![]() Hilton easily rounded first and pulled up to second. The crack of bat meeting ball echoed through the stadium. Hilton got a hit down the left-field line. ![]() The lead-off batter for the Swallows was Dave Hilton, a young American player who was new to the team. He easily retired the side in the top of the first inning. He was a short, stocky pitcher with a wicked curveball. Takeshi Yasuda was pitching for the Swallows. It was the season opener, and the Swallows were taking on the Hiroshima Carp. ![]() As usual, the stadium wasn’t very crowded. I was lying on the grass, sipping a cold beer, gazing up occasionally at the sky, and enjoying the game. There were no benches in the outfield seating area back then, just a grassy slope. It was a beautiful spring day, cloudless, with a warm breeze blowing. Jingu Stadium was within walking distance of my apartment at the time, and I was a fairly devoted Yakult Swallows fan. I was at Jingu Stadium, alone in the outfield, watching a baseball game. I can pinpoint the exact moment when it happened. And, pretty much out of the blue, it occurred to me to write a novel. I was reaching the age at which I wouldn’t be considered young anymore. I took a deep breath, glanced back at the stairs I’d just climbed, then slowly gazed around me and began to contemplate the next stage of my life. I was confident that I’d be able to handle any new problems that might crop up. Now I felt as though I’d reached the top of a steep staircase and emerged into an open space. Up to that point, it had been a question of sheer survival, and I hadn’t had time to think about anything else. To get started, I’d borrowed as much money as I could from every bank that would lend to me, and by now I’d paid a lot of it back. But, after a while, I began to make enough of a profit to hire other people, and I was finally able to take a breather. I had all kinds of painful experiences and plenty of disappointments. I was at the club from morning till night and I left there exhausted. I grew up in a white-collar household, so I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, but fortunately my wife’s family ran a business and her natural intuition was a great help. I’m more of a workhorse than a racehorse. My strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can handle a lot physically. I just figured that since failure was not an option, I had to give it everything I had. To tell the truth, I didn’t think that I had much aptitude for business, either. Well, their predictions were totally off. They figured that an establishment that was run as a kind of hobby couldn’t succeed, and that someone like me-I was pretty naïve and, they suspected, didn’t have the slightest aptitude for business-wouldn’t be able to make a go of it. Most of my friends had predicted that the club would fail. ![]() This kind of club was still quite rare in Tokyo back then, so we gained a steady clientele and the place did all right financially. We served decent food, too, and, on weekends, featured live performances. During the day, it was a café at night, it was a bar. The new venue wasn’t big-we had a grand piano and just barely enough space to squeeze in a quintet. The club had stayed there for about three years then, when the building it was in closed for renovations, I moved it to a new location, closer to the center of Tokyo. Soon after leaving college-I’d been so busy with side jobs that I was actually a few credits short of graduating and was still officially a student-I had opened a little club near the south entrance of Kokubunji Station. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. ![]()
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