the job, they agree to have dinner together and go to the discotheque. After their night of leisure, he mistakenly directs her onto the wrong train. Noticing his mistake, he takes the next train to the last station to reunite with her. After admitting his mistake and the woman confessing her insecurities, he says that he will call her tomorrow before she takes the next train back home. The following morning, he realizes that he threw away the matchbook on which her phone number was written. Despite that gaffe, he tries multiple alternatives to obtaining her number but is unsuccessfully; he never sees her again. As a 28-year-old businessman, the man runs into a Chinese classmate from high school in Aoyama. Although they talk for a while in a coffee shop, the man is unable to recall who his colleague is until the line "a lot of water has gone under the bridge" is uttered, a memorable line from their English textbook from high school. The colleague then tells him about how he sells encyclopedias to Chinese families in Tokyo. Wanting for information about the infobooks, he gives his business card to the colleague before they go their separate ways. The story ends with the narrator reminiscing on his idiosyncratic relationship with Chinese people. "The Dancing Dwarf" A man working at a factory manufacturing elephants dreams of a dancing dwarf, then hears the dwarf existed and danced for the king prior to the revolution. In a subsequent dream he makes a pact with the dwarf to win the heart of a beautiful girl at the factory dance. "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon" Proud of his work, a man decides to give up his job mowing lawns as having split up from his girlfriend he no longer needs the money. He tells of his last assignment near Yomiuri Land.(1987) "The Silence" While waiting for a flight to Niigata, an unnamed narrator asks his friend Ozawa, an amateur boxer, if the pugilist has ever punched another person over an argument; Ozawa responds by saying that he did once, during a middle school feud with classmate Aoki. Aoki was a model student who always got the top scores on tests. However, during one English test in middle school, Ozawa bested Aoki's score; Ozawa confesses that his parents promising him to buy an exclusive item motivated him to study harder than ever before.