The curse of the great monkey on the Ginza underground line.　　-Afternoon on the Islands of Langerhans-　Haruki Murakami

　　　The other day, I got on the subway and there were two women sitting across from me who were clearly a mother and daughter duo. They both had department store shopping bags on their laps and looked very similar. Since I had some free time, I observed them and thought to myself, "As expected of a parent and child, they look so much alike. This girl will surely become like her mother when she gets older." However, when the train stopped at Akasaka-Mitsuke station, the older woman got off without saying a word. In other words, those two were not a parent and child but simply strangers who happened to sit next to each other. I tend to make these kinds of mistakes frequently because of my flawed judgment and my imagination running wild. Once I assume they are parent and child, that perception takes on a life of its own, ignoring any fine details that might prove otherwise. It's a troubling habit, but despite this, I still can't entirely dismiss the possibility that those two women were, in fact, mother and daughter. Perhaps for some reason, they don't know they are related. For example, maybe the young girl was kidnapped by a giant monkey in the forest when she was a baby, in the same year as the Tokyo Olympics. When her mother returned from picking strawberries, she found the baby missing, leaving only a small woolen hat and some of the monkey's fur behind. Then, 22 years later, the girl had grown up under the monkey's care until the age of eight, when she was taken to the mayor's house in town, where she blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Today, she came to buy a stainless steel pepper shaker at Matsuya in Ginza. However, her mother still thinks she's dead and wouldn't recognize her daughter even if they sat next to each other on the subway. The curse of the giant monkey still hangs over them.