A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

I try to associate as little as possible with those who don’t interest me, everyone that I maintain a long relationship with has a certain something.

Kido seemed lonely, but now she was the one letting herself get carried away by the intense loneliness of middle age.

It was a bottomless, middle-aged kind of loneliness that he never could have even conceived of when he was younger, a loneliness that saturated him with bone-chilling sentimentality the moment he let down his guard.