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digging into one buttock, she tried to summon up her revulsion of him and, shockingly, could not. She was dizzy with a longing she could not name, with a desire she could not acknowledge.
    Slowly, as if her body weighed a thousand pounds, she turned over, away from him, into the darkness.
    Outside the window, cars passed, whirring like insects.
    Home. Once it was all the comfort he required. Nicholas’s house was located on the outskirts of Tokyo. It had been a strictly Japanese structure inside and out when he had first bought it from the estate of his late aunt, Itami, but gradually Justine had transformed the inside, ordering tiles, wall coverings, fixtures, and furniture from the States, Italy, and France, until he no longer recognized the place with which he had originally fallen in love.
    The camphor-wood beam exterior and the surrounding landscape had so far been spared her hand, but lately she had been making noises about wanting to turn the expanse of painstakingly manicured rare miniature parviflora and cryptomeria into a traditional English perennial garden. Denying her what she really wanted—to return to her home in America—Nicholas had been loath to deny her these smaller concessions that would surely make her feel more at home here.
    Not only had these transformations failed to assuage her essential unease, but, he realized now as he spun around the dangerous hairpin turn near the house, they had made him uncomfortable in the one place he had once felt most at ease. Even the construction going on two lots farther down the road hadn’t dampened his love for the place, but he took the last half mile at a slower than normal speed. It was a good thing he did because just before the driveway to the house he came upon one of the gigantic earthmovers being used to excavate the new house’s foundation, and he was obliged to pull into a neighbor’s driveway so that the monstrous vehicle could safely pass.
    Justine was waiting for him. He saw her as he went up the rough-hewn stone path from the gravel parking area. Her hazel eyes were the green they turned when she was upset or under stress, and the red motes danced in her left eye.
    “Seiko called,” she said even before he had a chance to kiss her hello. “Were you too busy to phone me yourself?”
    She turned on her heel, went inside, where he followed her into the kitchen.
    “The truth was I was too upset,” he said. “I had to work out to calm myself down.” He went past her, began the preparations for brewing green tea.
    “God, you’ve become just like all your Japanese friends. When only talk will do, you go ahead and brew your foul-tasting green tea.”
    “I’m happy to talk to you,” he said as he measured out the finely cut leaf, took up the reed whisk.
    “Why did you ask Seiko to call me?”
    “I didn’t. She saw it as her duty.”
    “Well, she was wrong.”
    The water was boiling in the ceramic pot. He took it up, poured it carefully into the cup. “Why can’t you understand? Here, efficiency is the most prized—”
    “Damnit!” Justine’s outflung hand slapped the cup across the counter. It skidded into the wall, smashed to pieces. “I’m tired of hearing about what’s important to the Japanese!” She ignored the reddening mark on her wrist where the boiling water had scalded her. “What about what’s important to this American! Why is it always a matter of my having to adapt to their way of doing things?”
    “You’re in their country, and you—”
    “But I don’t want to be here!” Tears were coursing down her cheeks. “I can’t stand it anymore, being the outsider, feeling no emotion from them but this subtle hostility. It’s freezing my bones, Nick! I can’t memorize one more minuscule custom, ritual, protocol, formality, or courtesy. I’m fed up with being shoved out of the way on the streets, pushed aside when I’m trying to use a public washroom, elbowed on a subway platform. How a people who are so