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THE OTHER AYA KAWAGUCHI
I Swept Her Words Away by Claudia McGill © 2009 he letter arrived in a handmade envelope sealed with red wax. Flipping through the bills and junk mail, Aya saw her name penned in perfectly shaped characters, tore open the seal, and read:
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Dear Kawaguchi-sama, I feel I must bypass the convention of commenting on the weather as I begin this letter because a more pressing matter is probably concerning you, that of my identity and purpose. I write in the spirit of greatest hope, and am aiming to reach the Ms. Aya Kawaguchi who was a student of Keio University in 1969. If this is not she, please ignore this letter. My name is Shingo Oeda, Professor of Psychology at Keio from 1960 until my retirement in 1991. From 1969-1970, I ran a series of experiments, the goal of which was to design and perfect a device—dubbed the ‘Amorometer’— capable of measuring one’s capacity to love.
(‘Amor,’ of course being the Latin root of the word “love”…) Of course, in 1969 there were no departmental regulations regarding the debriefing of experimental subjects. I assume you had no understanding of our research, let alone the extraordinary gifts these tests revealed: of all the subjects (439 in total) yours was the highest score in Lovingcapacity. In the Empathy measure you scored an astounding 32 points—more than two standard deviations above the mean. I must come to my point: I would very much like to meet you. As a widower of two years, I have found the companionship available to me (my tomcat and my memories) to be inadequate. The cat is unreliable and cantankerous, the memories often the same. It may be true that regardless of a man’s age, there remains inside him a kernel of youth. As I have aged, my curiosity has not lessened, but has migrated from my brain to my heart. It is not such a bad thing. With much hope,
Shingo Oeda P.S. This letter has taken me many years to write; the hypothetical results of my test on a ‘Cordometer’ (‘cord’ the Latin root for ‘heart,’ or ‘courage’) would likely be dismally low. I urge your quick reply, if possible. Aya Kawaguchi raised the letter up to the lamp at her desk, revealing the watermark. The thick paper, and the surprising space it created between her fingertips, made her feel somehow important. She had never been a student at Keio University. Since marrying Hisao all those years ago, she’d hardly visited Tokyo at all. She ran a fingertip over the seal. She imagined the professor dropping the thick wax onto the envelope’s flap and pressing his stamp there. She imagined the wool of his jacket and the creased leather of his shoes as he slipped out of
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