What a strange world we live in! All I want is a perfectly ordinary hamburger steak, and the only way I can have it at this particular point in time is Hawaiian-style without pineapple.

Your own hamburger steak, I gather, is the normal kind. Thanks to your letter, what I wanted most of all was an utterly normal hamburger steak made by you.

By contrast, the passage on the National Railways’ automatic ticket machines struck me as a bit superficial. Your angle on the problem is a good one, to be sure, but the reader can’t vividly grasp the scene. Don’t try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.

Your overall score on this newest letter is 70. Your style is improving slowly but surely. Don’t be impatient. Just keep working as hard as you have been all along. I look forward to your next letter. Won’t it be nice when spring really comes?

P.S. Thank you for the box of assorted cookies. They are delicious. The Society’s rules, however, strictly forbid personal contact beyond the exchange of letters. I must ask you to restrain your kindness in the future.

Nevertheless, thank you once again.

I KEPT THIS part-time job going for a year. I was twenty-two at the time.

I ground out thirty or more letters like this every month at two thousand yen per letter for a strange little company in the Iidabashi district that called itself “The Pen Society.”

“You, too, can learn to write captivating letters,” boasted the company’s advertisements. New “members” paid an initiation fee and monthly dues, in return for which they could write four letters a month to The Pen Society. We “Pen Masters” would answer their letters with letters of our own, such as the one quoted above, containing corrections, comments, and guidance for future improvement. I had gone for a job interview after seeing an ad posted in the student office of the literature department. At the time, certain events had led me to delay my graduation for a year, and my parents had informed me that they would consequently be decreasing my monthly support. For the first time in my life, I was faced with having to make a living. In addition to the interview, I was asked to write several compositions, and a week later I was hired. Then came a week of training in how to make corrections, offer guidance, and other tricks of the trade, none of which was very difficult.