In this first chapter of the novel, which serves as a prologue thereto, the narrator, a 29-year-old advertising copywriter living in Tokyo, learns of the death of a woman with whom he had an affair in college. The woman was killed at age 26, hit as a pedestrian by a passing truck. The narrator learns of her death through a newspaper clipping, read out loud to him by a friend; although he can no longer remember the woman’s name, he attends her funeral and briefly acknowledges her father: “On leaving, I lowered my head in silence, and he lowered his head in return, without a word” (4).

The narrator spends the remainder of the chapter recalling what he can of the woman. She left home at 16, was an avid reader, and was sexually promiscuous; her relationship with the narrator was impersonal, casual, and drug and alcohol-fueled, in a way that the narrator describes as typical of the time: “You know, the stuff of everyday. Meanwhile, the curtain was creaking down on the shambles of the sixties” (5).

The “Wednesday afternoon picnic” of the chapter title refers to a weekly ritual that the narrator had with this woman, where they would lie down together on the campus green during sunny days.