I just get freaked out imagining I might stab the baby. It’s not as if I actually want to stab her. Who doesn’t imagine things that make them anxious? Maybe nothing this extreme, but, like, having to give a speech at a wedding, for example — a lot of people are terrified of screwing up and being ridiculed or laughed at. Or you can accidentally make eye contact with some psycho on the train and think, What if he gets off behind me and follows me home? Thanks to the imagination, there’s no end to things in this world that can trigger anxiety. Normally, of course, you can free yourself from fears like that just by facing them, or telling someone about them.

Normally.

On the ground floor of the building next door was a video shop. At the end of a long day, after dinner and a bath, Yoko liked to sit with a glass of wine or beer and watch a movie. One night in the last month of her pregnancy, the two of them had watched Basic Instinct together. Kawashima wanted to flee the room as soon as he saw the first scene, which depicted a murder by ice pick, but Yoko said, ‘I’m not sure this is good for the baby, but it’s an interesting story, isn’t it?’ It was that attitude of hers, that detached amusement, that helped him calm down and sit all the way through the film.

Often during the past ten days he’d wondered why his fear was of stabbing only the baby and not Yoko. Remembering the time they’d watched Basic Instinct together gave him the answer: because Yoko could talk to him. Talking with someone helped neutralise the power of the imagination. And Yoko had a delicate but skilful way of dealing with the wounds he carried inside. Her attitude was neither insensitive nor indulgent — neither, Why don’t you just get over it? nor, Oh, you poor thing! She never went out of her way to avoid the subject, and when it came up her comments were always both clear-eyed and supportive.