“The headmaster glared at me: guilty as charged. For him, anyone who went to a boxing gym was already suspected of delinquency. Nor was I exactly the type of student teachers took to. Three days later, the police called me in for questioning. Needless to say, I was in shock.

“They put me through a simple police interrogation. I said how I’d hardly ever spoken to Matsumoto. It was true that I had hit a fellow student named Aoki three years before, but that was a perfectly ordinary, stupid argument, and I hadn’t caused any trouble since. That was it. There is a rumor that you were hitting this Matsumoto, said the officer on duty. That’s all it is, I told him, a rumor. Someone who has it in for me is spreading it around. There is no truth, no proof, no case.

“Word got around school that the police had questioned me. And the atmosphere in class grew even colder. A police summons was like a verdict—like, they didn’t haul people in for no reason, right? Everyone believed I’d been beating up on Matsumoto. I don’t know what nonsense Aoki was peddling, but everyone bought it. I didn’t even want to know what the story was; I knew it was dirt. No one in the entire school would speak to me. As if by consensus—it had to be—I got the silent treatment. Even urgent requests from me got a deaf ear. I was avoided like the plague. My existence was wiped from their field of vision.

“Even the teachers did their best not to look in my direction. They’d say my name when they took roll, but they never called on me in class. Phys. Ed. was the worst. When the class split into teams, I wouldn’t end up on either side. No one would pair up with me, and the gym teacher would pretend it wasn’t happening. I went to school in silence, attended classes in silence, went home in silence. Day after day, a vacuum. After two or three weeks of this, I lost my appetite. I lost weight. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d lie there, all worked up, my head filled with this endless succession of ugly images. And when I was awake, my mind was in a fog. I wasn’t sure if I was awake or asleep.