After Dark by Haruki Murakami
His question remains just that—a question, hanging in the air between them for a good thirty seconds. Mari is waiting for him to go on with his story.
Takahashi continues: “What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.”
He stares at the space above the table and heaves a long sigh.
“Anyhow, that day was a turning point for me. After that I decided to study law seriously. I figured that’s where I might find whatever I was looking for. Studying the law is not as much fun as making music, but what the hell, that’s life. That’s what it means to grow up.”
Silence.
“And that’s your medium-size answer?”
Takahashi nods. “Maybe it was a little long. I’ve never told this to anybody before, so I had trouble gauging the size…Uh, those little sandwiches you’ve got sitting on your plate: if you’re not planning to eat them, mind if I have one?”
“All that’s left are tuna fish.”
“That’s okay. I love tuna fish. You don’t?”
“No, I do, but mercury builds up in your body if you eat tuna fish.”
“Yeah?”
“If you’ve got mercury in your body, you can start having heart attacks in your forties. And you can start losing your hair.”
Takahashi frowns. “So you can’t have chicken, and you can’t have tuna?”
Mari nods.
“And both just happen to be some of my favorite foods.”
“Sorry.”
“I like potato salad a lot, too. Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with potato salad…?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Mari says. “Except, if you eat too much it’ll make you fat.”
“That’s okay,” Takahashi says. “I’m too skinny as it is.”
Takahashi picks up a tuna sandwich and eats it with obvious pleasure.
“So anyhow, are you planning to stay a student until you pass the bar exam?” Mari asks.
“Yeah, I guess so. I’ll just be scraping by for a while, I suppose, doing odd jobs.”
Mari is thinking about something.
Takahashi asks her, “Have you ever seen Love Story? It’s an old movie.”
Mari shakes her head.
“They had it on TV the other day. It’s pretty good. Ryan O’Neal is the only son of an old-money family, but in college he marries a girl from a poor Italian family and gets disowned. They even stop paying his tuition. The two manage to scrape by and keep up their studies until he graduates from Harvard Law School with honors and joins a big law firm.”
Takahashi pauses to take a breath. Then he goes on:
“The way Ryan O’Neal does it, living in poverty can be kind of elegant—wearing a thick white sweater, throwing snowballs with Ali MacGraw, Francis Lai’s sentimental music playing in the background. But something tells me I wouldn’t fit the part. For me, poverty would be just plain poverty. I probably couldn’t even get the snow to pile up for me like that.”
Mari is still thinking about something.
Takahashi continues: “So after Ryan O’Neal has slaved away to become a lawyer, they never give the audience any idea what kind of work he does. All we know is he joins this top law firm and pulls in a salary that would make anybody envious. He lives in a fancy Manhattan high-rise with a doorman out front, joins a WASP sports club, and plays squash with his yuppie friends. That’s all we know.”
Takahashi drinks his water.
“So what happens after that?” Mari asks.
Takahashi looks upward, recalling the plot. “Happy ending. The two live happily ever after. Love conquers all. It’s like: we used to be miserable, but now everything’s great. They drive a shiny new Jaguar, he plays squash, and sometimes in winter they throw snowballs. Meanwhile, the father who disowned Ryan O’Neal comes down with diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and Ménière’s disease and dies a lonely, miserable death.”
“I don’t get it. What’s so good about a story like that?”
Takahashi cocks his head. “Hmm, what did I like about it? I can’t remember. I had stuff to do, so I didn’t watch the last part very closely…Hey, how about a walk? A little change of atmosphere? There’s a tiny park down the street where the cats like to gather. We can feed them your leftover tuna-mercury sandwiches. I’ve got a fish cake, too. You like cats?”
Mari nods, puts her book in her bag, and stands up.
Takahashi and Mari walk down the street. They are not talking now. Takahashi is whistling. A black Honda motorcycle passes close to them, dropping its speed. It is the bike driven by the Chinese man who picked up the woman at Alphaville—the man with the ponytail. His full- face helmet is off now, and he scans his surroundings with great care. Between him and them, there is no point of contact. The deep rumble of the engine draws close to them and passes by.
Mari asks Takahashi, “How did you and Kaoru get to know each other?”
“I’ve been doing odd jobs at that hotel for the past six months or so. Alphaville. Dirty work—washing floors and stuff. Some computer stuff, too—installing software, fixing glitches. I even put in their security camera. Only women work there, so they’re happy to get a man’s help once in a while.”
“How did you happen to start working there specifically?”
Takahashi has a moment of confusion. “Specifically?”
“I mean, something must have led you to start working there,” Mari says. “I think Kaoru was being purposely vague about it…”
“That’s kind of a tough one…”
Mari keeps silent.
“Oh, well,” Takahashi says, as if resigning himself to the inevitable. “The truth is, I once took a girl there. As a customer, I mean. Afterwards, when it was time to go, I realized I didn’t have enough money. The girl didn’t, either. We had been drinking and really hadn’t thought much about that part. All I could do was leave my student ID with them.”
Mari offers no comment.
“The whole thing’s kind of embarrassing,” Takahashi says. “So I went the next day to pay the rest. Kaoru invited me to stay for a cup of tea, and we talked about this and that, at the end of which she told me to start part-time work there the next day. She practically forced me into it. The pay’s not much good, but they feed me once in a while. And my band’s practice space was something Kaoru found for us. She looks like a tough guy, but she’s actually a very caring person. I still stop in for a visit now and then. And they still call me if a computer goes out of whack or something.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“The one who went to the hotel with me?”
Mari nods.
“That was it for us,” Takahashi says. “I haven’t seen her since then. I’m sure she was disgusted with me. I really blew it. But anyhow, it’s no big deal. I wasn’t that crazy about her. We would have broken up sooner or later.”
“Do you do that a lot—go to hotels with girls you’re not particularly crazy about?”
“Hell no. I couldn’t afford it, for one thing. That was the first time I ever went to a love hotel.”
The two continue walking.
As if offering an excuse, Takahashi says, “And besides, it wasn’t my idea. She was the one who suggested we go to a place like that. Really.”
Mari says nothing.
“Well, anyhow, that would be another long story if I got started,” says Takahashi. “All kinds of stuff led up to what happened…”
“You seem to have a lot of long stories…”
“Maybe I do,” he says. “I wonder why that is.”
Mari says, “Before, you told me you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“Right. I’m an only child.”
“If you went to the same high school as Eri, your fam
“That would be another long story,” he says.
“You don’t have a short version?”
“I do. A really short version. Wanna hear it?”
“Uh-huh,” Mari says.
“My mother’s not my biological mother.”
“So you don’t get along with her?”
“No, it’s not that we don’t get along. I’m just not the kind of guy who likes to stand up and rock the boat. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend every day making chitchat and putting on a smiley face at the dinner table. Being alone has never been hard for me. Besides, I haven’t got such a great relationship with my father.”
“You don’t like each other?”
“Well, let’s just say our personalities are different. And our values.”
“What does he do?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” Takahashi says. “But I’m almost one hundred percent sure that it’s nothing to be proud of. And besides—this is not something I go around telling people—he spent a few years in prison when I was a kid. He was an antisocial type—a criminal. That’s another reason I don’t want to live with my family. I start having doubts about my genes.”
“And that’s your really short version?” Mari asks in mock horror, smiling.
Takahashi looks at her and says, “That’s the first time you’ve smiled all night.”
10
Eri Asai is still sleeping.
The Man with No Face, however, who was sitting beside her and watching her so intently, is gone. So is his chair. Without them, the room is starker, more deserted than before. The bed stands in the center of the room, and on it lies Eri. She looks like a person in a lifeboat floating in a calm sea, alone. We are observing the scene from our side—from Eri’s actual room—through the TV screen. There seems to be a TV camera in the room on the other side capturing Eri’s sleeping form and sending it here. The position and angle of the camera change at regular intervals, drawing slightly nearer or drawing slightly farther back each time.
Time goes by, but nothing happens. She doesn’t move. She makes no sound. She floats face-up on an ocean of pure thought devoid of waves or current. And yet, we can’t tear ourselves away from the image being sent. Why should that be? We don’t know the reason. We sense, however, through a certain kind of intuition, that something is there. Something alive. It lurks beneath the surface of the water, expunging any sense of its presence. We keep our eyes trained on the motionless image, hoping to ascertain the position of this thing we cannot see.
Just now, it seemed there might have been a tiny movement at the corner of Eri Asai’s mouth. No, we might not even be able to call it a movement. A tremor so microscopic we can’t be sure we even saw it. It might have been just a flicker of the screen. A trick of the eyes. A visual hallucination aroused by our desire to see some kind of change. To ascertain the truth, we focus more intently on the screen.
As if sensing our will, the camera lens draws nearer to its subject. Eri’s mouth appears in close-up. We hold our breath and stare at the screen, waiting patiently for whatever is to come next. A tremor of the lips again. A momentary spasm of the flesh. Yes, the same movement as before. Now there is no doubt. It was no optical illusion. Something is beginning to happen inside Eri Asai.
Gradually we begin to tire of passively observing the TV screen from this side. We want to check out the interior of that other room directly, with our own eyes. We want to see more closely the beginning of faint movement, the possible quickening of consciousness, that Eri is beginning to exhibit. We want to speculate upon its meaning based on something more concrete. And so we decide to transport ourselves to the other side of the screen.
It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind, and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass. With that accomplished, we can pass through any wall, leap over any abyss. Which is exactly what we do. We let ourselves become a pure single point and pass through the TV screen separating the two worlds, moving from this side to the other. When we pass through the wall and leap the abyss, the world undergoes a great deformation, splits and crumbles, and is momentarily gone. Everything turns into fine, pure dust that scatters in all directions. And then the world is reconstructed. A new substance surrounds us. And all of this takes but the blink of an eye.
Now we are on the other side, in the room we saw on the screen. We survey our surroundings. It smells like a room that has not been cleaned for a long time. The window is shut tight, and the air doesn’t move. It’s chilly and smells faintly of mold. The silence is so deep it hurts our ears. No one is here, nor do we sense the presence of something lurking in here. If there was such a thing here before, it has long since departed. We are the only ones here now—we and Eri Asai.
Eri goes on sleeping in the single bed in the center of the room. We recognize the bed and bedclothes. We approach her and study her face as she sleeps, taking time to observe the details with great care. As mentioned before, all that we, as pure point of view, can accomplish is to observe—observe, gather data, and, if possible, judge. We are not allowed to touch her. Neither can we speak to her. Nor can we indicate our presence to her indirectly.
Before long there is movement in Eri’s face again—a reflexive twitching of the flesh of one cheek, as if to chase away a tiny fly that has just alighted there. Then her right eyelid flutters minutely. Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to each other, their spreading ripples intermingling. The process takes place before our eyes. A unit of thought begins to form this way. Then it links with another unit that has been made in another region, and the fundamental system of self-awareness takes shape. In other words, she is moving, step by step, toward wakefulness.
The pace of her awakening may be maddeningly slow, but it never moves backward. The system exhibits occasional disorientation, but it moves steadily forward, step by step. The intervals of time needed between one movement and the next gradually contract. Muscle movements at first are limited to the area of the face, but in time they spread to the rest of the body. At one point a shoulder rises gently, and a small white hand appears from beneath the quilt. The left hand. It awakens one step ahead of the right. In their new temporality, the fingers thaw and relax and begin to move awkwardly in search of something. Eventually they move atop the bedcover as small, independent creatures, coming to rest against the slender throat, as if Eri is groping uncertainly for the meaning of her own flesh.
Soon her eyelids open. But, stabbed by the light of the fluorescent lamps ranged on the ceiling, the eyes snap shut again. Her consciousness seems to resist awakening. What it wants to do is exclude the encroaching world of reality and go on sleeping without end in a soft, enigmatic darkness. By contrast, her bodily functions seek positive awakening. They long for fresh natural light. These two opposing forces clash within her, but the final victory belongs to the power source that indicates awakening. Again the eyelids open, slowly, hesitantly. But again the fluorescent glare is too much. She raises both hands and covers her eyes. She turns aside and rests a cheek against the pillow.
Time passes. For three minutes, four, Eri Asai lies in bed in that same position, eyes closed. Could she have gone to sleep again? No, she is giving her consciousness time to accustom itself to the waking world. Time plays an important role, as when a person has been moved into a room with vastly different atmospheric pressure and must allow the bodily functions to adjust. Her consciousness recognizes that unavoidable changes have begun, and it struggles to accept them. She feels slightly nauseated. Her stomach contracts, giving her the sensation that something is about to rise from it. She overcomes the feeling with several long breaths. And when, at last, the nausea has departed, several other unpleasant sensations
Again time passes.
Finally she raises herself in bed and, with unsteady gaze, examines her surroundings. The room is huge. No one else is there. What is this place? What am I doing here? Again and again she tries to trace her memory back, but it gives out each time like a short thread. All she can tell is that she has been sleeping in this place: she is in bed, wearing pajamas. This is my bed, these are my pajamas. That much is certain. But this is not my place. My body is numb all over. If I was asleep here, it was for a very long time, and very deeply. But I have no idea how long it could have been. Her temples begin to throb with the determined effort of thinking.