"But I'm only twenty," she went on. "I don't want to end up this way."
We were quiet as the waiter laid out the food.
"You're still young," I said after he had left. "You'll fall in love, get married. Things will change one after another."
"No, nothing will change," she whispered, deftly removing her lobster's shell with her knife and fork. "No one will fall in love with me. I'll be darning sweaters and setting out crummy cockroach traps until I die."
I sighed. I felt, all of a sudden, that I'd aged several years.
"Look, you're cute and charming, and you've got long legs and a sharp mind. You can even shell lobsters. Things will go fine."
Excerpt from Pinball, 1973
*Early signs of Murakami's male protagonists giving inept consolations for damsels in distress
