---
The following Monday night, while working overtime at the Kitakyushu branch as usual, I got a call from Akasaka-san. My phone vibrated, so I picked it up. Akasaka-san… I was shocked to see the name I'd registered on my phone screen. I left the office and pressed the answer button in the hallway.
"Hello?" I said.
"Oh, hello, um, this is Akasaka-san…" she began. "Thanks for the other day…"
Not knowing what to say, I exchanged pleasantries. "I was wondering what happened after that."
Whatever happened, how could I possibly make progress since it had only been two days? I answered, thinking that. "Yeah, pretty much the same as usual."
Then Akasaka-san said, "Actually, as I said the other day, I told your wife to stop cheating on you today."
"So, what did your wife say?" I asked, unable to help wanting to hear more.
"Your wife and I were just talking during our lunch break, and she started talking about her girlfriend, so I decided to tell you," Akasaka said.
It was a long-winded way of saying it. I found myself irritated with this kind woman, a woman I'd only met once.
"So, what was my wife like? What did you say to her?" I pressed.
"I told her to stop because she would only continue to betray her husband if she continued to do that…" Akasaka's voice seemed to soften, perhaps because I had spoken so forcefully.
I continued listening.
"My wife said she knew that and that she just wanted to have fun," Akasaka said.
Nothing had progressed from what I'd heard the other day.
"Is that so? This time I'll tell her directly. I pretended not to know about my wife's affair and said that something was wrong," I said.
What an unreliable woman, I thought. But then I wondered, what could she have done? She was a woman who had simply come to me to kindly tell me. Perhaps it was the fact that I was doing nothing that was abnormal. As I was thinking this, Akasaka started talking again.
"But wait a moment. I'll persuade her, so please take better care of your wife at home…" she said.
"Ms. Akasaka, I'm very grateful that you're thinking of us. But this is our problem. And it's between me and my wife. I'll decide what happens from now on," I said.
"But…" she started.
"I appreciate what you're doing, but if you keep doing this, nothing will progress. And it'll be my family who will suffer," I said, perhaps a little too forcefully.
"I understand," Akasaka said in a small voice.
"I'll contact you if anything else happens. So please continue to cooperate," I said, speaking while pretending to be calm, hiding my feelings of guilt, frustration, and impatience.
"Yes, I'll contact you too," Akasaka said, and then hung up the phone.
It was easier when I didn't know anything, when I still had suspicions. Perhaps somewhere in my heart, I knew I'd be forced into a situation that would require enormous effort and time and require me to sacrifice many things.
That week, on Thursday night, an envelope arrived at my room in Kitakyushu. I took it out of the mailbox and looked at the sender, but there was nothing written on it. All it had was my address and name. I returned to my room and opened the envelope. The moment I saw the contents, my heart started beating. Inside was a DVD in its case.
A package with an unknown sender, a DVD inside, could only mean one thing. Was my wife sending me the DVD containing the video of her I'd discovered the other day? However, when I looked at the DVD, I saw some writing on it: "Noriko var5." My wife's name, followed by the number "Version 5."
I felt the temperature in the room rise. Sweat poured out of my body, and my heartbeat quickened. It seemed unlikely that Noriko would go to the trouble of sending me a DVD. But Noriko was the only one who knew this address. Could it be her man…? No matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn't figure it out. I decided to take a look inside.
I started up my PC and entered my password. A feeling of anger or fear overwhelmed me, and it seemed to take an awfully long time to boot up. After what seemed like minutes, I inserted the DVD into my PC and started the player. A pitch-black screen appeared. Then, an image appeared. It was different from any DVD I had seen before. It was like a rental adult DVD, with three items like a title menu. The items were just numbers: "1," "2," and "3."
I stared at the title screen, not understanding what it was. About a minute passed, and then the video started. I was so stunned that I thought, "If it has a title menu, surely this is just an adult DVD?" and had no idea what was going on.
It appeared to be a room in an apartment, with lace curtains and bright light streaming in from outside. It didn't seem particularly large. The image rotated left and right, showing the entire room. The walls were clean, and it didn't look like a room where anyone lived. The image gradually tilted downwards, revealing the edge of a bed. An empty room, just curtains and a bed…
Then, as the image continued to move downwards, a woman appeared. It was unmistakably my wife. She was dressed in a gym uniform that was too small for a middle school student, sitting with her knees bent and facing the camera, her hands behind her back. If she hadn't been my wife, and if it had just been any other woman sitting there, it would have simply felt like a gravure photo of a healthy, well-dressed girl. However, when I compared what had happened up to that point, what I had seen up to that point, and the image now on the screen, I could immediately imagine what was about to happen.
The DVD I had seen before was something I would never watch again, something I didn't need. So I threw it in the trash at the convenience store. But it was a copy of something I had discovered by chance. This time, it had been sent to me. Perhaps my wife had a part-time job and wanted to confide in me about it. If that's the case, then there's no point in not putting my wife's name on the sender's label.
The man filming this DVD—my wife's lover, as Akasaka had mentioned—was a mess in my head, and I didn't know what to think. All I could feel was an unbearable sense of humiliation. I didn't even know what was connecting everything and how it was making me feel this way. I felt the urge to smash the PC in front of me.
Stay calm. I tried to summon the little bit of rationality I had. But I still couldn't stay calm. Of course. Just when I'd finally decided on a direction after so much deliberation, I was left feeling so humiliated. He showed me a DVD of my wife, forcing me to see the dark side of her that I'd been trying to avoid seeing. My head felt like it was about to explode, and tears welled up in my eyes. It had been decades since I'd cried out of shame.
Maybe it was because I was alone in my room, but I felt like I'd lost all my pride. I didn't feel any shame or anything like that about the tears welling up in my eyes. No, I didn't care that tears were streaming from my eyes. I couldn't escape the humiliation I felt, and there was nothing I could do, nothing I did, and yet things were continuing to go in an unpleasant direction, making me feel powerless and despairing. No matter what I did now, it wouldn't change anything, and I didn't care about trying to look cool. I was bawling like a child, just playing around with nothing to do.
Everything I'd cultivated in my life. I'd grown older. I'd been given more responsibilities at work, and I'd gained my own confidence. But those things don't guarantee anything in life.
If I were more level-headed, I might have considered it. Sleeping with someone else's wife and sending the DVD to her husband? Is that even possible? Would there be any benefit to doing something like that? Was it just a silly desire on the part of a man? Or was it just my wife harassing me? No matter how much I thought about it, it probably wouldn't solve anything.
The tears that had suddenly flowed, as if a weak spot in my heart had been grabbed, subsided. I looked at the computer screen and saw a man appear. But it was his back. He was doing something facing my wife, but the man's back was in the way, blocking my view. Then, when the man moved away from the camera, I saw something. My wife's small, pure white gym clothes had a different colored section. When I saw that, I realized what the man was doing. The fabric had been cut away from her nipples, exposing them.
Noriko, my wife and mother, was being stared at by another man, staring intently at her nipples, something I hadn't even seen before because I had been denied access to them the other day. And she was posing in a perverted way. Noriko, without doing anything, was simply exposing her nipples. The man who had just cut the gym clothes off could do anything he wanted to my wife on screen. But I was merely a bystander, watching it on my computer.
I couldn't even claim that the woman on screen was my wife. Men masturbating to adult DVDs and AV actresses—they were in the position of simply watching and being satisfied, or being seen. My wife was out of my reach, and I couldn't do anything about it. Even though the star of the scene was my wife, I was only allowed to watch. And the main character, the wife, had a partner in the same position, while I was just a completely different customer. I'm only allowed to watch from the outside.
After crying, I had no desire to think about the situation that had left me heartbroken. I found myself just staring at the screen. Perhaps I was numb. Seeing myself as the lowest in my own worldview was the most reassuring thing I could do. Perhaps I was trying to accept the situation.
---