He still felt the same about Yoko as he had back then: he couldn’t believe he’d managed to meet, fall in love with, and actually marry a woman like this.

He and she were the same age. They’d met six years ago, in early summer, at an art gallery in Ginza. It was the opening of an exhibition of works by a Russian-born French artist named Nicolas de Staël, a painter of sombre abstracts. He wasn’t well-known in Japan and, although it was Saturday afternoon, the two of them were the only visitors. Yoko was the first to speak.

‘Are you an artist?’ she said.

Kawashima was carrying a sketchbook under his arm.

‘I do some drawing, yes,’ he told her.

She was wearing glasses with cream-coloured frames, and they looked good on her, but he couldn’t help thinking she’d be even prettier without them. They left the gallery together and went to a coffee shop with glass walls overlooking the Ginza crossing. He ordered a double espresso and she the shop’s famous cheesecake and a cup of apple tea. The sun of early summer slanted gently through the blinds, and on each table was a glass bud-vase with a single orchid. Yoko smelled good. Mixed with her perfume Kawashima thought he detected another fragrance, though he didn’t yet recognise it as the smell of freshly baked bread. He only knew he found it pleasant, presumably because he really liked this person and felt so relaxed around her. (Conversely, whenever he was stressed out or stuck in the company of someone he didn’t care for, even ambient smells tended to strike him as repulsive.) Yoko ate her cheesecake slowly as she pored over the pages of his sketchbook. At one point a tiny crumb fell on one of the drawings, and she very carefully removed it with the corner of her napkin. Something about the way she did that made him very happy.