmured.
    “Right near where I live there’s a man who raises roosters. Must have had them for years and years. In a half hour or so they’ll be crowing up a storm. This is my favorite time of the day. The pitch-black night sky starting to glow in the east, the roosters crowing for all they’re worth like it’s their revenge on somebody. Any roosters near you?”
    On this end of the telephone line I shook my head slightly.
    “I’m calling from the phone booth near the park.”
    “Um,” I said. There was a phone booth about two hundred yards from her apartment. Since Sumire didn’t own a phone, she always had to walk over there to call. Just your average phone booth.
    “I know I shouldn’t be calling you this early. I’m really sorry. The time of day when the roosters haven’t even started crowing. When this pitiful moon is hanging there in a corner of the eastern sky like a used-up kidney. But think of
me—
I had to trudge out in the pitch dark all the way over here. With this telephone card I got as a present at my cousin’s wedding clutched in my hand. With a photo on it of the happy couple holding hands. Can you imagine how depressing that is? My socks don’t even match, for gosh sake. One has a picture of Mickey Mouse; the other’s plain wool. My room’s a complete disaster area; I can’t find anything. I don’t want to say this too loudly, but you wouldn’t believe how awful my underpants are. I doubt that even one of those panty thieves would touch them. If some pervert killed me, I’d never live it down. I’m not asking for sympathy, but it would be nice if you could give me a bit more in the way of a response. Other than those cold interjections of yours
—oh
s and
um
s. How about a conjunction? A conjunction would be nice. A
yet
or a
but.
”
    “However,” I said. I was exhausted and felt like I was still in the middle of a dream.
    “ ‘However,’ ” she repeated. “OK, I can live with that. One small step for man. One very small step,
however.
”
    “So, was there something you wanted?”
    “Right, I wanted you to tell me something. That’s why I called,” Sumire said. She lightly cleared her throat. “What I want to know is, what’s the difference between a sign and a symbol?”
    I felt a weird sensation, like something was silently parading through my head. “Could you repeat the question?”
    She did. “What’s the difference between a sign and a symbol?”
    I sat up in bed, switched the receiver from my left hand to my right. “Let me get this straight—you’re calling me because you want to find out the difference between a sign and a symbol. On Sunday morning, just before dawn. Um . . .”
    “At four-fifteen, to be precise,” she said. “It was bothering me. What could be the difference between a sign and a symbol? Somebody asked me that a couple of weeks ago, and I can’t get it out of my mind. I was getting undressed for bed, and I suddenly remembered. I can’t sleep until I find out. Can you explain it? The difference between a sign and a symbol?”
    “Let me think,” I said, and gazed up at the ceiling. Even when I was fully conscious, explaining things logically to Sumire was never easy. “The emperor is a symbol of Japan. Do you follow that?”
    “Sort of,” she replied.
    “ ‘Sort of’ won’t cut it. That’s what it says in the Japanese