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My grandfather liked to go out very much. When I still lived with him in my hometown, he was dressed with a flashy red tie to go out one day. He showed off his new tie to my parents and me while saying, “You had better dress showily to look young as you get older!” We frowned on him but didn’t oppose him as usual. I just asked him where he was going with such a flamboyant tie, and he told me that he was seeing his girlfriend. It became customary for him to have coffee with her at a cafe inside an expensive hotel. To me it sounded a date, but my grandmother didn’t care at all. His girlfriend was an old widowed woman named Ms. Tamada. He talked about her so much that almost everything he was talking about had gotten to be something related to her. He began to have her over and I saw her in our house so often. She became a good friend of my grandmother too, who usually hated others. She and my grandparents would talk for hours about mainly one topic that was how honorable and virtuous my grandfather was. As a person who doubted it, I chuckled whenever I overheard them. She raved about my grandfather every time she saw me, which was so annoying. Since she exalted him immensely, my grandparents were absorbed in her visits while other members of my family – my parents, my sister and I – felt quite unpleasant. Four of us were taking a trip to Europe, our first ever overseas travel, to celebrate my graduation from high school. My grandparents were to stay at home and they invited Ms. Tamada to see us off on the day of our departure. When we were about to leave home, she made a fuss in rapture as if we had been headed for space. She took pictures of us leaving, continually congratulated us and ruined our starting part of the trip. We really didn’t know her, yet she acted like a close member of our family. We set off sullenly by being seen off by a stranger…
