Sandra takes your hand in hers and after a moment’s hesitation you grip her stubby fingers. You and Sandra walk together in the bitter air through a light, untimely fall of snow Not even a breath of wind. You learn that Hirohito-sama’s problems are not particular but generalised and systemic The old man is dying of his age He ascended the throne, you recall, in 1925 Over sixty years as “Heaven’s Emperor”. The miracle is that he survived the crushing defeat his kingdom endured at the end of the Second World War It was the death of an era, an empire and a god. A middle- aged mortal, short and slight of build, stripped of power and godhood, lived on.Silence in the East Garden. Amplified Christmas carols in garbled English, flashing ornaments and parcel-laden crowds swarming through the Ginza.

You find a traditional inn tucked between two giant banks on a street behind Ueno Station. Make several trips to the headquarters of Japan Air Lines where you confirm reservations and where, if you are not very much mistaken, a bowing kimono-clad doorman exclaims in fervent English, “We hope you have enjoyed our hostility.”Silence in the East Garden. Over one of these granite walls, behind some ornate, immemorial door in the heart of the Imperial Palace, the Mikado is dying. This morning’s Japan Times informs you that he is in a critical but stable condition – a contradiction in terms you have never understood. But monsters are not immune to fear; and so, night after night, while dawn’s official duties spun towards you out of the dark, you lay awake in the arms of premonitions: you and Sandra at seventy, chastened and respectable, leaving the ballet for streets where angels in designer blue-jeans scamper by just out of grasp. You felt them crawling inside you, multiplying, probing icy tentacles into your outermost parts Clearly you were now a monster. In their tired faces you saw Sandra’s face shadowed as if in a crude, distorting mirror, a mirror marred by hairline cracks that map out an appalling future in wrinkles.Terrible thoughts you were having.

Jim, as usual, had appropriated your Lay-Z-Boy chair and was drinking your last Export, while visibly fending off sleep. During your affair she had steadily put on weight – as if billowing with pent-up shame, indignation Dorothy sat beside her discussing laxatives. She was sitting on the sofa under the window, her face grey in the pale light seeping through those cheap gauze curtains she’d insisted on. You returned one afternoon from a taxing rendezvous and her look told you everything. But you could not stop what you were doing.Sandra knew all about it. It was not till two years later in Japan that you found in subway ads and T-shirt inscriptions an analogue of her crippled speech.You could laugh at her, and you could laugh at Gareth You could even laugh at yourself. When you made love to her she behaved as if your eyes were the attentive lenses of two Hollywood cameras.

Years of indiscriminate praise and the scheming deference of suitors had atrophied her brain. “At least that’s my personal opinion.”Randi was a celluloid goddess, a high-profile big-city model with an anorexic mind. You’re only young once – better make hay while the sun shines.” He leered and licked a silver fleck of beer-foam off the edge of his moustache. Times are changing, join the club.” Gareth always sounded like the Dictionary of Phrases you later used in classes in Japan “It’s the way of the world. And you felt his sceptical eyes upon you at the Christmas party.You started an affair, as Gareth had long predicted you would.”Listen, Nick, a guy can’t hold out forever. And still the two of you could laugh together when recalling an incident from an office party: Gareth loudly presenting his girlfriend, a secretary from accounting who dressed plainly and used no cosmetics but had arrived made-up like an auditioning stripper – “This,” he roared several times in the course of the evening, his pink face puffy with bourbon and pride, “is the real Barbara.”Your work suffered Your boss dropped hints, then began to make warnings You’d better shape up, Asher You call in sick too often. To fortify your image of the old, authentic Sandra and buttress her memory against the onslaught of this pudgy impostor, you erected along the edges of your desk a breastwork of wedding and pre-wedding pictures.

On your desk for several years you kept a picture of your wife on your wedding day and insisted to yourself with pious regularity that this was the Sandra you’d married; and every evening when she came home (exactly twenty minutes after you) she looked less and less like the woman you spent your coffee breaks recreating. You thought marriage would admit you to a secure and roomy structure promising freedom and maturity and creature comforts along with its duties and responsibilities – but its unexpected confines brought out the ogre in you, the wayward, wilful child. “A teacher!” she’d cried on first meeting Sandra, and at the time you believed she had said it with pleasure.Your career was devouring itself too You were not cut out for office work The idleness, the cramped spaces oppressed you. She would never offer Sandra dessert, she would suggest a long walk after dinner, she would find other, more subtle ways to accuse her of obesity and ugliness.