March 12

March 12 is the date of an urgent call from Tadao to Hiromi, made just after the third performance of her play. His insistence that they meet that night, and her growing dread as she waits to do so, make the date a threshold between a successful performance and an encounter whose purpose remains concealed.

The Call and the Arrangement

On March 12, the third performance of Hiromi’s play had just ended safely when Tadao phoned. He said he needed to see her urgently, preferably that night, and sounded deadly earnest. Hiromi asked what the matter was, but he would not explain; he said only that he had a few things he wanted to give her.

Hiromi already had a business dinner that evening and could not be free before ten. Tadao proposed eleven, underscoring his hurry even as he accepted the delay. Hiromi agreed to meet at their usual place. Because it was March, that meant Saemonbashi Bridge.

Dread Before the Meeting

The call unsettled the shape of Hiromi’s evening. Her dinner companion, a freelance producer, wanted her to direct a play he had adapted from a novel she had read. Under ordinary circumstances she would have been enthusiastic, and the producer expected the story’s theme to appeal to her. But the unexplained urgency of Tadao’s request left her with such an overpowering sense of dread that she could not give the proposal her full attention.

The date’s significance is therefore not simply that a meeting was arranged. The contrast between the play’s safely completed third performance and Hiromi’s anxious anticipation turns March 12 into a hinge in the sequence: public work reaches its evening conclusion while a private, undisclosed matter presses toward a late-night meeting at Saemonbashi Bridge.