Pick-up Cells

Everyone is surprised when I tell them that I, a serious and strait-laced person, spent my student days trying to pick up women. But there is a reason for that.

As a law student, I complained to my friend Shun Takashina, who had gone to the same high school and was now in medical school, that I couldn't get a girlfriend. After listening, Shun lowered his voice.
—Shall I transplant some pick-up cells into you in secret?
—Pick-up cells?
—That's just the common name, of course; there's a complicated scientific name for them.
—Will I become popular with women?
—No, you'll just gain the resilience to keep asking women out no matter how many times you're rejected.

I went to the laboratory where he worked, made a small scratch on my cheek, and the surgery was completed simply by rubbing in the contents of a petri dish.

The essence of picking up women is, above all, to keep approaching them. At first, no one responds. Eventually, women start accepting your invitations. Another essential point, as Casanova himself said, is to approach pairs of women. Before long, I became able to tell whether a woman would accept my invitation even before I spoke to her.

Even now that I am a married man, I can tell just by looking whether a woman will come if I ask her out. When that happens, I take her to a certain bar. There, Shun Takashina, who quit being a doctor to become a bartender, makes cocktails for us.

Usually, he makes a cocktail that cools the heat of love for both the woman and me. However, if I give him the signal, he can mix an aphrodisiac into the cocktail that makes one want to surrender body and soul, though I have yet to give that signal.