When he glanced her way, Sekiguchi Masashi saw that the writer’s wife, sitting at the kitchen table, had started silently munching away on a bowlful of mixed nuts. She was sucking them into her mouth one after another, grains of every size and color imaginable—brown, cream, black, white. Sekiguchi felt a sticky sense of discomfort spread throughout his chest just watching. He had never had a strong stomach. A bowl of oil-rich nuts would undoubtedly give him indigestion.

He was watching her over the shoulder of her husband, the author seated across from him, Nowatari Tetsuya. The wife was slouched over with her cheek pressed against the table, her hand moving back and forth between the bowl and her mouth as she stared across at him—or rather, at her husband’s back.

“Hmm, well . . . How about a protagonist like this then? A woman who unconsciously parrots the words of everyone around her—her husband, her children’s classroom teachers, the owner of a bar she frequents, you name it. She’s completely vacuous, without even the slightest sense of self, but that’s the beauty of her. She has an innocence, a purity of mind like a delicate glass vessel, untainted by soiled ideas or thoughts. I wrote about the same kind of woman in my last short story, but I think it will have more impact in a novel-length work.”

“Interesting. That certainly does sound like your style. A work filled with philosophical depth.” Distracted by the wife’s actions, Sekiguchi could provide only the vaguest of responses.

Nowatari cast his gaze to the glass ashtray in the center of the coffee table as he started mumbling to himself. “Hmm, and yet, hmm . . .”

The author looked like he was stewing over something. Nonetheless, Sekiguchi knew that if he was to speak up now, he would only find himself at the receiving end of a dark glower for having interrupted the writer’s thoughts.

Nowatari was the kind of author who looked to his editor not for opinions or advice but simply for someone with whom to bounce ideas. To be honest, it would have made no difference whether it was Sekiguchi sitting across from him or a Jolly Chimp toy complete with banging cymbals. In a sense, he was a very hands-off writer, the kind who would sink into a sea of contemplation entirely by himself and would then put together a story of a certain quality without any outside intervention.

That was why Sekiguchi could turn his attention unreservedly to the wife. She spent close to twenty minutes quietly finishing the bowl of nuts and then went to retrieve a two-liter bottle of mineral water from the fridge. She poured the water into a glass, tilted her head back, and gulped it down in one swallow.

Then, in a single soft, slow motion, like a tree hacked from its roots, she fell flat to the ground.

“Ah,” emerged a cry from Sekiguchi’s throat.

Nowatari glanced over his shoulder before dashing into the kitchen a heartbeat later. “What’s wrong, Rui?!”

The wife blinked heavily as her husband took her in his arms, and she casually pushed him away. “I’m a bit tired.”

“What . . . ? If you need to get some sleep, go to bed first.”

“Yes. I’ll do that.” The wife rose to her feet more surely than Sekiguchi would have expected.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you, Mr. Sekiguchi. Please, take your time.” She flashed him a wry smile as she walked past.

With those parting words, she made her way out of the living room, probably to the bedroom on the second floor, the pitter-patter of her light footsteps echoing down the staircase.

“What was all that about?” Nowatari frowned before staring fixedly at the empty bowl on the kitchen table. “Is that . . . ?”

“Ah, your wife was having a bite to eat just now.”

“She was eating that? You’ve got to be kidding me! Those were the seeds I was going to plant in the empty plot next door!”

The author’s face turned pale, and he sped upstairs, empty bowl in hand. “Rui, Rui!” he cried in a high-pitched wail, which was soon followed by his wife’s low, ragged voice.

Holed up with his wife on the second floor, embroiled in heated discussion, Nowatari still hadn’t returned even thirty minutes later. Sekiguchi, giving up on completing their meeting, scribbled a note to leave in the living room and set off back to the office.

Nowatari Tetsuya and his wife, Rui, were widely known in the publishing world as a pair of lovebirds.

Why was it that the wife, twelve years her husband’s junior, was just as well-known as he was? The answer to that question could be found in his breakthrough work.

Eight years earlier, the then-thirty-five-year-old author, who had already passed seven years since his literary debut, first entered the limelight when his novella Tears, a story that followed the invigorating romantic exchanges between a young man and woman, earned him his first-ever nomination for a prestigious prize. The text might have been a work of fiction, but not only was the Japanese title pronounced the same as his wife’s name, it was also clearly grounded on his relationship with her.

When Sekiguchi met Rui for the first time at the Nowatari residence, a certain passage from Tears sprang to mind:

Her body, with her unadorned shorts and naked torso, reminded me of the little green peppers that I had fumbled with as a child in the fields under the blazing summer sun. That unaffected object, softly attenuated by shallow shadows flowing over its occasional swells, glowed with a sense of clear purity.

Rui, with her short-cropped hair and her flat, boyish build, was the very image of the wife from that work. Her lush, dark eyes flickered with light as she gave him a wispy nod.

“Are you Tetsuya’s new editor? It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Sekiguchi, from Yamairi Press. Please forgive the intrusion,” he said, accepting her soft hand.

He could feel sweat beginning to bead down his back as various passages from Tears flashed before his eyes.

The touch of a firm, smooth green pepper, the unexpected moisture and warmth of its folds and interior, the way that its hard, distant flesh seemed to unravel and ripen the more that you looked at it. The images from Tears that she conjured up were sensual, uncomfortable even, and irresistibly arousing. It was difficult to meet her gaze.

Rui didn’t even pretend to be bothered by this reaction, smoothly letting go of his hand and making her way toward the kitchen.

Even now, more than three years since their first encounter, Sekiguchi could still recall the shadow of her shoulder blades floating on the back of her white tank top. It was a strange, airy feeling, as of having shaken hands with a character in a fable.

At noon the following day, the editorial department at Yamairi Press received a telephone call from Nowatari. The writer wanted to apologize to Sekiguchi for having left their meeting prematurely, said that he would get back in touch again after he had developed a more concrete idea for his next work, and confirmed in rough terms their next deadline.

Finally, in the same tone of voice that someone might use when announcing that they had at long last managed to post a set of documents that they had forgotten to send out, Nowatari said: “My wife has germinated.”