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the basis of all sports. No, it’s more than that—it’s the basis of life. People are always comparing life to a marathon, right? Yazaki, you bum, you’ve got a lung capacity of 6,100, and you just slack off and haven’t run the distance once. You’re a scumbag. You’ll end up in the gutter, wait and see.”
    “Scumbag,” “bum”—is that any way for an instructor to speak to an impressionable teenager? Not that I couldn’t understand where he was coming from. It was true, after all, that having run for about five hundred meters, I’d stop to stroll along with all the slobs, chatting about the Beatles and girls and motorbikes and what have you, and then, when there were five hundred meters or so left to go, I’d start running again and wouldn’t even be breathing hard as I crossed the finish line.
    “It’s all my fault. I didn’t bring you up properly,” my long-suffering mother, who was in Korea during the war, says even to this day. When things get a bit difficult, I quit; when some little thing stands in my way, I just give up and go with the flow; always looking for the easy way out, the path of least resistance—that’s me, she says. I hate to say it, but she’s right.
    Nevertheless, I did take part in the long-distance race my first year. The course covered seven kilometers: from the school to Mt. Eboshi, halfway up the mountain, and back. Along with the geeks, the physically unfit, and my fellow gutless wonders, I walked silently up the mountain road to the turning point, being passed by a number of girls who’d started five minutes later, then bounded lightly back down the road to the school, where most of the students were already wrapped in blankets, gasping for breath, or being led off, puking, to the first-aid room, or drinking hot glucose with trembling hands; and when I crossed the finish line, number 598 out of 662 male students, whistling “A Day in the Life,” not only Kawasaki but most of the teachers there agreed that I was scum.
    Being the sensitive child I was, I didn’t want to go through that sort of thing again, so in the winter of my second year, when I was sixteen, I ran away from home.
      
    I withdrew the nearly thirty thousand yen I had in postal savings and headed for the sprawling metropolis of Hakata. In addition to avoiding the school marathon, there was one other thing I wanted to accomplish during this trip.
    Losing my virginity.
    As soon as I reached Hakata, I checked into the ANA Hotel—the fanciest hotel in all of Kyushu at the time—then put on my George Harrison-style tweed jacket and hit the streets. I was strolling down an avenue lined with leafless trees, singing “She’s a Rainbow,” when a woman’s voice said, “Hi there.” It was dusk, and the sky was a pale, heart-stirring purple. The voice belonged to a woman several years older than me who looked a lot like Marianne Faithfull and was driving a silver E-type Jaguar. She beckoned to me with her forefinger, opened the door of the Jag, and said, “I have a favor to ask you. Would you mind getting in? Please?” I got in. Her perfume was intoxicating. “You see,” she said, “I used to be a top fashion model but I got into a bit of trouble in Tokyo and had to hide out down here for a while and now I’m working at a very exclusive club called Cactus and I got involved with this customer and it’s turning into a problem, you see, because he’s a yakuza who owns a lumber-yard and he wants to set me up as his mistress and won’t take no for an answer but, well, I don’t really need the money and I don’t want to be anybody’s mistress so I told him I’ve got a younger brother who’s my only living relative and he’s got heart disease so I have to stay with him, but I don’t actually have any brothers so I was planning to get somebody to play the part but I never got around to it and today’s the day I’m supposed to go talk to the guy, so...” She asked me if I’d be willing to