![]() In this world, love can spring from anything – even Tetris. The Tetris blocks that Yoshida dropped were the most beautiful Tetris blocks I had ever seen. Too nervous to look her full in the face, I observed her figure furtively with sidelong glances. When she lost, she’d bite her bottom lip in frustration, and when she won, she threw her fists up slightly in a mini celebration. Yoshida wound up winning just one of ten games. She’d boasted about being ‘pretty good’ and she probably was better than the average girl, but it turned out that she was no match for me, the saddo who wiled away every waking hour playing video games. Managing to avoid the gaze of the teacher, we began a match. The two consoles connected up fine with the cable. Even though they were probably exactly the same model, Yoshida’s Gameboy seemed to shine. “Right!” Yoshida cried, taking her Gameboy out from her desk. The next day, as if under a spell, I took in my Gameboy, the Tetris software, and a cable to connect up for a match. “Well then, bring your Gameboy in tomorrow! We’ll have a match! Unless you think a girl like me won’t be much competition.” I sat up, bracing myself for a potential grilling. Then one day, during a boring social studies class, Yoshida suddenly struck up a conversation. We became desk buddies after a change to the seating plan in third year, but we’d never really talked. She came drifting into my life from nowhere, an out-and-out chav with dyed brown hair, bright red lipstick, and a skirt that completely went against school regulations. Yoshida was in the same year as me at middle school. And the worst thing of all? That blonde-haired miscreant was my first love, Yoshida. I’d stumbled upon the worst possible scene. In the faint glow, the blonde-haired miscreant was really laying into my bike lock with a pair of pliers. When I rushed to the nearest station to grab my bike and head home, I saw the lone figure of a girl illuminated, as if in a spotlight, by the dim, orange light of a shoddy streetlamp. Preparations for the school festival meant it was past 9 p.m. It was the autumn of my second year in high school. The year 1996, when trendy teens with bleached hair wearing statement baggy socks and girls impersonating pop idols like Namie Amuro were all the rage. After all, my first love was a bike thief. Obviously, thieves are nothing but a fucking nuisance, but I do have a certain soft spot for bike thieves. Probably targeted because it was so pricey. Two months after I began cycling to work, now a full-grown man who finally understood the joys of cycling, my beloved bike was stolen. When I pedalled my squeaky bike, breathing in the air of unfamiliar neighbourhoods, I could brush off most bad things with a, “Pah, who cares?” The bicycle truly is a wondrous thing, somehow becoming even more fun to ride as an adult than as a child. ![]() No matter the place, there were always small pleasures to be found and charming discoveries to be made. Seeing the comically pushy manner of brothel touts in certain suburbs. Buying an entire set of erotic manga I could never afford as a student from a second-hand bookshop. Finding insanely good tonkatsu pork cutlet in a dilapidated canteen on a deserted shopping street. I got so that on my occasional days off, too, I would mount my bike and head for neighbourhoods I’d never been to before. In that fortnight, I lost a whole 7 kilos. The joy of whizzing down the road without getting caught up in all the traffic, the ease of paying no heed to train times or changes, the freedom of being able to stop and aimlessly peruse my favourite shops on the way home – it was wonderful. Those commutes, which brought me nothing but exhaustion at first, suddenly became fun after a couple of weeks when my body got used to it. They do say you should follow the advice of your elders and betters. He himself looked eternally ill, so was just about the last person I wanted to be taking health advice from, but since he actually went as far as buying me an expensive, foreign, Bianchi bike, I really had no choice but to try out a cycling commute, at least for a bit. It’d take about 30-40 minutes from Nakano, where my home was, to the office in Shibuya. My boss, who was concerned about his ever-gigantifying subordinate’s health, strongly recommended that I commute by bike. My weight, 60 kilos when I first moved to Tokyo, had shot up to nearly 100 kilos, fat enough to put to shame the blubbery American tourists I’d sometimes pass on the street. I’d taken to heavy drinking and gluttonous eating to relieve the stress from work and had started to get repulsively fat. The most beautiful Tetris block in the worldĢ008, Spring. ![]() Translated from the Japanese by Eve Thomas Extract from Only on Nights When I Want to Die by Kirio Tsume ![]()
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