Sometimes I’d run in circles around the room for, I don’t know, two or three minutes. Afterwards I could never remember anything, only that something had terrified me so badly that I didn’t know who I was and couldn’t even recognise the people around me. It was like they’d melted into my dream, become characters in this nightmare. It was so scary. So scary. Now that I’m grown up, it’s not quite as bad. I mean, I don’t forget who I am anymore, and like, tonight, I knew that was you speaking to me, asking me what was wrong.’

‘So why,’ Yoko asked, ‘did you dash out all alone? Why didn’t you let me hold you?’

Kawashima shook his head.

‘I’ve just always thought it best, when I lose control like that, not to be around anybody else. Better to go somewhere by myself and walk it off, do some deep breathing to calm myself down.’

He decided, then and there, to tell Yoko everything he’d been keeping secret for so long — with the single exception of the time, at nineteen, that he’d stabbed a certain woman with an ice pick. He didn’t want to get into that, partly because the event was so vague and uncertain in his memory, and partly because he feared it might scare her away. He didn’t want to lose her.

‘I think what’s behind them, behind the night terrors, is that after my father died, when I was four, my mother started hitting me. She’d beat the hell out of me. I don’t remember my father at all, except for this vague sense that he used to take us out for drives in a car. And I know he had one, for a while at least, because my mother always used to describe him as the sort of fool who’d put a down payment on a car he couldn’t afford. I haven’t seen my mother for years, but the last time we met, at my high-school graduation, she said she’d treated me the way she did because I reminded her of him — meaning my father the fool. I was afraid of the beatings, because they really hurt, but I always just assumed she must be doing it because I was such a bad kid.