“Anyway, during summer vacation a terrible thing happened. One of my classmates, a kid named Matsumoto, committed suicide. He wasn’t a particularly outstanding student. To be frank, he made almost no impression at all. When I heard that he died, I could hardly remember what he looked like. He’d been in my class, but I doubt if we ever talked more than two or three times. Kind of gangly, poor complexion—that’s about all I could say about him. Matsumoto died a little before August fifteenth, I remember, because his funeral was on Armistice Day. It was a real scorcher. There was this phone call saying that the boy had died and that everyone had to attend the funeral. The whole class. Matsumoto had leapt in front of a subway, for unknown reasons. He left a suicide note, but all it said was that he didn’t want to go to school anymore. Nothing else. At least, that’s how the story went.

“Naturally, this suicide had the whole school administration scrambling. After the funeral, the seniors were called back to the school and lectured by the headmaster about how we were supposed to mourn Matsumoto’s death, how we all had to bear the weight of his death, how we had to work extra hard to overcome our grief. The usual stock sentiments. Then we were asked if we knew anything about the reason Matsumoto committed suicide; if we did, we had to come right out and set the record straight. Nobody said a word.

“I felt sorry for my dead classmate, but somehow it seemed pretty absurd. I mean, did he have to jump? If you don’t like school, don’t go to school. It was only half a year before you wouldn’t have to go to that miserable school, anyway. Why kill yourself? It didn’t make sense. The guy was probably neurotic, I figured, driven to the brink by all this cramming for entrance exams day and night. Not so surprising, if you think about it. One nut’s bound to crack.