Hardboiled & Hard Luck Read Online Free PDF

day I asked her, So what made you decide to live in a place like this? To which she replied with a smile, Somehow I feel really relaxed here. Because when I see too many ordinary people, I start thinking that I’m strange, and that makes me uneasy.
    Chizuru kept things abnormally clean—the floors and the kitchen were always polished until they shone. More than once I’d been awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of her scrubbing the floor, and it was so slick I used to slip and fall all the time.
    She almost never slept. She said a few hours of sleep was enough. And that scrubbing the floor was just a way to kill time. She said she had been scrubbing the floors even before we started living together, even though there was no one to notice how clean they were, as she waited for daybreak. 
    She also insisted that she saw ghosts. She was constantly muttering to herself, saying the most frightening things. There’s an old woman coming, and look, she’s got a bunch of persimmons! That kid must have been run over by a car, huh? And so on. While I was with her, the world teemed with ghosts.
    I had made up my mind that if I couldn’t see something, it didn’t exist, so I wasn’t too concerned about all that. And yet, from time to time, I did sense something. Out on the street, in the apartment. And every time that happened, without fail, she would say someone was there.
    In order to sleep peacefully without seeing ghosts, Chizuru always went to bed wearing an array of objects that glowed or lit up. Rings, earrings, bracelets. She said these things kept the ghosts away. As a result, when we had sex—for some reason, she always played a masculine role—I always ended up getting poked in all kinds of places by various accessories, and it invariably hurt.
    There really was a lot of fog that year.
    When I awoke, near daybreak, Chizuru would often be sitting with a rag in one hand, partway through scrubbing the floor, gazing out the window.
    The headlights of cars would reflect off the fog, filling the air with a mysterious glow. It was like a scene from another world. Or like something you might see at the edge of this world—and that included Chizuru, the spectator. I would open my eyes a crack and watch her, without letting her know I was awake. She would rest her elbow on the rusty window frame, which rattled in the wind, and gaze out like a child, cradling her chin in her hand. The fog out there was milky, so thick it seemed you could reach out and touch it. I felt as if morning might never come. Chizuru’s torso and her arms were so thin they seemed to have been rejected by the world. They were only allowed to exist in these peculiar landscapes.
    People tend to think they break up because they get tired of the person they’ve been with—that it’s someone’s decision, either yours or theirs. But this isn’t really true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it. Human willpower can’t change that—which means, if you look at it another way, that we might as well enjoy ourselves until that day arrives.
    Our life together was peaceful and fun, right to the very end.
    Or was I the only one who felt this way? No, I doubt that.
    Little by little, as we lived a life fueled by convenience store meals in that old apartment, I began to train my mental muscles, which was what I needed to do to become an adult. It occurred to me that maybe it was time to try living alone. I found a place that was cheap, just right for me, and not too far away; I decided to take it right away, and told Chizuru. She didn’t seem particularly disturbed at the time. She just smiled and said, We can still go back and forth, right? So I didn’t realize what a shock it gave her.
    Our last Sunday together, we felt a little lonely. So Chizuru said she wanted to go for a drive. We headed for a nearby mountain, me behind the wheel of Chizuru’s car. We had a lunch of rice with mushrooms at a small