When Yoshiro was a child, his mother babied him whenever he caught cold or ran a fever. Wallowing in self-pity had felt sweet, warm, and deliciously sad. As an adult he knew that, although he had to go to work no matter how much he hated it, illness would give him a bona fide excuse for staying at home, spending the whole day in bed reading or just thinking. It was easy to catch the flu. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t get enough sleep. And even after he recovered, he always managed to get sick again a few months later. Finally, he realized that his true purpose was not to come down with some illness, but to quit his job.

Yoshiro liked writing picture postcards. Though it seemed strange to be sending postcards to a family member when he wasn’t traveling, a page of stationary had so much more space than he had news that whenever he tried writing a letter he ended up not writing anything at all. There was so little space on a postcard that from the first stroke of his pen he could already imagine the period at the end. Being able to see the end of anything gave him a tremendous sense of relief.

Knowing there was a possibility they were not genetically related, Yoshiro had once considered sending a lock of Mumei’s hair to the hospital to be tested, but one day, feeling some hairs he’d picked up from the tatami between his fingers, he started to chuckle. Genes have no odor. Yet how well he knew that sweet, milky fragrance of infancy that still rose from Mumei’s body. It was clearly sending him a message. Neither of the child’s parents had ever gotten drunk on that smell the way he did. Didn’t that mean that Nature herself had chosen him, Yoshiro, as Mumei’s guardian?