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Murakami in front of an avenue of old ginko trees
Photo: Noriko Hayashi / DER SPIEGEL
A young man who does not yet know where his life will lead him.
Maybe he will never know that for sure, after all, he is a character from the literary cosmos of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
This young man receives an invitation to a piano concert.
A few years earlier he had taken piano lessons with a young woman, now she's inviting him.
Your concert will take place on the outskirts of Kobe, in a hall on a hill.
The young man buys a bouquet of red flowers and takes the bus to the address mentioned.
But there he only finds a locked gate.
Nothing else.
At a loss, he goes back, sits down in a small park in an ivy-covered arbor and feels a kind of panic attack rise within him.
When he looks up, an older man is sitting across from him.
“All older people looked the same to me.
Sixty or seventy, what was the difference?
Unlike me, they weren't young anymore, ”says the first-person narrator.
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