Chapter 24 bye, bye, bye

The monthly serialization lasted for two years, and each time I wrote ten manuscripts of hand-written novels.The job was harder than expected.However, after actually finishing it, I discovered one thing - I love writing hand fiction.In the future, when my physical strength declines and I feel that writing novels and serial novels is too tiring, I might as well write a novel every week and enjoy the fun of it.I think very seriously, twenty-five years later I want to live this kind of life. I decided to say goodbye in the last article.Say goodbye not to people, but to objects that disappear from around you without knowing it.The things I love will be deeply imprinted in the details of my life. Describing these items is equivalent to recalling my stories according to the age.

So I settled on the VCR, the bicycle, and the word processor.How should I put it, the items I've chosen don't seem eye-catching, but there's nothing I can do about it.Because, I am a study student, I only like writing, music boxes and walking.Since I was a child, I only do what I like and live my life willfully.Thank you for your patience in reading this very personal work.I hope that one day, we can meet again in other novels. No matter how cherished, objects around us will disappear.Moreover, it usually disappears without knowing it.Just like an elephant will quietly go to its own grave, those objects will also disappear from the stage according to their own will.

The Parker pen that I received as an admission gift when I was in junior high school; the Seiko watch that I received as an admission gift when I was in high school; and the scarves and sweaters that my girlfriend gave me, countless things stayed with me for a while, and then left me again and go. This time, I choose three of them as my last farewell speech.Thanks to the (few) long-time readers, this kind of pamphlet allows the author to do his best and is therefore superior to large-print media such as newspapers and weekly magazines.The ten manuscripts each time allowed me to play freely, which is a very pleasant experience (of course, I have also suffered).One post a month, the two-year series felt like a dream, yet, once it was over, it felt a bit like the memory of a dream.When I opened my eyes, everything disappeared.Please read the last article quietly, quietly, and with a relaxed mood.

When I was in middle school, tape recorders were very popular. You can use the VCR to listen to late-night radio programs, or record FM radio to learn about the latest information on Western music.At the age of thirteen, what interests me is not the Western art learned in music class, but youth pop music. I saved my monthly allowance to buy my favorite VCR.One night in May, as I lay reading the catalog I'd seen hundreds of times, my father, coming home from get off work, said: "Do you want it that much?" I replied without looking up: "Yes, I have already saved more than half of the money, and I can buy it if I save a little more."

"Yes. Come out with me." I followed my father to a nearby electrical store.Inside the glass window, there is the Sanyo "REC8000" that even appeared in my dreams, and every button seems to be shining. "Do you want to buy it for me?" My father nodded, and I handed all the pocket money I had saved to my father.The excitement of heading home with a big cardboard box in front of my chest, and the soft night breeze in spring are still impressive to this day. Go back to your room, plug it in immediately, and turn on the radio.The DJ was introducing the track when the FM radio was tuned in.I wanted to try it out, so I put in the tape provided by the store and recorded it.Black singers sang medium and slow songs with husky voices."Show & Tell" (AI Wilson), which I heard at the time, is still my favorite song to this day.

For the next seven years, whenever I was awake, I would listen to music on this VCR.Listening to ten songs in an hour, based on an eight-hour day, is 80 songs a day, and there are 29,000 songs in a year.Over a seven-year period, I listened to more than two hundred thousand pieces of popular music.There are also more than 500 cassettes with audio recordings.In short, I am a person who is easily obsessed. That original monophonic recorder formed the foundation of my love of music.That was long before the advent of digital music such as CDs. Any music has a faint noise, like a lingering scene in a memory.

That Sanyo REC8000 also disappeared unconsciously. Goodbye, VCR. I was studying at a preparatory high school in Tokyo, and I had to take a bus to a train to get to school.I hated buses and trams, so I started saving my pocket money again.This time, my target is a bicycle.I once mentioned in "4TEEN" that I love bicycles. What I want to buy is a Peugeot road car.Reynolds 531 molybdenum steel frame is used, with ten-speed shifting, and the round tube tires are only the width of a thumb (although the ride feels great, but it is easy to leak air, I often fill it in the bicycle parking lot in high school) .

I will never forget when that car was delivered home.Because it is as light as a feather.Just put two fingers on the frame and lift it up easily.I ride the race bike like the wind every day, on ten kilometers each way.It really is a special car for racing, even I can easily reach a speed of 40 kilometers per hour, and often overtake the bus without any effort. I love rain, and when it rains in the summer, I'm always excited to take the long detour home.On the way, you have to pass a one-kilometer-long bridge across the water supply road. Sometimes you can see a rainbow emerging from the clouds, which is a pleasant moment to enjoy on the way home.

After that, I gradually stopped riding this race road bike, and it disappeared somewhere. Goodbye, bicycles. After college, I lived a freelance life for a few years.At the beginning, I joined an advertising production company, which coincided with the popularization period of word processors. The company ordered me, who was always accustomed to handwriting, to learn to use word processors. At that time, the brand I was using was Canon.Afterwards, most of my manuscripts were written on a Canon A-series word processor.I also bought one at home for writing articles outside of work (articles for part-time jobs and advertising copywriting, etc.).

It was the spring of 1996. Spurred on by a women's magazine I was flipping through, I wrote my first novel on this word processor.Although the first thriller short story entered the final judging stage, it was still miserably defeated by Waterloo. The second modern novel (pure literature?) also squeezed into the last five selected works, but lost its name again.The third youth mystery novel I wrote is.Fortunately, this work won an award and became my first published work. A few days before the deadline for the Newcomer Award, I had already finished writing this debut work. When I was revising it, the whole novel disappeared due to an operation error.It was such a shock that my wife was horrified when she found me collapsed in the hallway of the apartment.

"What's wrong with you? Why are you sleeping here?" "Half of the novel I finally finished is missing." The maximum capacity of each file on that word processor is forty-two manuscript pages.I only have three days left.That night, I worked hard and tried to recall what I had written.The ability of a person when he is cornered is inestimable. It only took me one night to almost completely reproduce the contents of forty-two manuscripts. Moreover, the second time is to rewrite while recalling. Not only the writing speed is accelerated, but the text is also smoother, which is easier to understand than the second half.Afterwards, I worked hard to connect the content of the remaining sixty manuscript papers with the content of the first half. To be honest, I don't like computers very much, I used word processing and writing until I released my third work after my debut.In fact, this article was also typed horizontally, which is a habit I developed when using the black and white LCD screen of my first word processor. In the past, I always sent the disks to the publishing house by courier.Now, I have also joined the computer family, but I still cannot adapt to the word processor software in the computer. Regardless of performance and operation, it cannot be compared with a real word processor.Now I use electronic manuscripts to send manuscripts, and I can no longer do without the computer.But can't the speed of switching to Chinese characters be faster?Moreover, the method of the input method should also be more flexible. However, this memorable word processor also disappeared without knowing it. Goodbye, word processors. This book is finally coming to an end. The end of a novel is as difficult as the beginning of a novel.Of course, there is no shortcut, and that is to go back to the first story. The first story in this collection of novels is my real experience.It was my mother who was hospitalized in a coma, and the whiteboard with numbers written on it is indeed true.One day, if I want to write a novel, I will write about this matter.That's what I thought, sitting on a bench outside the intensive care unit.Therefore, I want to dedicate this book to my late mother, Takami Ishihira. Goodbye, mother.