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means of survival—a job. He spent the three years of high school wanting to graduate
so that he could begin living a more serious life as soon as possible.
Even after entering college, however, he continued with judo, living basically the
same life as before. Keeping up his judo meant he could live in the dormitory and thus
be spared any difficulty in finding a place to sleep or food to eat (minimal though it
was). He also received a scholarship, though it was nowhere nearly enough to get by
on. His major was mathematics, of course. He studied fairly hard and earned good
grades in college, too. His adviser even urged him to continue into graduate school.
As he advanced into the third year and then the fourth year of college, however, his
passion for mathematics as an academic discipline rapidly cooled. He still liked
mathematics as much as ever, but he had no desire to make a profession of research in
the field. It was the same as it had been with judo. It was fine as an amateur endeavor,
but he had neither the personality nor the drive to stake his whole life on it, which he
well knew.
As his interest in mathematics waned and his college graduation drew near, his
reasons for continuing judo evaporated and he had no idea what path he should next
pursue. His life seemed to lose its center of gravity—not that he had ever really had
one, but up to that point, other people had placed certain demands and expectations
upon him, and responding to them had kept him busy. Once those demands and
expectations disappeared, however, there was nothing left worth talking about. His
life had no purpose. He had no close friends. He was drifting and unable to
concentrate his energies on anything.
He had a number of girlfriends during his college years, and a lot of sexual
experience. He was not handsome in the usual sense. He was not a particularly
sociable person, nor was he especially amusing or witty. He was always hard up for
money and wasn’t at all stylish. But just as the smell of certain kinds of plants attracts
moths, Tengo was able to attract certain kinds of women—and very strongly, at that.
He discovered this fact around the time he turned twenty (which was just about the
time he began losing his enthusiasm for mathematics as an academic discipline).
Without doing anything about it himself, he always had women who were interested
enough to take the initiative in approaching him. They wanted him to hold them in his
big arms—or at least they never resisted him when he did so. He couldn’t understand
how this worked at first and reacted with a good deal of confusion, but eventually he
got the hang of it and learned how to exploit this ability, after which Tengo was rarely
without a woman. He never had a positive feeling of love toward any of them,
however. He just went with them and had sex with them. They filled each other’s
emptiness. Strange as it may seem, he never once felt a strong emotional attraction to
any of the women who had a strong emotional attraction to him.
Tengo recounted these developments to his unconscious father, choosing his words
slowly and carefully at first, more smoothly as time went by, and finally with some
passion. He even spoke as honestly as he could about sexual matters.
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