“I’m a Giants fan,” she said. “Which team do you like?”

“They’re all the same to me. I just like to watch them play.”

“What’s the fun of that? How can you get excited about the game?”

“I don’t have to get excited. I’m not playing. They are.”

I had two more whiskeys on the rocks and treated her to two daiquiris. She was a major in commercial design at Tokyo University of the Arts, so we talked about art in advertising. At ten, we moved on to a bar with more comfortable seats, where I had a whiskey and she had a grasshopper. She was pretty drunk by this time, and so was I. At eleven, I accompanied her to her apartment, where we had sex as a matter of course, the way they give you a cushion and a cup of tea at an inn.

“Put the light out,” she said, so I did. From her window you could see a big Nikon ad tower. A TV next door was blasting the day’s pro-baseball results. What with the darkness and my drunkenness, I hardly knew what I was doing. You couldn’t call it sex. I just moved my penis and discharged some semen.

As soon as the moderately abbreviated act was finished, she went to sleep as if she couldn’t wait any longer to be unconscious. Without even bothering to wipe up properly, I got dressed and left. The hardest thing was picking out my polo shirt and underpants from among her stuff in the dark.

Outside, my alcoholic high tore through me like a midnight freight. I felt like shit. My joints creaked like the Tin Woodman’s in The Wizard of Oz. I bought a can of juice from a vending machine to sober me up, but the second I drank it down I vomited the entire contents of my stomach onto the road—the corpses of my steak and smoked salmon and lettuce and tomatoes.

How many years had it been since I last vomited from drinking? What the hell was I doing these days? The same thing over and over. But each repetition was worse than the one before.

Then, with no connection at all, I thought about Noboru Watanabe and the soldering iron he had bought me. “You really ought to have a soldering iron in the house. They come in handy,” he had said.

What a wholesome idea, I said to him mentally as I wiped my lips with a handkerchief. Now, thanks to you, my house is equipped with a soldering iron. But because of that damned soldering iron, my house doesn’t feel like my house any longer.

That’s probably because I have such a narrow personality.