The Red Devil

The other day at work, a younger female colleague asked, "I'd like to ask everyone, is there anything you think I should do while I'm in my 20s?"

Since I am technically still in my 20s, I kept my mouth shut and listened to the seniors' answers, but the content of their responses was generally things like "travel," "having fun," and "romance." To put it kindly, they were standard; to put it bluntly, they were cliché.

However, one woman in her 50s said, "You should wear a bikini while you're young. You won't be able to wear one when you get older." Hearing this reminded me of something.

There was someone at my previous workplace. What was it? A woman who had longed to wear a red bikini when she was young but couldn't find the courage, and for some reason, at age 55, she couldn't suppress that longing anymore and went into the mixed-gender hot spring at Es Con Field wearing a red bikini.

I wonder if the other customers at the time had any idea what was happening. A flabby body advancing with a red bikini in tow, a red devil appearing like a comet. Just as a lightning bolt named Usain Bolt ran through the night in Beijing in 2008, she suddenly appeared in Kitahiroshima.

Unfulfilled longings from one's youth shine brightly even as one gets older—no, they shine even brighter as the years go by. That is why middle-aged men collect sneakers they couldn't buy in the past, and why I ended up buying the Woody doll from Toy Story that I wanted when I was a child.

That is why I strongly recommended that my younger colleague wear a red bikini.