In the short story "Yume no Onna" (The Woman of the Dream) from Shuichi Yoshida’s short story collection *The Women Play Twice*, a college-student protagonist is at a station with a male friend when they spot an incredibly beautiful woman. Just messing around, the friend and the protagonist decide to follow her. "What kind of place does she live in?" "It's probably a high-rise condo or an upscale residential neighborhood," they chat as they trail her all the way to her home. In the end, though, the woman returns to a decades-old, dilapidated apartment near a public bathhouse. That’s where it ends for the day. However, the protagonist just can't get her out of his head. A few days later, he happens to see her at the station again. Unable to contain himself, he approaches her, and on the spur of the moment, lies to explain why he spoke to her: "You look just like a woman who appears in my dreams." Desperate to establish some kind of connection, he hands her a flyer for the restaurant where he works part-time and invites her to come by. Secretly, the protagonist hopes she'll show up at his workplace. But there's no sign of her coming at all. Gradually, his desire for her to visit turns into resentment: "Why won't she come?" Then, one day, as he is heading to the public bathhouse with his usual soap and towel, it crosses his mind to walk past the woman's place. As he passes the run-down apartment, the lights are on in her room, and he can faintly hear the laughter of the woman and a man who appears to be her boyfriend. The moment he hears it, all of a sudden, what he had been doing strikes him as utterly ridiculous, sending him into a surge of agitation. He hurls the bar of soap from his washbasin straight at the woman's window and runs off. From behind, he hears her open the window and call out, "What is it?" I thought the pathetic way the protagonist built up his own expectations and then grew bitterly disillusioned on his own left a really bad aftertaste. Sorry for the long post.
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