Shimamoto appeared while Hajime feels inferior as the only child in his family. They were 12 years old when they met, and she was like a ray of sunshine to open Hajime‘s heart. Shimamoto was a very pretty girl but polio has left her lame, even though Hajime still thought she was very pretty and different from others. The solitary Hajime encountered with Shimamoto who also came from a one-child family and found that there were many common points between each other. However they soon became good friends whom could share their secrets with each other. They spend long afternoons in her living room listening to Liszt and Nat King Cole on her father's prized new stereo, and talking with a pre-adolescent openness that becomes erotic only in retrospect. They were in a delicately poised relationship and had a period of pure and amused time. Shimamoto saved Hajime and gave a great support to his unbearable isolated world. For Hajime, Shimamoto’s existence was not just the end of the loneliness, more importantly he found the resonance of the mind from her. Shimamoto filled the missing sense of his life, she was the indispensable existence. They separated when entering junior high-school and moved to different areas. Dramatically, they met each other at 36 years old again. Hajime is catapulted into the past unreservedly but Shimamoto suddenly left him without a word after they spent a night together. Shimamoto is a beautiful, intense and mysterious woman; we don’t know any background of her later life. We know that she had a baby who died in infancy. She was single, not working, but had a very decent quality of life.