Excerpt from In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami.
Two of the cages
were occupied—one by a young man in training wear and the other by the male half of a drunken couple. His woman was egging him on. “Go for a home run!” she shouted before every pitch. The man was staggering drunk and missed most of the balls completely, but the woman kept at him as if their lives depended on it: “Don’t let ’em beat you! Don’t let ’em beat you!” ...
[And later]
The don’t-let-’em-beat-you woman was now helping her defeated warrior stumble off tuoward the stairs.
