thinks her brother tries to make a joke out of everything. When the sister invites Noboru over for dinner at the apartment, the men get a chance to interact with each other talking about plans after the wedding. The bachelor then leaves to go out for a drink. He meets a woman at a bar; they talk about baseball and proceed to have sex at her apartment after a few more drinks. When he returns home, he and his sister have a talk about their sex lives, where they learn the number of partners they each slept with; the bachelor says twenty-six while the sister says two before she met Noboru. After, they proceed to their separate rooms for the night. "A Window'" A graduate spends a year working at "The Pen Society" where he is employed to reply to letters from members, grading and making constructive comments on their prose. When he leaves he makes personal contact with one of his correspondents, a childless, married woman. They spend an evening at her place eating dinner and discussing their interests, particularly regarding arts and letters, before he leaves. When he passes by her neighborhood ten years later, he thinks fondly of that afternoon he spent with her. "TV People" 20–30% smaller than normal people, the TV people install a television in the narrator's flat, but the change is ignored by his wife. He later spots them carrying a television through his workplace, but when he mentions it to his colleagues they change the subject. Then his wife disappears, but he meets TV People again. "A Slow Boat to China" A Tokyo man recounts his contacts with Chinese people. In 1959 or 1960 when the man was still in secondary school, he goes to a "Chinese elementary school" to take a standardize aptitude test. He remembers having to traverse up a hill to the classroom. When the proctor arrives he gives clear test-taking directions before announcing that he is Chinese and teaches at the school. He then asks the forty test-takers to respect the desks by not vandalizing them. Everyone but the narrator responds "yes" and the proctor tells them to be proud. As a nineteen-year-old college student in Tokyo, he meets a similar-aged Chinese woman during a part-time job at a publisher's warehouse; being born in Japan, she has little ties to her ethnic background. After their final day on