One summer morning, the beginning of July, I got this long letter from my girlfriend, and in it she’d written that she wanted to break up with me. I’ve always felt close to you, and I still like you even now, and I’m sure that from here on I’ll continue to … et cetera, et cetera. In short, she was wanting to break it off. She had found herself a new boyfriend. I hung my head and smoked six cigarettes, went outside and drank a can of beer, came back in and smoked another cigarette. Then I took three HB pencils I had on my desk and snapped them in half. It wasn’t that I was angry, really. I just didn’t know what to do. In the end, I merely changed clothes and headed off to work. And for a while there, everyone within shouting distance was commenting on my suddenly “outgoing disposition.” What is it about life?

That year I had a part-time job for a lawn-care service near Kyodo Station on the Odakyu Line, doing a fairly good business. Most people, when they built houses in the area, put in lawns. That, or they kept dogs. The two things seemed mirror alternatives. (Although there were folks who did both.) Each had its own advantages: A green lawn is a thing of beauty; a dog is cute. But half a year passes, and things start to drag on everyone. The lawn needs mowing, and you have to walk the dog. Not quite what they bargained for.

Well, as it ended up, we mowed lawns for these people. The summer before, I’d found the job through the student union at the university. Besides me, a whole slew of others had come in at the same time, but they all quit soon thereafter; only I stayed on. It was demeaning work, but the pay wasn’t bad. What’s more, you could get by pretty much without talking to anyone. Just made for me. Since joining on there, I’d managed to save up a tidy little sum. Enough for my girlfriend and me to take a trip somewhere that summer. But now that she’d called the whole thing off, what difference did it make? For a week or so after I got her good-bye letter, I tried thinking up all sorts of ways to use the money. Or rather, I didn’t have anything better to think about than how to spend the money. A lost week it was. My penis looked like any other guy’s penis. But somebody—a somebody I didn’t know—was nibbling at her little nipples. Strange sensation. What was wrong with me?