However, when I was born, nothing indicated that there had been a war. You could no longer see burnt ruins or occupying soldiers. We lived in a quiet small town, in the house provided to us by my father's company. The house was pre-war, somewhat aged but quite spacious. The garden had pine trees, even a small pond and some stone lanterns. The town where I grew up resembled a typical middle-class suburb. All my friends at school lived in neat little houses lined up in a row. Some might have been a bit larger than mine, but all had identical entrances and pines in the gardens. The jobs. My friends' fathers worked in companies or practiced some kind of freelance profession. Almost none of the mothers worked. And almost everyone had a cat or a dog. None of the people I knew lived in an apartment. Later, I moved to another area of the city, but it was almost identical. Until I went to study in Tokyo, I believed that everyone in the world lived with their family in a house with a garden, had a pet, and commuted to work dressed in a suit by train or bus.
In the world where I grew up, a typical family had two or three children. All my friends when I was young belonged to such stereotypical families. If not two children in the family, then three; if not three, then two. Rarely did you encounter families with six or seven children, but even rarer were families with only one child. I happened to belong to one of the rare ones, as I was an only child. And that gave me an inferiority complex, as if there was something strange about me, since I lacked what everyone else had and took for granted. I hated the term "only child." Every time I heard it, I felt as if something was missing—as if I wasn't a whole person.