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what you want to ask your father about?"
    "Well, yeah. By the way, Mom, what do you think the odds were of life arising on earth naturally?"
    "Like winning the lottery."
    Kaoru laughed out loud. "Come on! Way smaller. You can't even compare the two. We're talking a miracle."
    "But someone always wins the lottery."
    "You're talking about a lottery with, like, a hundred tickets and one winner, where a hundred people buy tickets. I'm talking about rolling dice a hundred times and having them come up sixes every time. What would you think if that happened?"
    "I'd think the game was rigged."
    "Rigged?"
    "Sure. If someone rolled the same number a hundred times in a row, it'd have to mean the dice were loaded, wouldn't it?" As she said this, she poked a finger into Kaoru's forehead affectionately, as if to say, Silly.
    "Loaded, huh?"
    Kaoru thought for a while, mouth hanging open. "Of course. Loaded dice. It had to be rigged. It doesn't make sense otherwise."
    "Right?"
    "And humanity just hasn't noticed that it's rigged. But, Mom-what if dice that aren't loaded come up with the same number a hundred times in a row?"
    "Well, then we're talking about God, right? He's the only one who could do something like that."
    Kaoru couldn't tell if his mother really believed that or not.
    He decided to move on. "By the way, do you remember what happened on TV yesterday?" Kaoru was referring to his favourite afternoon soap opera. He loved the soaps so much that he even had his mother tape them for him sometimes.
    "I forgot to watch."
    "Well, remember how Sayuri and Daizo met again on the Cape?"
    Kaoru proceeded to recount the plot of yesterday's episode almost as if it involved people he knew personally. Sayuri and Daizo were a young couple in their first year of marriage, and a series of misunderstandings had brought them to the brink of divorce. They were still in love, but coincidence had piled on coincidence until they were hopelessly tangled in the cords that bind men and women: now they were in a morass they couldn't find their way out of. So they'd separated. And then, one day, by pure chance, they'd run into each other on a certain point of land on the Japan Sea coast. The place was special to them-it was where they'd first met. And as they began to remember all the wonderful times they'd had together there, their old feelings for each other had been reawakened. They cleared up their misunderstandings one by one, until they were sure of each other's love again.
    Of course, a heart warming twist lay behind this trite tale. Both of them were under the impression that it was purely by chance that they'd run into each other on this sentimental promontory, but they were wrong. They had friends who were desperate to see them make up, and those friends had colluded, taking it upon themselves to arrange it so that each would be there at that moment.
    "Get it, Mom? What are the chances of a separated couple running into each other like that- being in the same place at the same time on the same day? Not exactly zero. Coincidental meetings do happen. But in some cases, when the chances of something happening are really small, and then it actually happens, you tend to think that there's somebody in the shadows pulling strings. In this case, it was Sayuri and Daizo's nosy friends."
    "I think I see where you're going with this. You're trying to say that even though there was almost zero chance of it happening, life actually did arise. After all, we exist. In which case, there must be something somewhere pulling the strings. Right?"
    Kaoru felt that way constantly. There were times when the idea that he was being watched, manipulated, insinuated itself into his brain for no apparent reason. Whether this was a phenomenon unique to himself, or whether it was in fact universal, was something he hadn't yet figured out.
    Suddenly he got chills. He shivered. He looked at the sliding-glass door and found that it was open a crack. Still seated on the sofa, he