Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
“I don’t know, but it seems kind of idiotic to be twenty,” she said. After dinner we cleared away the dishes and sat on the floor drinking the rest of the wine. While I finished one glass, she helped herself to two.
She’d never talked like she did that night. She told me these long stories about her childhood, her school, her family. Terribly involved stories which started with A, then B would enter the picture, leading on to something about C, going on and on and on. There was no end to it. At first I made all the proper noises to show her I was following along, but soon gave up. I put on a record and when it was over, I lifted up the needle and put on another. After I finished all the records, I put the first one back on. Outside it was still pouring. Time passed slowly as her monologue went on without end.
I didn’t worry about it, though, until a while later. Suddenly I realized it was eleven p.m. and she’d been talking nonstop for four hours. If I didn’t get a move on, I’d miss the last train home. I didn’t know what to do. Should I just let her talk till she dropped? Should I break in and put an end to it? After much hesitation, I decided to interrupt. Four hours should be enough, you’d think.
“Well, I’d better get going,” I finally said. “Sorry I stayed so late. I’ll see you again real soon, OK?”
I wasn’t sure whether my words had gotten through. For a short while she was quiet but soon it was back to the monologue. I gave up and lit a cigarette. At this rate, it looked like I’d better go with Plan B. Let the rest take its course.
Before too long, though, she stopped. With a jolt I realized she was finished. It wasn’t that she’d finished wanting to talk: her well of words had just dried up. Scraps of words hung there, suspended in midair. She tried to continue, but nothing came out. Something had been lost. Her lips slightly parted, she looked into my eyes with a vague expression. As if she was trying to make out something through an opaque membrane. I couldn’t help feeling guilty.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” I said slowly, weighing each word. “But it’s getting late so I thought I’d better be going…”
It took less than a second for the teardrops to run down her cheeks and splash onto one of the record jackets. After the first drops fell, the floodgates burst. Putting her hands on the floor she leaned forward, weeping so much it seemed like she was retching. I gently put my hand out and touched her shoulder; it shook ever so slightly. Almost without thinking, I drew her near me. Head buried in my chest, she sobbed silently, dampening my shirt with her hot breath and tears. Her ten fingers, in search of something, roamed over my back. Cradling her in my left arm, I stroked the fine strands of her hair with my right. For a long while I waited in this pose for her to stop crying. But she didn’t stop.
That night we slept together. That may have been the best response to the situation, maybe not. I don’t know what else I should have done.
I hadn’t slept with a girl for ages. It was her first time with a man. Stupid me, I asked her why she hadn’t slept with him. Instead of answering, she pulled away from me, turned to face the opposite direction, and gazed at the rain outside. I stared at the ceiling and smoked a cigarette.
In the morning the rain had stopped. She was still facing away from me, asleep. Or maybe she was awake all the time, I couldn’t tell. Once again she was enveloped by the same silence of a year before. I looked at her pale back for a while, then gave up and climbed out of bed.
Record jackets lay scattered over the floor; half a dilapidated cake graced the table. It felt like time had skidded to a stop. On her desktop there was a dictionary and a chart of French verb conjugations. A calendar was taped to the wall in front of the desk, a pure white calendar without a mark or writing of any kind.
I gathered up the clothes that had fallen on the floor beside the bed. The front of my shirt was still cold and damp from her tears. I put my face to it and breathed in the fragrance of her hair.
I tore off a sheet from the memo pad on her desk and left a note. Call me soon, I wrote. I left the room, closing the door.
A week passed without a call. She didn’t answer her phone, so I wrote her a long letter. I tried to tell her my feelings as honestly as I knew how. There’s a lot going on I don’t have a clue about, I wrote; I’ll try my damnedest to figure it all out, but you’ve got to understand these things take time. I have no idea where I’m headed—all I know for sure is I don’t want to get hung up thinking too deeply about things. The world’s too precarious a place for that. Start me mulling over ideas and I’ll end up forcing people to do things they hate. I couldn’t stand that. I want to see you again very much, but I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do…
That’s the kind of letter I wrote.
I got a reply in the beginning of July. A short letter.
For the time being I’ve decided to take a year off from college. I say for the time being, but I doubt I’ll go back. Taking a leave of absence is just a formality. Tomorrow I’ll be moving out of my apartment. I know this will seem pretty abrupt to you, but I’ve been thinking it over for a long time. I wanted to ask your advice, many times I almost did, but for some reason I couldn’t. I guess I was afraid to talk about it.
Please don’t worry about everything that’s happened. No matter what happened, or didn’t happen, this is where we end up. I know this might hurt you, and I’m sorry if it does. What I want to say is I don’t want you to blame yourself, or anyone else, over me. This is really something I have to handle on my own. This past year I’ve been putting it off, and I know you’ve suffered because of me. Perhaps that’s all behind us now.
There’s a nice sanatorium in the mountains near Kyoto, and I’ve decided to stay there for a while. It’s less a hospital than a place where you’re free to do what you want. I’ll write you again someday and tell you more about it. Right now I just can’t seem to get the words down. This is the tenth time I’ve rewritten this letter. I can’t find the words to tell you how thankful I am to you for being with me this past year. Please believe me when I say this. I can’t say anything more than that. I’ll always treasure the record you gave me.
Someday, somewhere in this precarious world, if we meet again I hope I’ll be able to tell you much more than I can right now.
Goodbye.
I must have read her letter over a couple of hundred times at least, and every time I was gripped by a terrible sadness. The same kind of disconcerting sadness I felt when she gazed deep into my eyes. I couldn’t shake the feeling. It was like the wind, formless and weightless, and I couldn’t wrap it around me. Scenery passed slowly before me. People spoke, but their words didn’t reach my ears.
On Saturday nights I still sat in the same chair in the dorm lobby. I knew a phone call wouldn’t come, but I had no idea what else to do. I turned on the TV set and pretended to watch baseball. And gazed at the indeterminate space between me and the set. I divided that space into two, and again into two. I did this over and over, until I’d made a space so small it could fit in the palm of my hand.
At ten I turned off the TV, went back to my room, and went to sleep.
At the end of that month my roommate gave me a firefly in an instant-coffee jar. Inside were blades of grass, and a bit of water. He’d punched a few tiny air holes in the lid. It was still light out so the firefly looked more like some black bug you’d find at the beach. I peered in the jar and sure enough, a firefly it was. The firefly tried to climb up the slippery side of the glass jar, only to slip back down each time. It’d been a long time since I’d seen one so close up.
“I found it in the courtyard,” my roommate told me. “A hotel down the street let a bunch of fireflies out as a publicity stunt, and it must have made its way over here.” As he talked, he stuffed clothes and notebooks inside a small suitcase. We were already several weeks into summer vacation. I didn’t want to go back home, and he’d had to go out on some fieldwork, so we were just about the only ones left in the dorm. Fieldwork done, though, he was ready to go home.
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“Thanks, good idea,” I said.
After sundown the dorm was silent. The flag was gone, and lights came on in the windows of the cafeteria. There were just a few students left, so only half the lights were lit. The lights on the right were off, the ones on the left were on. You could catch a faint whiff of dinner. Cream stew.
I took the instant-coffee jar with the firefly and went up to the roof. The place was deserted. A white shirt someone had forgotten to take in was pinned to the clothesline, swaying in the evening breeze like a cast-off skin. I climbed the rusty metal ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of the water tower. The cylindrical water tank was still warm from the heat it had absorbed during the day. I sat down in the cramped space, leaned against the railing, and looked down at the moon before me, just a day or two short of full. On the right, I could see the streets of Shinjuku, on the left, Ikebukuro. The headlights of the cars were a brilliant stream of light flowing from one part of the city to another. Like a cloud hanging over the streets, the city was a mix of sounds, a soft, low hum.
The firefly glowed faintly in the bottom of the jar. But its light was too weak, the color too faint. The way I remembered it, fireflies were supposed to give off a crisp, bright light that cuts through the summer darkness. This firefly might be growing weak, might be dying, I figured. Holding the jar by its mouth, I shook it a couple of times to see. The firefly flew for a second and bumped against the glass. But its light was still dim.
Maybe the problem wasn’t with the light, but with my memory. Maybe fireflies’ light wasn’t that bright after all. Was I just imagining it was? Or maybe, when I was a child, the darkness that surrounded me was deeper. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even recall when I had last seen a firefly.
What I could remember was the sound of water running in the night. An old brick sluice gate, with a handle you could turn around to open or close it. A narrow stream, with plants covering the surface. All around was pitch black, and hundreds of fireflies flew above the still water. A powdery clump of yellow light blazed above the stream, and shone in the water.
When was that, anyway? And where was it?
I had no idea.
Everything was mixed up, and confused.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm myself. If I kept my eyes shut tight, at any moment my body would be sucked into the summer darkness. It was the first time I’d climbed the water tower after dark. The sound of the wind was clearer than it had ever been. The wind wasn’t blowing hard, yet strangely left a clear-cut trace as it rushed by me. Taking its time, night slowly enveloped the earth. The city lights might shine their brightest, but slowly, ever so slowly, night was winning out.
I opened the lid of the jar, took out the firefly, and put it on the edge of the water tower that stuck out an inch or two. It seemed like the firefly couldn’t grasp where it was. After making one bumbling circuit of a bolt, it stretched out one leg on top of a scab of loose paint. It tried to go to the right but, finding a dead end, went back to the left. It slowly clambered on top of the bolt and crouched there for a time, motionless, more dead than alive.
Leaning against the railing, I gazed at the firefly. For a long time the two of us sat there without moving. Only the wind, like a stream, brushed past us. In the dark the countless leaves of the zelkova rustled, rubbing against each other.
I waited forever.
A long time later, the firefly took off. As if remembering something, it suddenly spread its wings and in the next instant floated up over the railing and into the gathering dark. Trying to win back lost time, perhaps, it quickly traced an arc beside the water tower. It stopped for a moment, just long enough for its trail of light to blur, then flew off toward the east.
Long after the firefly disappeared, the traces of its light remained within me. In the thick dark behind my closed eyes that faint light, like some lost wandering spirit, continued to roam.
Again and again I stretched my hand out toward that darkness. But my fingers felt nothing. That tiny glow was always just out of reach.
—TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL
CHANCE TRAVELER
The “I” here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story. Mostly this is a third-person narrative, but here at the beginning the narrator does make an appearance. Just like in an old-fashioned play where the narrator stands before the curtain, delivers a prologue, then bows out. I appreciate your patience, and promise I won’t keep you long.
The reason I’ve turned up here is I thought it best to relate directly several so-called strange events that have happened to me. Actually, events of this kind happen quite often. Some of them are significant, and have affected my life in one way or another. Others are insignificant incidents that have no impact at all. At least I think so.
Whenever I bring up these incidents, say, in a group discussion, I never get much of a reaction. Most people just make some noncommittal comment, and it never goes anywhere. It never jump-starts the conversation, never spurs someone else to bring up something similar that’s happened to him. The topic I bring up is like so much water flowing down the wrong channel and being sucked up in a nameless stretch of sand. No one says anything for a while, then invariably someone changes the subject.
At first I thought I was telling the story wrong, so one time I tried writing it down as an essay. I figured if I did that maybe people would take it more seriously. But no one seemed to believe what I’d written. “You’ve made it all up, right?” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that. Since I’m a novelist people assume that anything I say or write must have a touch of make-believe. Granted, my fiction contains more than its share of invention, but when I’m not writing fiction I don’t go out of my way to make up meaningless stories.
As a kind of preface to a tale, then, I’d like to briefly relate some strange experiences I’ve had. I’ll stick to the trifling, insignificant ones. If I started in on the life-changing experiences, I’d use up most of my allotted space.
From 1993 to 1995 I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a sort of writer-in-residence at a college, and was working on a novel entitled The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In Harvard Square there was a jazz club called the Regattabar Jazz Club where they had lots of live performances. It was a comfortable, relaxed, cozy place. Famous jazz musicians played there, and the cover charge was reasonable.
One evening the pianist Tommy Flanagan appeared with his trio. My wife had something else to do so I went by myself. Tommy Flanagan is one of my favorite jazz pianists. He usually appears as an accompanist; his performances are invariably warm and deep, and marvelously steady. His solos are fantastic. Full of anticipation, then, I sat down at a table near the stage and enjoyed a glass of California Merlot. To tell the truth, though, his performance was a bit of a letdown. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Or else it was still too early for him to get in the swing of things. His performance wasn’t bad, it was just missing that extra element that sends us flying to another world. It lacked that special magical glow, I guess you could say. Tommy Flanagan’s better than this, I thought as I listened—just wait till he gets up to speed.
But time didn’t improve things. As their set was drawing to a close I started to get almost panicky, hoping that it wouldn’t end like this. I wanted something to remember his performance by. If things ended like this, all I’d take home would be lukewarm memories. Or maybe no memories at all. And I may never have a chance to see Tommy Flanagan play live again. (In fact I never did.) Suddenly a thought struck me: what if I were given a chance to request two songs by him right now—which ones would I choose? I mulled it over for a while before picking “Barbados” and “Star-Crossed Lovers.”
The first piece is by Charlie Parker, the second a Duke Ellington tune. I add this for people who aren’t into jazz, but neither one is very popular, or performed much. You might occasionally hear ?
I had my reasons, of course, for choosing these unlikely pieces for my fantasy requests—namely that Tommy Flanagan had made memorable recordings of both. “Barbados” appeared on the 1957 album Dial JJ 5 where he was pianist with the J. J. Johnson Quintet, while he recorded “Star-Crossed Lovers” on the 1968 album Encounter! with Pepper Adams and Zoot Sims. Over his long career Tommy Flanagan has played and recorded countless pieces as a sideman in various groups, but it was the crisp, smart solos, short though they were, in these two particular pieces that I’ve always loved. That’s why I was thinking if only he would play those two numbers right now it’d be perfect. I was watching him closely, picturing him coming over to my table and asking, “Hey, I’ve had my eye on you. Do you have any requests? Why don’t you give me the titles of two numbers you’d like me to play?” Knowing all the time, of course, that the chances of that happening were nil.
And then, without a word, and without so much as a glance in my direction, Tommy Flanagan launched into the last two numbers of his set—the very ones I’d been thinking of. He started off with the ballad “Star-Crossed Lovers,” then went into an up-tempo version of “Barbados.” I sat there, wineglass in hand, speechless. Jazz fans will understand that the chance of his picking these two pieces from the millions of jazz numbers out there was astronomical. And also—and this is the main point here—his performances of both numbers were amazing.