Firmly believes that living the life of a Japanese salaryman is a life of quiet desperation, nothing but a waste of life, although after completing his university education in the U.S., he spends the next three years as a salaryman in California and New York City, working for American companies (instead of Japanese multinational corporations). After quitting his last real job in New York City, he decides to test himself in a larger world. He spends a period of time in India. He then moves to Thailand and becomes a high school teacher, teaching Japanese at Pathum Kallayanee Secondary School in Pathum Thani province, which is where he meets Hannah and gets involved in a romantic relationship with her. He spends two years at Pathum Kallayanee. He then starts teaching at a language school ‘Speak in Style’ – Hannah is no longer in the picture. A few years later though his income is somewhat unstable, fluctuating up and down, he is working as a freelance Japanese teacher, enjoying a degree of freedom in life, but as he approaches middle age, the realization hits him: he lives alone in a small studio apartment, not even in Bangkok but in Rangsit, Pathum Thani, a municipality bordering but outside of the capital city. He has certainly not accomplished much of anything in life. He has not achieved success in life in the conventional sense: money, fame and whatnot. Nor has he in the traditional understanding of life: getting married, having a child, sending the child to college, etc. Amidst this, the COVID-19 pandemic engulfs the world. Thailand, too, plunges into a dark time. “Can I survive through this?” he wonders. A thought flashes across his mind. “Should I perhaps put an end to the life of a mediocre adventure, compromise and settle into mundane life, that is, to get a full-time job that at least enables me to pay my bills, that is, to become a cog of the wheel called the modern-day society at this late stage in life? Or just jump from the balcony of my studio apartment and end it all?” Amidst the time of this trial, OAHS, i.e., One Arm HandStand, becomes a symbol of hanging onto life itself vs. succumbing to the temptation to quit it. He says to himself, “No. This is not the end of the larger-than-life story of an ordinary man. I am not quite ready to give up” – this happens to be the quintessential conflict of the protagonist: to be a type of salaryman vs. to not be.