Shintaro Ishihara

While the older generation thought it was growing ever more broad-minded, but actually grew narrower in outlook, the young looked for something broad and fresh to build on. And besides, who started measuring naked human feelings in terms of material things

Tatsuya had long given up on love as well. His only notion of it was limited to an image of himself and a woman in a forest somewhere, where they played about naked among the trees

was because he had never been so deeply stirred by a woman before, or because his pace was no match for her eagerness, even though it was he who had challenged first. Eiko seemed to be making him grasp for something out of reach. She twisted away from him before he finally got hold of her. He was caught in a web of her making, and in the end he felt as if it were he who had been seduced

She had not been waiting very long when there was a phone call for her from a nearby hospital. The man had been killed in a collision at a railway crossing

The sight of the car, smashed and flattened, made her obsessed with the destruction of other men she loved after that

Her experiences with men changed her into a woman who had to sleep with any man she was attracted to

She felt as if her former self had died with the man she had loved

It had been the cradle for a passionate and intoxicating pleasure which neither Eiko nor Tatsuya had known before. They experienced in each other's bodies a satisfaction they had long been searching for.

Beyond the hills, the moon was rising. Eiko looked at it and knew for certain that she was really capable of loving a man.

At last I can really love someone,"