Please write to
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me, I said, and sent the letter special deliveryThe answer never cameThis was the beginning of one weird springI spent the whole holiday
waiting for lettersI couldn't take a trip, I couldn't go home to see my
parents, I couldn't even take a part-time job because there was no
telling when a letter might arrive from Naoko saying she wanted me to
come and see her on such-and-such a dateAfternoons I would spend
in the nearby shopping district in Kichijoji, watching double bills or
reading in a jazz caf?I saw no one and talked to almost no oneAnd
once a week I would write to NaokoI never suggested to her that I
was hoping for an answerI didn't want to pressure her in any wayI
would tell her about my painting job, about Seagull, about the peach
blossom in the garden, about
louis vuitton white speedy the nice old lady who sold tofu, about
the nasty old lady in the local restaurant, about the meals I was
making for myselfBut still, she never wroteWhenever I was fed up reading or listening to records, I would work a
little in the gardenFrom my landlord I borrowed a rake and broom
and pruning shears and spent my time pulling weeds and trimming
bushesIt didn't take much to make the garden look goodOnce the
owner invited me to join him for a cup of tea, so we sat on the veranda
of the main house drinking green tea and munching on rice crackers,
sharing small talkAfter retirement, he had got a job with an insurance
company, he said, but he had left that,
too, after a couple of years, and now he was taking it easyThe house
and land had been in the family for a long time, his children
roxanne mulberry bag were
grown-up and independent, and he could manage a comfortable old
age without workingWhich is why he and his wife were always
travelling together"That's nice," I said"No it's not," he answered"Travelling is no funI'd much rather be
working
He let the garden grow wild, he said, because there were no decent
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gardeners in the area and because he had developed allergies that
made it impossible for him to do the work himselfCutting grass made
him sneezeWhen we had finished our tea, he showed me a storage shed and told
me I could use anything I found inside, more or less by way of thanks
for my gardening"We don't have any use for any of this stuff," he
said, "so feel free
And in fact the place was crammed with all kinds of things - an old
wooden bath, a kids' swimming pool, baseball batsI found
gold chanel earrings an old
bike, a handy-sized dining table with two chairs, a mirror, and a
guitar"I'd like to borrow these if you don't mind," I said"Feel free," he said againI spent a day working on the bike: cleaning the rust off, oiling the
bearings, pumping up the tyres, adjusting the gears, and taking it to a
bike repair shop to have a new gear cable installedIt looked like a
different bike by the time I had finishedI cleaned a thick layer of dust
off the table and gave it a new coat of varnishI replaced the strings of
the guitar and glued a section of the body that was coming apartI
took a wire brush to the rust on the tuning pegs and adjusted thoseIt
wasn't much of a guitar, but at least I got it to stay in tuneI hadn't had
a guitar in my hands since school, I realizedI sat on the porch and
picked
tiffany diamond my way through The Drifters' "Up on the Roof" as well as I
couldI was amazed to find I still remembered most of the chordsNext I took a few planks of wood and made myself a square letterboxI painted it red, wrote my name on it, and set it outside my doorUp
until 3 April, the only post that found its way to my box was
something that had been forwarded from the dorm: a notice from the
reunion committee of my schoolA class reunion was the last thing I
wanted to have anything to do withThat was the class I had been in
with KizukiI threw it in the binI found a letter in the box on the afternoon of 4 AprilIt said Reiko
Ishida on the backI made a nice, clean cut across the seal with my
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scissors and went out to the porch to read itI had a feeling this was
not going to be good news, and I was
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