I hadn’t decided, I told her. I had no idea what to do. When I said this, she smiled again. “Maybe you ought to do some kind of work that involves writing,” she said. “Your critiques were beautifully written. I used to look forward to them. I really did. No flattery intended. For all I know, you were just writing them to fulfill a quota, but they had real feeling. I’ve kept them all. I take them out every once in a while and reread them.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And thanks for the hamburger.”

TEN YEARS have gone by, but whenever I pass her neighborhood on the Odakyu Line I think of her and of her crisply grilled hamburger steak. I look out at the buildings ranged along the tracks and ask myself which window could be hers. I think about the view from that window and try to figure out where it could have been. But I can never remember.

Perhaps she doesn’t live there anymore. But if she does, she is probably still listening to that same Burt Bacharach record on the other side of her window.

Should I have slept with her?

That’s the central question of this piece.

The answer is beyond me. Even now, I have no idea. There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate. All I can do is look up from the train at the windows in the buildings that might be hers. Every one of them could be her window, it sometimes seems to me, and at other times I think that none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.

—translated by Jay Rubin

TV PEOPLE

IT WAS SUNDAY evening when the TV People showed up.

The season, spring. At least, I think it was spring. In any case, it wasn’t particularly hot as seasons go, not particularly chilly.

To be honest, the season’s not so important. What matters is that it’s a Sunday evening.

I don’t like Sunday evenings. Or, rather, I don’t like everything that goes with them—that Sunday-evening state of affairs. Without fail, come Sunday evening my head starts to ache. In varying intensity each time. Maybe a third to a half of an inch into my temples, the soft flesh throbs—as if invisible threads lead out and someone far off is yanking at the other ends. Not that it hurts so much. It ought to hurt, but strangely, it doesn’t—it’s like long needles probing anesthetized areas.