When you reach thirty, you realize its not the end of the world
The narrator is a thirty-year old woman, married to a dentist and mother of a child. She is mindful of her figure and weight, and likes to keep herself fit. She used to be idealistic and hopeful, and believed thirty to be an age when one starts to get old. She realizes that being thirty has not made her old, at least not in mind. She still has desires, buried under her duties and responsibilities. She accepts the fact that she is getting old, but still cares about her looks.
The whole point is the Lederhosen.
The narrator and his wife’s friend had been discussing the importance of Lederhosen in her mother’s divorce. The narrator feels that there could be a possibility that her mother divorced her husband due to a third person in their marriage, since he finds it difficult to believe that she began to hate him simply by the act of buying him a pair of pants. But, the friend says that her mother hated him already, it was only due to the Lederhosen, she got to realize that she hated him. Had it been the mater of an extra-marital affair, she may have disguised these feelings under jealousy.
A person can’t exist without morals. I wouldn’t doubt if morals weren’t the very balance to my simultaneity.
Narrator had met this mysterious man through the girl he had a liking to. This girl had found him on a trip to Africa, and while the three of them had been smoking joints, the man tells narrator that he like burning barns. The narrator questions if burning barns isn’t immoral. The man says that he has deep belief in his morals. It’s just that they didn’t conform to the morals narrator had. He says that his need to burn barns is a part of that moral.
I wander through China. Without ever having boarded a plane.
Narrator describes the circumstances of how he met the first three Chines people he ever saw in Japan. First was the invigilator to an examination which was conducted in a school run by Chinese. He is intimidated and fascinated by this man, who is authoritative. His second experience had been with a girl whom he mistakenly sent on a wrong train, due to which she missed her curfew. She realizes that despite being born and raised in Japan, and not knowing a word in Chinese, she is not comfortable in Japan. The third Chinese he meets is a man who studied with him in ninth-grade. Through these experiences, he realizes that Chines and Japanese cultures are getting entwined and he is able to have a look in the lives of Chinese people without having to go to China.
To them the air vibrates, therefore I am.
The narrator is a lonely man whose job entails him to categorize complaints. He gets obsessed to a woman who had written a complaint. He decides to send her a recorded message. He is explaining how difficult it is to talk, since he is not comfortable talking to everyone, and how difficult it is to talk to someone would listen to his ‘prattling’. He says that speaking in a microphone is easy, since for the machines, the vibration of air when someone speaks is enough to record sounds irrespective of what one is saying. He believes that for machines, his existence is not dependent on his words or stature but just the fact that he can express himself by speaking.
