A Quiet Place Read Free Page A

a great salary.
    Finally, after keeping him in suspense for a good while, Eiko had agreed to marry him. Asai loved her. His second wife was much younger and more immature than his first, and he treated her more like a favourite child. Sometimes the age difference felt a lot closer to a dozen years.
    Eiko, for her part, rather enjoyed being spoiled by her affectionate husband. It wasn’t uncommon for her to spend two or three days at a time lying on the sofa, claiming to be too tired to do any housework. Asai never complained. He’d go out shopping and do all the cooking and cleaning himself.
    Whenever she was feeling fatigued, Eiko wouldn’t let Asai anywhere near her. She’d never been particularly into sex. This didn’t mean she wasn’t affectionate to her husband – she just wasn’t very assertive in bed. It was a little disappointing to Asai, but it didn’t stop him from adoring his young wife.
    Eiko was very sociable and loved to spend time with friends. This aspect of her personality contrasted strongly with how quiet she was at home. She had two completely different sides. Asai often wondered if she was bored staying at home with him. She certainly came to life whenever she went out somewhere.
    Mostly she spent time with women she’d known for years, and friends of those friends. At the beginning they’d allstudied traditional Japanese ballads together. Somewhere along the line they’d quit those classes, and switched to playing the shamisen. Next it had been Japanese-style painting. Most recently, Eiko had been studying haiku with a woman poet in Suginami Ward. One of her friends who had been a pupil there for some time had invited her to join the class. She didn’t seem to be able to stick with things for long, but Asai supposed, as a result, her life was never monotonous.
    Happily, the haiku infatuation seemed to have stuck. Eiko had already been studying it for two years, with no sign of giving up. She even seemed to have a small amount of talent for it, and her poems were often praised by her teacher and fellow pupils. From time to time, she’d have a poem chosen for publication in an amateur haiku fan magazine. Eiko’s teachers had praised her shamisen playing and her painting in the past, but actually seeing her own work in print had encouraged her more than anything. Being average at something was depressing; to be top of her class put her in great spirits. She always enjoyed comparing her results to other people’s. She had cleared her desk at home of all her paints and brushes, and for a while now it had been covered in books – collections of haiku poetry, glossaries of terms, dictionaries.
    Apparently, the women who wrote haiku were either very old or very young; there weren’t many in between. Women around Eiko’s age – in their mid-thirties – were usually housewives with two or three children and found it difficult to get away, so Eiko and three or four of her friends were the only ones of that generation who attended the meetings.
    It was about two or three years ago that Eiko had turned to her husband and asked, out of the blue, “Do you think I’m sexy?”
    Asai had asked if someone had told her she was, to which she’d replied that a fellow haiku poet had told her that she was very sexy – not in any vulgar way, but that she had a kind of glamour about her. She’d clearly been delighted.
    â€œWas it a man or a woman who told you that?” Asai was very conscious of the fact that there were far more men than women in her haiku circle.
    â€œOf course it was a woman! I never talk to the men about anything but poetry. There’s no one who’d say anything like that to me. But this woman said that if she could see it, then it must be obvious to men too.”
    Because Asai was around her day in day out, he hadn’t really noticed, but when Eiko had told him this he’d seen what she