Chapter 20 19

It's a long story, but I'm twenty-one. Still young enough, but not as young as before.If you're not satisfied with that, there's no other way than to climb up to the Empire State Building and jump off the roof on a Sunday morning. I've heard jokes like this in old movies about the Great Panic. do you know?Every time I pass under the Empire State Building, I have to hold an umbrella every time, because there are always people falling from it. I'm only twenty-one, and I'm not planning to die, at least not yet.I've slept with three girls so far. The first girl was a classmate in high school, we were seventeen years old, and we both believed we were deeply in love with each other.In a forest at dusk, she took off her tea-colored loafers, white cotton socks, light green seersucker dress, and strange underwear that was obviously out of size. After a little hesitation, she took off her watch, and we were in The Sunday edition of the Asahi Shimbun embraced each other.

We separated suddenly a few months after high school.The reason has been forgotten.But that's the reason why it can be forgotten to that extent.I haven't seen her again since.At night when I can't sleep, I often think of her, that's all. The second object is a hippie girl I met at Shinjuku Station on the subway.She was sixteen, broke, had nowhere to sleep, and barely had breasts.There is a pair of beautiful eyes that seem to have a good mind.It was a night of violent demonstrations in Shinjuku.Trams, buses, everything has come to a complete stop. You hang around there without fear of getting caught?I told her.She huddled in the closed ticket gate, squatting and reading sports newspapers picked up from the trash can.

But the police will give me food. I'll give you a great look. I'm used to it. I lit a cigarette and gave her one too.My eyes hurt because of the tear gas. Didn't eat anything? morning to now. How about, take you to eat, anyway, come outside. Why are you taking me to eat? No reason.Why I don't know.I dragged her out of the ticket gate and walked to the sparsely populated road in Mejiro District. This girl who talks very little, lived in the house I rented for about a week.She wakes up after noon every day, smokes after eating, reads books and watches TV in a daze, and sometimes makes love to me feebly.The only thing she owns is the white canvas bag, which contains only a thick windbreaker, two T-shirts, a pair of blue jeans, three dirty underwear and a box of sanitary napkins.

Where are you from? Sometimes I ask her that. From somewhere you don't know. She answered in this way, and otherwise said nothing. When I came back from the supermarket one day with the grocery bag in hand, she was gone.Her white canvas bag was missing, too, along with several other items.The little change I had scattered on the table, the packs of cigarettes, and my freshly laundered T-shirts.On the desk was a piece of paper torn from a note that looked like a message note, with only one nasty guy written on it.That might mean me. The third object was a French girl I met in the university library, but she hanged herself in a barren weed forest next to the tennis court during the spring break of the second year.No one found her body until the beginning of the new semester, hanging by the wind for two weeks.Now that it was dark, no one dared to go near the woods.