Sleep well, dear."

As he hurried to banish from his mind merely dutiful concern for this reticent, precocious, bothersome child, this boy whom he didn't really love, Ryuji managed to convince himself that he was brimming with genuine fatherly affection.

Like an insect folding in its wings, Fusako lowered her long lashes. Happiness enough to drive a man crazy, Ryuji thought. Happiness that defied description.

He pondered, as he rocked toward sleep, the glistening figures of absolute reality twice glimpsed since the night before during lapses in the unmoving, tedious, barren world. . . .

He saw them as marvelous gold embroideries leaping off a flat black fabric: the naked sailor twisting in the moonlight to confront a horn--the kitten's death mask, grave and fang-bared--its ruby heart . . . gorgeous entities all and absolutely authentic: then Ryuji too was an authentic hero . . . all the incidents on the sea, in the sea, under the sea--Noboru felt himself drowning in sleep. "Happiness," he thought. "Happiness that defies description. . . ." He fell asleep.

Noboru tried comparing the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor. But compared to this, they weren't naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvelous horn and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn't possibly have penetrated so deeply as this . . . the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.

He hadn't been able to explain his ideas of glory and death, or the longing and the melancholy pent up in his chest, or the other dark passions choking in the ocean's swell. Whenever he tried to talk about those things, he failed. If there were times when he felt he was worthless, there were others when something like the magnificence of the sunset over Manila Bay sent its radiant fire through him and he knew that he had been chosen to tower above other men. But he hadn't been able to tell the woman his conviction.

He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.