In this chapter, the narrator explains that he's cheating by giving people extra points for going to certain shrines on special days. For example, if you go to the shrine on a special day, you'll get 126 extra days of merit, which means you can visit the shrine for 126 days in one day. The elderly lady in the story is eighty-eight years old, and she's been sick all day. She couldn't go to her shrine on the day you went to it, but you were there on the same day. This is unfair, says the narrator, because the elderly lady would have missed out on the extra merit if she had been sick on the normal day. If we allow it to continue, he says, then we'll become a society where people only bother to work when there's a special bonus involved. The narrator then goes on to explain that the timing of things can make or break a person's life. For instance, if your parents tell you not to do something while your friend is gone, they're going to be ten times more furious than normal. If you turn the light off in the bathroom when your friend isn't around, they are going to feel ten times as angry as normal. This makes the narrator wonder what the perfect timing would be for someone to die, since it would seem to be five times more sad than an ordinary death.