I READ A LOT , but not a lot of different books: I like to read my favorites again andagain. Back then it was Truman Capote, John Updike, Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, but I didn’t see anyone else in my classes or the dorm reading writers like that. They liked Kazumi Takahashi, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, or contemporary French novelists, whichwas another reason I didn’t have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books.

啊哈哈，果然这次读发现了更多高中时不可能发现的东西。渡边说他喜欢看菲茨杰拉德和雷蒙德钱德勒，而其他同学喜欢大江健三郎和三岛由纪夫，所以他们没有什么可以聊的。我想说渡边同学你活该，大江健三郎和三岛由纪夫，连我都爱死他们了，至于菲茨杰拉德，你一遍又一遍地推荐他的了不起的盖茨比，虽然我个人认为还不错，啊哈哈，但是在我心中，还是三岛好

We lived in the same dorm and knew each other only by sight, until one day when I was reading Gatsby in a sunny spot in the dining hall. He sat down next to me and asked what I was reading. When I told him, he asked if I wasenjoying it. “This is my third time through,” I said, “and every time I find something new that I like even more than the last time.” “This man says he has read The Great Gatsby three times,” he said as if to himself. “Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend ofmine.” And so we became friends. This happened in October.

“That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed,the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”