Lucy and Teiji's jazz-club date

Lucy and Teiji’s jazz-club date begins as a tentative invitation and becomes, for Lucy, both a rare shared plan and a declaration of possession. In the dark club, their intimacy appears to place them inside a private world; by morning, Teiji’s guarded response to Lucy’s personal story exposes a distance she had not understood. The event matters not simply as a romantic interlude but as a turning point Lucy remembers through desire, uncertainty, and the fear that she has misread their relationship.

A First Planned Outing

Lucy did not especially like parties. In her student days, she had gone to them with a clear sexual purpose, while disliking the small talk, bathroom queues, and emotional scenes around rejection. She had no particular wish to attend parties in Tokyo either, but thought Teiji might want to go because he had spent many nights at them with Sachi. With his electronic jazz playing on his CD player, she suggested a party, then a club, making herself nervous as she tried to find a way to invite him out.

Teiji was washing his only cup, a pale-green one with a chip, and handled it carefully as he listened. He did not want to revisit the places he had gone with Sachi; she was no longer there, and returning would feel strange. Instead, he suggested a new jazz club nearby, described to him by one of the noodle shop’s customers as small, cozy, and unusual. The proposal gave the evening a particular significance: it was the first time Lucy and Teiji had really planned to go somewhere together, and Lucy felt that they were going on a date.

Before leaving, Lucy glanced at herself in the mirror, smoothed her hair, and winked at her reflection. She did not wear makeup and did not think she had nice clothes, but the small gesture records her excitement at entering a shared occasion that neither of them had simply stumbled into.

The Club and Its Intimacy

The club’s darkness made its small room seem to have no visible end. Lucy and Teiji could barely distinguish the other tables; the walls receded into blue-black shadow, while the piano and saxophone played in dim, dusty light. Though the musicians were only a few metres away, they seemed distant. Their melancholic, caressing music warmed Lucy and brought a smile to her face before she consciously recognized that she was happy.

The candlelight made Teiji’s skin shimmer, recalling Lucy’s first impression of him as water in the rain. The memory sharpened her desire. She sipped gin and touched Teiji beneath the table; he responded by kissing her and touching her in turn. They slipped from their cushioned chairs to the dark floor and had sex there. The last of Lucy’s gin spilled across Teiji’s face, and she licked it away while the saxophone played. The scene joins music, drink, touch, and the image of melting ice to the sensual intensity with which Lucy experiences him.

The room’s darkness also lets their encounter remain unseen. Lucy believes no one notices or cares enough to stop them, and she half hopes they will be caught. Her wish is not merely for the night to continue undisturbed: she wants the world to know Teiji is hers. The date’s apparent privacy therefore contains a competing impulse, toward public acknowledgment and possession. What feels to Lucy like a mutual romantic advance also reveals how urgently she wants their relationship to be legible as exclusive.

The Morning After

The next morning, Teiji lies beside Lucy watching her. His camera is not in sight. He calls her a bit strange, a remark that stays clear in Lucy’s memory even though she cannot decide whether he spoke in English or Japanese. She questions whether the Japanese word she remembers would have sounded harsher, and whether being strange could be qualified at all. His expression seems worried, perhaps even afraid; Lucy has no answer and closes her eyes, pretending to be asleep.

Lucy later connects his reaction to the story she had told him after the club. She had described her first sexual encounter, hoping that by sharing something of her own she might return some of the confidence she felt she had taken from Sachi. She also thought Teiji might fall asleep, as he had during earlier stories. Instead, she believes he stayed awake through the night, listening and staring at her. The morning remark thus follows an intimacy Lucy had hoped would deepen trust, but which seems to have made Teiji see her differently.

Lucy has been called strange since childhood, yet she says that being strange had always seemed normal to her. That morning, however, she reads Teiji’s expression as evidence that he does not feel as close to her as she had assumed. She does not ask what he means or try to argue that his own nighttime photography is unconventional. To Lucy, Teiji is simply Teiji; the question of who is normal does not occur to her. Her silence leaves the remark unresolved, and her interpretation of his unease becomes more powerful than any explanation he might have given.

Recollection and Consequence

Lucy remembers the date while reconstructing her past for the police, at a point when she says the night in question is blurred and must be recovered bit by bit. Her account of the jazz-club episode is therefore a flashback shaped by recollection rather than a detached report. She admits that she has been approximating Teiji’s language; the morning remark survives vividly, but even its original language is uncertain. The memory is precise about physical details—the chipped cup, the candle, the gin, the absent camera—and less certain about what Teiji’s words meant.

Afterward, Lucy does not go to Teiji’s apartment the following night. She fears he may not be there, or may tell her to leave because she is being strange. She plans a trip to Sado Island and tells herself she will see him when she returns and try to repair the damage she believes she has caused. The date therefore ends not with an agreement or an explicit break, but with withdrawal and an attempted postponement. Its romantic promise remains real to Lucy, yet the morning after has already turned their first planned outing into a memory of threatened loss.