Her name was Shiori, and she was the girl I got along with best. She started doing this bizarre work after she graduated from college. I guess it was sort of like restrained prostitution, you know, a kind of service. But she was such a wonderful person. . . . We lived together when we were in college, in the same apartment I'm in now. And it was terrific. It was so much fun I could hardly believe it. We were never afraid of anything, we just spent every day talking about things, all kinds of things, and then sometimes we'd stay up all night, sometimes we'd get unbelievably drunk. Even if something really unpleasant happened while we were out, we'd come back home to the apartment and go crazy making jokes about it until finally we'd forgotten the whole thing. God, it was fun! We used to discuss my relationship with you a lot, you know. Except when I say “discuss” I mean things like, you know, maybe we'd talk about what a jerk you were, or else I'd go on and on about how happy you made me, it was just that kind of stuff, and she'd do the same. You know what I mean, right? Men and women can't be friends, right, that just can't happen. And by the time you start feeling totally comfortable together you're not really in love anymore, are you? But with Shiori that problem didn't exist, we just got along really well together. I don't know how to explain it, but when I was with her it was like, you know, like those times when life starts weighing down on you so much, it felt like that weight had been reduced by half. I just started feeling better, it wasn't like she did anything special or anything, I guess it was just that however relaxed we got, however much she and I let down our guards, things never got at all mushy, you know, she was gentle and kind just the right amount, that's what she was like. Women friends are the best, they really are. Back then I had you, and then I had Shiori, and to tell the truth that period was really hard for me. Though when I think back on all that now, it was really all just fun and games, it was like a big party. Every day I'd just laugh and cry and laugh and cry. Yeah, Shiori was a wonderful person, really great, she'd listen to you and she'd keep nodding and saying yeah, yeah, and there was always a bit of a smile hovering around her lips. And then she'd get these dimples. But she killed herself. She'd left my apartment a long time before that, she was living all by herself in this gorgeous place, and then she took a whole lot of sleeping pills and lay down in this tiny little single bed that she had there and just died. . . . She had a gigantic bed in the room she used for her work, this huge soft bed like you'd expect to find some medieval aristocrat falling asleep in, you know, a canopy over it and everything, and I really wonder why she didn't decide to die in that one. I guess there are some things even friends can't understand. You know I can even imagine her saying something about that, about how you'd probably have a better chance of going to heaven if you died in the big bed, it's just the sort of thing she might say. Her mother flew in from the country, and she called me up, and that's how I found out that Shiori had died. It was the first time I'd met her mother. She looked so much like Shiori I could hardly stand it. She asked me what sort of work Shiori had been doing, but in the end I couldn't even answer.