Toki-sensei, hello. It’s been ages.
Miyu Otani here, 25 and still a bit impatient. My background music of choice is your “Tokyo Drive”.
Have you done a correspondence by letter before? I really like Kinshu [Autumn Brocade] by Teru Miyamoto, a novel in the form of letters. After reading it I developed a real thing for letter correspondence. Even today when everything’s so convenient, in a world where I can send a message in seconds, the time spent waiting for a letter makes my heart flutter. How is this possible? It’s like the craziness of teenage love.

Recently people have been asking me a lot about Tokyo. The year 2020 has probably brought this place called Tokyo to mind again for many people. It’s a cheering prospect, somehow. I was brought up in a traditional Shitamachi downtown area. I think Tokyo is a city where you really have no idea what’s going to happen. When I was a teen, it was all about the glittering playgrounds of Harajuku and Shibuya. “What if I was a star tomorrow?” I used to think in my delusion, walking around as an adolescent. But it’s this town which is making the dreams I still have come true. I’m pretty sure that in future too, this town will make different things happen for me. There are so many people gathered in Tokyo. With so many people passing each other by, I feel even dreamlike things can happen. It’s a good place.

While we’re doing this exchange, please let me call you Toki-sensei. I always used to want to become a woman like you when I grew up. I’d like to go eat curry with you when our correspondence has finished.