Julie and Yoshiko were holding hands and standing in front of the departure gate at Itami International Airport. Julie's plane was to take off in about ten minutes. Both were crying.

"Julie, what am I going to do without you? I miss you already." Yoshiko said.

"I know. I miss you already, too." Julie's voice started to crack. She swallowed hard. "We both know I have to go. I can't stay in Japan forever."

"I wish you could stay a few more months. The apartment will be so empty without you."

"Oh, come on, you know your mother will be coming over all the time. Please thank her and all your family again for everything they've done for me. I love them just like my own family."

"They love you, too, but not as much as I do."

"Yoshiko, this isn't the end. You can still come visit me anytime in Canada and I'll come back to Japan someday. I know it. Come here. Give me one last hug. You'll always be my best friend."

Yoshiko hugged Julie as tightly and warmly as she could. Then Julie picked up her carry-on luggage and walked through the gate leading to the boarding ramp. Yoshiko watched the plane taxi down the runway and take off. She stared at the sky for a long time after the plane disappeared from sight.

Yoshiko took a sip from her third glass of whiskey, set the glass back down on the kitchen table, and looked out the sliding glass door leading to the garden behind her apartment. Outside was a wall of blackness. Inside the apartment was cold and empty.

She lit a cigarette, then picked up the birthday card from Julie and read through it once more. "Why," she said, "did you have to leave me today of all days? Now all I have is my coffee, my cigarettes, and my whiskey."

Her diary lay open before her. She wanted to write down everything that was in her mind, but her thoughts were all jumbled and the page remained blank. She began writing the kanji character for "righteousness." In Japan each of the five strokes was used as a counter the way westerners wrote four vertical lines with a diagonal slash through them for units of five. Yoshiko began thinking of former lovers.

There were the three Japanese boys after she had graduated from high school and the owner of the Cocos Island coffee shop. That was before she had gone to Canada. She took a deep drag off her cigarette and another sip from her whiskey. Franz, Julie's brother, was the fifth. That made one kanji.

Franz was an artist who, in the beginning, gave her confidence, tried to draw out the artist in her soul by giving advice, encouragement, praise for her attempts at finding a medium to express herself, this in the time when she still spoke little English. But sex with him, like all the others, was masturbatory with little regard for her own pleasure. As she came to know him better he seemed to carry a demonic aura about him, an affected superiority, as if through his sculpting, painting, and poetry he was above the rest. The world belonged to him alone. He was always playing games, setting people up in situations where he was the sole judge of who they were, of how worthy they were, secretly sizing them up in his mind to see if they were in fact worthy of him. She despised that. She was grateful for what he brought out of her, for the confidence that emerged bit by bit, but in the end she found she could never love a man with such an enormous ego, a man who professed to have such great compassion yet was so lacking in it, a man who believed the artist was God.

There was Ron, the Scot with whom she spent nearly a month. He had a musical character and a sweet voice. He was very intelligent. Yoshiko felt grateful to him, too, for the books he gave her, for the different thoughts so new and strange and intoxicating that came from reading those books in the cold winter of his apartment. They had good times together. He showed great tenderness in his love-making, but she did not experience orgasm. Then one day he took too many drugs and ended up in the hospital. That day frightened her more than anything else in her life.

There was Thomas, the Buddhist monk who put great existential questions to her during the time she had first grappled with a new belief in God. She respected him in the beginning, especially when he rejected her initial sexual advances. He seemed like such a pure man, calm, gentle with other people. But his calm posture was just a mask covering a seething volcano of inner conflicts and doubts. She eventually discovered his true belief: To rid oneself of worldly desires one had to continually punish oneself, to literally beat oneself into a submission of the spirit. She was thoroughly disgusted the day she found him with another lover, bound and gagged to the bed, welts on his body, a rubber hose in the lover's hand, a look of ethereal joy in Thomas's eyes.

Ten minutes had passed. Yoshiko had written two kanji characters in the diary. She poured herself another drink and lit another cigarette. Two kanji characters. Ten men. She was single, 23 years old today, the age when most Japanese women began to think seriously about the future and marriage. If there was one among the ten Yoshiko could have committed her life to, it was Joe, but he was far away living alone in his shack in the Canadian wilderness.

She tried again to compare Joe to Harlan. Harlan had an independent strength that was difficult to define. She knew there were deep wounds inside him that caused him to project a facade of harsh toughness, but she liked being with him, sleeping with him, feeling his gentle caresses and strong arms. It was only after she left him that she felt his coldness.

She spoke aloud in Japanese.

"You can have anything you want in this country, but what of me? Do I dare be alone in this world? What will I do now that Julie has left me? Will you become my one lover? Will you stay hidden behind your mask?

"I'm not strong enough. For you it's easy. You can drink your beer and read your books and have your little adventures to block your loneliness, but for me it's different. There's something more to my loneliness that even my whiskey can't erase."

Her mind was like a merry-go-round spinning in a frenzy. She felt a surge of insanity creep into it. Tears formed. She lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and watched the trail of blue smoke rise to the ceiling. She shook her head, as if trying to cast off the weight of her own thinking. She rose from the table, stumbled a bit, put on her jacket, grabbed the bottle of whiskey, and walked out into the night. By the time she reached Harlan's apartment, Yoshiko's head had cleared a little. Harlan was seated at hiskotatsu. Yoshiko sat down beside him, pulling the blanket around her legs, and looked at him intently.

"Are you OK?" Harlan asked.

"Yes, just feeling lonely is all."

"Would you like some coffee?"

"I'd rather drink this whiskey."

"I'll help you."

Harlan went to the kitchen, came back with two glasses, and poured them both half full.

"So Julie is on her way to Canada," he said.

"Yes, I miss her already."

"Crying about it won't help. Life is full of separation. You just have to accept it. There's nothing we can do about it."

"You don't believe in God, do you?"

"It depends on what you mean by God."

"God of the Bible."

"Well, if you mean the Christian God, I guess not really. I suppose for a while I was an atheist, but these days I'm more of an agnostic."

"What do you mean, atheist and agnostic?"

"An atheist is someone who believes absolutely there is no God. An agnostic is someone who believes it isn't possible to know whether God exists."

"They both sound the same to me. I don't understand the difference."

"I guess they do seem almost the same. To me, an atheist would think that man is alone in the universe, while an agnostic would think it's possible there's a God, but he won't find out until after he dies. That's how I feel. I've seen too much misery in the world to think any decent God could create this mess, but I've also had several experiences that were maybe spiritual and made me think there must be someone looking after me. I simply don't know. I'd like to believe in God, but I can't accept organized religions the way man has made them."

"What kind of spiritual experiences did you have?"

"Things like when I should have died, but didn't. You know, if I had been one foot to the right or left of where I was at a particular moment or a second or two earlier or later. Or people or events that came out of nowhere to save me or guide me. It's hard to explain. All I can say is that I survived sometimes because of something more than just luck."

Yoshiko thought about what Harlan had said. The way he expressed himself was enigmatic and bothered her. She wanted him to say something more direct, something concrete to reveal himself. He was too evasive. Always at the point of revealing some clue about his past, about the reasons and the forces behind his entering her life, he would suddenly cast a cloak over himself and withdraw from her.

"Julie always said that we have to have faith in God. God doesn't show himself to us because he wants to test our faith." Yoshiko said.

"I don't believe that. If God is like that, he's a mean and terrible creator. The only real faith I have is in myself."

"You're not sad that Julie went back to Canada, are you?"

"No. She had to move on, that's all. Like I said before, life is full of separation and we just have to accept it and get on with our lives. Maybe if you had the experiences I've had, you would feel the same way."

Harlan was becoming weary of this tedious dialogue. He picked up the bottle of whiskey and poured two more drinks. Yoshiko sat holding her glass and staring into it, absorbed in the privacy of her own mind. Harlan knew she was reaching out to him for an answer to the confusion of her existence, but he was powerless to provide it. He knew only that people never knew enough about other people and their sufferings to have the right response at the right time. The more people spoke to each other, the more wretched and self-conscious they became.

He wanted somehow to explain everything about his life to her, every little detail and how each experience, each thought, each relationship he had accumulated in the course of his 33 years was connected to who he was and how he saw the world. But words always failed him, always complicated things. That was probably the force behind his need to write. He had a deep need to express himself, to explain himself and try to make sense of the kaleidoscope of life-experience images that constantly ran through his brain, but he could not do it with a stream of spoken utterances. He needed time to examine and reexamine his thoughts before putting them down on paper. Even then it was an impossible task. It took years to find the right words to explain a single experience to himself, let alone to another human being.

This is what had amazed him about Sachiko. She was the first one who had ever responded to his written words, the first to show some inkling of understanding. She seemed to have an intuitive sense of what was inside him. It was as if she were the one reader he had been writing to all his life. Her letters to him were the voice and the response he, like Yoshiko, had longed for, yet the duality of her nature was impenetrable. When in her presence, there was a wall between them. He felt no stir of emotions. She was a block of stone. Her own passions, like his, seemed confined to too much intellectual scrutiny and exposed themselves only in bits and pieces.

Yoshiko had more of the animal instinct. She was tormented by the same questions of self-examination, but her questions were closer to the surface and had an urgency to them. She required immediate answers that could not be given. Her emotions and yearnings were out in the open. There was also a sense of urgency to her love-making, as if in calling forth and focusing all her passion she could exhaust her suffering.

Harlan reached out to put his hand on her shoulder. She moved closer to him. They finished the bottle of whiskey. Harlan pushed the kotatsu away and spread out the futon.

"Do you want me to give you a massage?" he asked.

"Please."

Yoshiko lay face down on the futon. Harlan began kneading her back, shoulders, and neck. Her head was spinning from the whiskey. The tightness dissolved and she felt herself floating. Later, in the middle of the night, she woke with a start. She had been dreaming. She had been in the Canadian wilderness searching frantically for Joe's shack. There had been wolves chasing her. She had called for Joe, but he had not come.

Harlan stirred and put his arm around her. Yoshiko snuggled closer for warmth. Tears started, but she willed them away. She had come to Harlan tonight wanting his support and an affirmation of her faith. It had not happened. She wondered if she would be able to change him, change his negativism. A sudden pattering of rain outside disturbed the silence.