Azuma has finished his story, but he still has a dilemma: Should he show his novel to Aizuma, or should he not show it at all? The narrator tells us that the two of them have been talking about the novel for two weeks now, and that they haven't spoken to each other in two weeks. Azum says that he'll tell her how he feels when he's ready to show the novel to her, but that he doesn't want to badger her about it. Hizawa interrupts the conversation to tell us that he is the one who wrote the novel, and he wants her to read it. The narrator says that she didn't know whether she wanted to show him the novel or not, but she wanted him to be the one to see it. She says that it's her "precious story," and that she's so embarrassed that she could "drop dead" if she were to dump her lover. She asks him what he would say if she dumped him, and the narrator says he'd say "Kokoro by Natsume Soseki you, uuh," which means "I'll drop dead." Hizawa says that the novel had his "cynical cynicism" and that it was "so romantic" that he couldn't understand the narrator. He asks the narrator to stop reading it, because he can't figure out what the narrator is saying. The author says that, like the narrator, he thought it would be the best way to gain "romance" from the human condition. He's always found that there's no such thing as "puzzles" or "intrigues," but he decided to write a romance even if he were out of his mind.