New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Eve is a recurring threshold in the book, where routine and private feeling meet. At an annual party in Roppongi, the narrator’s attempt to keep to himself is interrupted by a woman who has asked to meet him; later, as “Auld Lang Syne” plays, their conversation reaches the final minutes of the year. Elsewhere, the holiday is marked by waiting, intimacy, or ritual repetition, making it less a single event than a setting in which time’s passage becomes tangible.

The Annual Party in Roppongi

The narrator attends a New Year’s Eve party at a rented bar in Roppongi because his job requires him to make an appearance each year. A piano trio plays, and food and drink are plentiful. He does not enjoy parties, but this one is tolerable: he can stand alone in a corner, relax with a drink, and listen to the music without being pressed into meeting strangers or enduring their opinions.

That relative solitude ends when someone introduces him to a woman. After the usual small talk, he tries to retreat to his corner, but she follows him with a glass of whiskey and explains that she had asked to be introduced to him. The encounter shifts the party from a professional obligation into a personal meeting initiated by her.

The Last Minutes of the Year

The two talk as the band begins “Auld Lang Syne.” The woman glances at the gold watch on her pendant and notes that it is eleven fifty-five, locating their exchange at the edge of the new year. She says she likes the song; the narrator replies that he prefers “Home on the Range,” associating it with deer and antelope. The moment does not resolve into a grand declaration: its significance lies in the contrast between the song’s communal farewell and their lightly individual conversation, carried out amid the party.

Holiday Time and Repeated Routines

New Year’s Eve also appears in less public forms. In the narrator’s account of his eighteenth year, he describes spending Sundays with his dead friend’s girlfriend and waiting in the dormitory lobby on Saturday evenings for her telephone calls. Their contact is irregular—sometimes she is silent for three weeks, sometimes she calls for two weeks in a row—and the quiet lobby becomes a place where he tries, unsuccessfully, to grasp his own feelings. She does not go home for New Year’s, and the two share dinner at her apartment. The holiday therefore falls within an uncertain relationship shaped by bereavement, waiting, and the narrator’s difficulty expressing himself.

The book also presents time through repeated schedules that make ordinary days feel ritualized: a restaurant manager carries the owner’s dinner upstairs every night at eight, while a mother and son move methodically through their newspapers after breakfast. These are not New Year’s Eve observances, but they echo the holiday’s association with recurrence. Against such routines, the year-end party stands out as a marked occasion—one that brings people together briefly, even as the calendar turns on.