MAN OF THE ROOF

I’ve been living in the this apartment in Tokyo for thirty-five years.
However, this morning at day-break.I witnessed something that I’d never
seen before.I got up a littre after four in the morning.I’d prepared two columun in my notebook : “Things I want to do”and “Things I should do,”and I
was getting ready to write in them. The first thing that I wanted to do was to
open the glass door and let the wind in.Outside it was still a bit dark.
I was looking absentry at the white building opposide. and suddenly I realized
that a man was noiselessly scaling the guardrail of the fire escape outside
the fifth floor. I saw him hang from the roof awning of the fifth floor, lift one
leg high, and presto, he hoiseted himself onto the roof.
It seemed as if I could hear him gasp for breath. He was wearing a kind of undershirt and had leather fingerless gloves. You would have said he was one
of thse gladitors that you see in the movies, or should I say Spyderman.
I kept watching him, full of curiossity, wondering what he was going to do
next when I noticed that he, as well, was staring at me , I start,as if I had been surprised in the act of looking at something that I was’t suppesed to see, and, closing the glass door halfway, I went to the other room. There I
continnued my spying behind a bamboo shade and saw him move from the
the roof of the white building to the one next to it, a slighter taller beige
building. He nimbly climbed over a metal reailing, then another to get the
roof of the seventh floor without using the fire escape.