Chapter 1 - Mino

After leaving the inn and driving down the narrow, winding snow-covered road for several minutes, just at the place where the main road leading to the town appeared, Jennie, seated in the passenger seat, said, “if there’s a pharmacy, could you stop by for a little while?”

Casting a sideways glance to study her expression, Mino immediately understood. 

A pharmacy came into view in a few minutes and Mino, without saying a word, let the car slide into the car park.

As it was still early on a weekday, it was very nearly empty, so he was able to park his car in the immediate vicinity of the shop’s entrance.

“I won’t be long,” Jennie said, forcing a smile as she stepped out of the car. And, after quietly closing the door, moved at a slow pace before disappearing into the shop.

Eyeing her until her receding figure passed out of sight, Mino tipped his seat back and reclined. He lifted his chin and gazed at the sky visible through the windscreen. The sky was very clear. During the winter season, this region was hardly ever associated with blue skies; it was as if a gray lid had been placed over the area. But this year there had been an unusual number of sunny spells. 

Mino lowered his line of sight to the spacious car park where several cars were parked. In a corner, a huge mound of compacted snow still sat heavily. It was a remnant of the heavy snow that fell a week ago. Since then, days of sub-zero temperature persisted, so the raked-up snow refused to melt away easily.

Even in the central part of the city, where Mino and Jennie lived, the situation was similar; the residential road in front of their apartment was still rough and bumpy. Every time Mino took out the car it would wobble so much that when the two entered the road yesterday, Jennie had said, “This is going to be terrible if I get pregnant.”

By the time the news of her pregnancy was expected to arrive, though, the snow would have completely disappeared. But then again, such a thing as pregnancy, in the first place, was impossible, Mino silently thought to himself. 

“I somehow have this gut feeling I’ll get lucky,” Jennie had said a few days ago, regarding the trip to the hot-spring resort this time.

Right about now, Mino mused, she must be dropping her shoulders in defeat while applying a sanitary pad between her legs in the toilet of the pharmacy, disappointed at the unreliability of her gut feeling.

Such a thing had been recurring for a full two years now.

Though Mino had initially taken delight every month at the sight of Jennie overcome with disappointment and irritation, in these past several months a shift in his attitude was gradually beginning to grow.

In the early days, for more than a year, it used to be thrilling. 

Mino was simply unable to forgive Jennie, following her with betrayal of him, chasing after another man, less than two years after their marriage.

“Mino-yah, I have something important to tell you, actually,” Jennie, who had just returned from her office, had said, calling out to Mino’s back, just when he had stepped out of the bath and was about to take a beer from the refrigerator. This happened three summers ago. 

Having broached the subject with the words, ‘something important to tell you,’ before even changing her clothes, Mino thought, it must probably be about work. In spring, she had been moved from the marketing department to the advertising department and was troubled all the time by the fact that she wasn’t getting along with her immediate female superior there.

Perhaps today, Mino surmised, some considerably decisive event had occurred, and she