They began meeting about once a week to have dinner or visit a museum or see a movie together. Kawashima was working for a graphic design firm and drawing in his spare time. His drawings were all of narrow roads in the moonlight; no other subjects had ever interested him. But one day near the end of summer he drew from memory a pencil sketch of Yoko’s face. When he presented the sketch to her on their next date, she invited him to her apartment for the first time. And there she made a halting and clearly painful confession. Until about a year before, she’d been dating an older man from her company, and on the day they broke up she’d swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and been rushed to the hospital. What did he think of a woman who’d do something like that? Kawashima said he didn’t think it was any big deal, and he meant it.

‘Who hasn’t wanted to die at one time or another?’ he said.

Not long afterwards, they moved in together. They’d been sharing a place for about six months when, late on a freezing winter’s night, Kawashima awoke and leaped out of bed drenched in a sweat that had soaked all the way through the covers. Startled from sleep, Yoko frantically asked what was wrong, but all he would say was that he needed to take a little walk. He threw on some clothes and left the apartment. When he returned, some two hours later, he told her something he’d never told anyone before.

‘I get like that sometimes,’ he said. ‘It’s happened to me ever since I was a little kid, but I never had a name for it until I got older and found it in a psychology book. They call it pavor nocturnus — night terrors. It was even worse when I was little. I’d wake up in a panic and jump out of bed, like I did tonight, only I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs.