The white man and the pachinko girl

There was no place in Ikebukuro, Tokyo at 10 pm every night like this enormous Pachinko parlor called the “Passage”. Recently renovated, this huge gambling establishment that could easily be mistaken as a ladies’ department store by the unknowing eyes of the foreigners because of its blazingly fluorescent white-light lit entrance way and a grandiose lobby lit by equally intense light bulbs of no less than two, three hundred in quantity, cleverly arranged on the ceiling and behind the translucent floorboards to direct all the stumbling pedestrians from the relative gloominess of the outside world to the top of the staircase where the gambling activities were concentrated, was convulsing with violent laughter and angry cries over a collage of noises coming from the Pachinko slot machines. Among one of these cheerless men who were only occasionally stirred to irritation by the clanking sound of steel balls pouring out in an enviously large quantity into the winning buckets of their lucky yet despicable neighbors, was a white man in his fifties spotting a wrinkly gray suit called Smith.