wednesday afternoon outing A friend who happened to hear of her death in the newspapers called me with the news.He read the report from a morning newspaper slowly by the receiver.The text of the report is very ordinary, probably written by a reporter who has just graduated from university. On a certain day of the month, a certain driver on a certain street corner crushed someone to death.The driver is under investigation on suspicion of professional negligent death. It sounded like a short poem on the title page of a magazine. "Where is the funeral?" I asked. "It's—don't know," he said. "The question starts with: Does the kid have a home or something?"

Of course she also has a home. I called the police that day and asked for the address and phone number of her parents' home, and then called her parents' home to find out the date of the funeral.As someone said, everything can always be figured out if you don't bother. Her home is in Shitamachi.I opened the Tokyo zoning map and marked the area where her house is located with a red ballpoint pen.It is indeed the settlement of ordinary people in Tokyo City.Subway lines, state-run electric train lines, and special bus lines criss-cross like a mess of cobwebs without a clue.Several dirty water rivers pass through it, and the messy roads are tightly attached to the surface like melon patterns.

On the day of the funeral, I took the Toei Tram from Waseda.I got down at the small station near the end and opened the zoning map, but the map and the globe were equally useless, so I bought several packs of cigarettes and asked several times before I reached her door. Her home is an old wooden house surrounded by brown wooden courtyard walls.After entering the gate, there is a small courtyard on the left, which is so narrow that it seems to say "maybe it is not useless".In the corner of the courtyard was an old pottery brazier that had been abandoned for a long time, and there was 15 centimeters of rainwater in the brazier.The courtyard soil is dark and damp.

It was also because she ran away from home at the age of 16 and never came back. Only relatives attended the funeral, which was quiet.The relatives were almost all elderly people, and a man in his early 30s who was not sure if it was her brother or cousin was conducting the funeral. My father was fifty-six or seventeen years old, not tall, wearing a black suit with a funeral armband on his arm, standing almost motionless in the gatehouse, his appearance reminded people of an asphalt road that had just receded from the flood. Before leaving, I silently bowed my head to him, and he silently bowed his head too.

The first time I saw her was in the autumn of 1969, when I was 22 and she was 17.There is a small cafe near the university where I often wait for friends.Although the cafe is not very eye-catching, you can hear rock and roll music, and drink coffee that tastes like a mess while listening. She always sits with me, leaning her elbows on the table and reading a book.Although the glasses she wears look like braces, and her hands are well-defined, she always seems to have a feeling of being approachable.The coffee in her cup is often cold, and the ashtray is often full of cigarette butts.But the title of the book has been changed.Sometimes it's Mitch Spieler, sometimes it's Kenzaburo Oe, sometimes it's The Ginsberg Poems.In short, as long as it is a book.The students in and out of the cafe lent her books, and she read one after another like eating corn on the cob.At that time, everyone wanted to lend books to others. I think she never felt sorry for reading books.

Delts, The Rolling Stones, Butts, Dipper Pabble, Moody Brutz—it was that era, too.The air always seems to be tense, and it seems that with a slight kick, ordinary things will immediately fall apart. We drank cheap whiskey, made bland sex, chatted mindlessly, read borrowed books, and so on and so on.And the clumsy '60s are coming to an end with a creaking sound. Forgot her name. Of course I can remember the newspaper clipping that reported her death, but the name and the like are no longer necessary.I've forgotten her name, that's all. When I saw my former companion once, I mentioned her occasionally.They also don't remember her name.By the way, wasn't there a girl who slept with everyone in the past, what was her name?Forget it all.I have also been trapped with her several times, how is it now?I'm afraid I don't understand if I run into them suddenly on the road.

——Once upon a time, somewhere, there was a girl who slept with everyone. This is her name. Of course, to be precise, she doesn't sleep with everyone, and she has her own benchmark. Even so, as a matter of fact, she was trapped with similar men. Once, out of sheer curiosity, I asked her about her benchmarks. "Well—" she pondered for 30 seconds, "Of course it doesn't mean that anyone can do it. There are times when I find it annoying. But maybe after all, I want to know all kinds of people, or I want to know people who are right for me. How the world is made."

"By sleeping together?" "Ok." This time it was my turn to meditate. "So... how much do you understand?" "More or less," she said. From the winter of 1969 to the summer of 1970, I hardly saw her.Universities are either closed or suspended.I have nothing to do with this, but a little personal matter. When I went to that cafe again in the autumn of 1970, all the faces of the customers had changed, and she was the only one I knew.Although rock and dance music is still playing, the tense atmosphere is gone.Only she is the same as bad coffee from a year ago.I sat in the chair across from her, drinking coffee and talking about my past companions.

Most of them dropped out of college.One committed suicide and the whereabouts of the other is unknown. "What have you been doing this year?" she asked me. "It's hard to say," I said. "Smarter?" "a little bit" That night, I got sleepy with her, for the first time. I don't know much about her life experience.It seems that someone has told me, and it seems that I have heard it from her in bed.It probably means that in the summer of my first year of high school (high school!), I had a big fight with my father and ran out of the house.As for where he lived and what he did for a living, no one knew.

She sat on a chair in a rock and roll cafe all day, drank coffee with one cup and smoked the other, flipping the pages of the book while waiting for someone to pay for the coffee and cigarettes (it was still the same amount for us at the time) ), and then basically sleep with the other party. That's all I know about her. From the fall of that year to the spring of the following year, she came to my dormitory in the suburbs of Mitaka once every Tuesday night.She ate simple dinners I cooked, filled the ashtrays, and listened to FEN's rock music at full volume while she fucked.Wake up on Wednesday morning and go for a walk in the miscellaneous woods, walk to the ICU②campus together, and stop by the cafeteria for lunch.Drink diluted coffee in the lounge in the afternoon, and lie on the lawn to watch the sky when the weather is good.

① Brief introduction of Far East Network, the Far East Broadcasting Station of the US Army, headquartered in Los Angeles. ② Brief introduction of International Christian University, International Christian University. She calls it a Wednesday outing. "Every time I come here, I feel like I'm on an outing." "Is it really like going on a picnic?" "Well. The lawn stretches as far as the eye can see, and the people are beaming..." She sat on the lawn and wasted several matches to light the cigarette. "The sun rises and sets, people come and go, time flows like air, isn't it a bit like an outing?" At that time, I was 21 years old, and I will be 22 in a few weeks.No hope of graduating from college right now, and no decent reason to leave college.In the despair with which it was all inexplicably mingled, I did not take a step for months. I feel like the whole world is going on and on, but I'm stuck in the same place. In the autumn of 1970, as far as the eye could see, everything seemed to be desolate and gloomy.Even the sun and the smell of grass and the low sound of rain make me restless. I dreamed of night trains several times, the same.The car was filled with the smell of cigarettes, the smell of toilets, and the smell of the uninformed crowd. It was so crowded that there was almost no room to stand, and the seats were stained with vomit from the past.I couldn't bear it anymore, left my seat and got off at a station.And there was nothing but desolation, no lights of a house to be seen, no station attendant, no clock, no timetable, nothing—such was the dream. There were a few times during that time that I seemed to be rough with her.How rude I can't remember now.It is also unknown whether he was being rude to himself.But anyway, she didn't look like she cared at all, or rather (to put it in the extreme) enjoyed it, why I don't know.After all, it was not tenderness that she was looking for in me.Thinking about it this way, I feel unbelievable now, feeling sad for a moment, as if my hand suddenly touched a thick wall that was invisible to the naked eye floating in the air. I still vividly remember that strange afternoon on November 25, 1970.The leaves of the ginkgo trees that fell from a heavy rain are yellow--yellow like a dry river--a path among the miscellaneous trees.She and I put our hands in our coat pockets and paced up and down the path.There was no sound but the clatter of two shoes on fallen leaves and the high-pitched cry of a bird. "What are you worried about?" She asked me suddenly. "No big deal," I said. After walking a little further, she sat down by the side of the road to smoke, and I sat next to her. "Always have bad dreams?" "I always have bad dreams. Most of them dream that the ticket vending machine can't find change." She smiled, put her hands on my knees, and retracted them. "Surely you don't want to talk about it, do you?" "It's definitely not good." She threw the half-smoked cigarette on the ground and crushed it carefully with her sneakers. "It's bad to say what you really want to say, isn't it?" "Do not understand." Two birds flew up from the ground "fluttering", and disappeared into the sky without a trace of clouds as if they were sucked in.We silently watched the direction where the bird disappeared.After a long time, she began to draw some inexplicable figures on the ground with small dead branches. "Sleeping with you makes me sad all the time." "I'm sorry." I said. "It's not your fault. It's not because you thought of other girls when you hugged me. It doesn't matter anyway. I," she shut her mouth suddenly, slowly drawing three parallel lines on the ground, "don't understand." "It's not that I want to close my mind," I said after a pause, "but I can't grasp what's going on. I'd like to hold things as fairly as possible without being overly exaggerated or realistic. But That takes time." "how long?" I shook my head, "I'm not sure, maybe 1 year, maybe 10 years." She dropped the twig on the ground and got up to beat the dead grass on her coat. "Hey, don't you think 10 years is like forever?" "Yeah." I said. We walked through the woods to the ICU campus, sitting in the lounge eating hot dogs as usual.At two o'clock in the afternoon, Yukio Mishima was repeatedly introduced on the TV in the lounge.There was something wrong with the volume controls, and the sound was barely audible.It's none of our business anyway.We finished our hot dogs and had a cup of coffee each.A student rode on the back of the chair and turned the volume control button for a while, then gave up, jumped off the chair and went to nowhere. "want you." I say. "Yes you can." She smiled. Still putting our hands in our coat pockets, we walked slowly back to the dormitory. When she woke up suddenly, she was crying.Her narrow shoulders trembled violently under the towel.I lit the heater and glanced at the clock: 2:00 am.A bright white moon floats in the center of the night sky. When she stopped sobbing, I boiled water and made a bag of black tea, and the two drank it.No sugar, no lemon, no milk, just hot tea.Then light two cigarettes and give one to her.She sucked in a big gulp and exhaled three times in a row, and then coughed for a long time. "I said, are you planning to kill me?" she asked. "kill you?" "Ok." "Why do you ask that?" She wiped her lower eyelids with her fingertips while smoking a cigarette. "Just wanted to ask." "No." "real?" "Really," I said, "why did you have to be killed?" "Yeah," she nodded impatiently, "I just felt that it wouldn't be bad if someone killed me." "I'm not the type to kill." "yes?" "perhaps." She smiled, poked the cigarette into the ashtray, drank the remaining black tea in the cup, and lit another cigarette. "Live to 25," she said, "and die." She died in July 1978, aged 26.