ABSTRACT
The date of my birth, well, I’m not exactly sure. I’m certain of the month and the day, January 29, but I don’t know what year it was, although I think I’m about seventy-two this year. When my son, Yuji, got married, he went to get our family register from the town hall, and according to it, he said, I was bom around 1907 or 1908. But that’s wrong. My mother and father were in no rush to go to a place like the village hall, so they didn’t report my birth; then, when I was close to ten and was about to go abroad, my brother registered my birth for the first time. But my own honest calculation and the calculation made by the village hall differ by ten years, and so my neighbor, who is the same age as I, is able now to get money for the elderly from the government, while I don’t get a speck of dust.
