2010-9-18
This happened the day before yesterday, when I was waiting for the subway with our company’s managing director at the station where the line begins.
A train pulled in with remarkably few passengers, considering that it was the evening rush hour… Ah. This one must terminate here… Once the passengers had finished getting off and the train began to pull away… the managing director, standing beside me, said… Oh, that poor woman. She’s been carried off to the depot…
What…? Apparently, one female passenger had been fast asleep and had simply been carried away as she was.
…Hmm… After staring at the train as it disappeared toward the pitch-dark depot… I burst out laughing, though it was rather unkind to the woman…
When I was young and lived near the subway’s starting station in Moriguchi… I once boarded at Tennoji Station and fell sound asleep… only to wake up next at that very same Tennoji Station, much to my dismay and despair… Tennoji to Moriguchi is quite a long journey.
But when I thought about this woman’s fate… even after we had boarded our own train… I was still laughing helplessly… How would it feel to wake up inside a pitch-dark depot?
The thought kept me laughing… What if the two conductors, one at the front and one at the back, were so relieved to think, “Ah, that’s work finished for today”… that they assumed there couldn’t possibly be anyone left aboard… and went home without checking the train… What would happen to this woman?… At that thought, I burst out laughing again…
To this train of thought of mine, the managing director added… You can’t get a mobile signal around there, either…
That brought on the final great burst of laughter… I’m sorry to sound as though I was laughing at someone else’s misfortune, but I could picture the expression on that woman’s face so vividly.