The narrator begins this chapter by saying that he's making a "yaminabe" of the heart, which is a kind of porridge made of black rice. The narrator says that the darkness in the heart will spread, but that at least the porridge contains some rice. He also says that Harumi's "most popular story" is her loss time, and that's why she'd complete one chapter to stop there. He says that he doesn't know where he'd found such a thing as that, but he does know that there are plenty of dark things in the world. For example, he says, he wanted to buy a new shirt, but spilled ink over his old one. He made his brother wear an asimo, a cardboard costume, and even brought a newspaper with him to his handwriting class so that he could strip off his mother's old clothes and put them in the hole of the wooden plank on the floor where he dropped the baton during the relay race. He thinks that there's a lot of darkness inside of the world, and he plans to kill himself.