Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
“Those lyrics don’t make any sense,” I told him. “It just sounds like you’re making fun of the song ‘Yesterday.’ ”
“Don’t be a smartass. I’m not making fun of it. Even if I was, you gotta remember that John loved nonsense and word games. Right?”
“But Paul’s the one who wrote the words and music for ‘Yesterday.’ ”
“You sure about that?”
“Absolutely,” I declared. “Paul wrote the song and recorded it by himself in the studio with a guitar. A string quartet was added later, but the other Beatles weren’t involved at all. They thought it was too wimpy for a Beatles song.”
“Really? I’m not up on that kind of privileged information.”
“It’s not privileged information. It’s a well-known fact,” I said.
“Who cares? Those are just details,” Kitaru’s voice said calmly from a cloud of steam. “I’m singing in the bath in my own house. Not putting out a record or anything. I’m not violating any copyright, or bothering a soul. You’ve got no right to complain.”
And he launched into the chorus, his voice carrying loud and clear, like people do when they’re in the tub. He hit the high notes especially well. “Tho’ she was here / Til yesterday…” Or something along those lines.
He lightly splashed the bathwater as an accompaniment. I probably should have interrupted him, sung along to encourage, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. Sitting there, talking through a glass door to keep him company while he soaked in the tub for an hour, wasn’t all that much fun.
“But how can you spend so long soaking in the bath?” I asked. “Doesn’t your body get all swollen?”
I’ve never been able to spend much time in the bath. I get bored trying to sit still and soak. You can’t read a book or listen to music, so I soon find myself at loose ends.
“When I soak in a bath for a long time, all kinds of good ideas suddenly come to me,” Kitaru said.
“You mean like those lyrics to ‘Yesterday’?”
“Well, that’d be one of them,” Kitaru said.
“Instead of spending so much time thinking up ideas in the bath, shouldn’t you be studying for the entrance exam?” I asked.
“Jeez, what a downer you are. My mom says exactly the same thing. Aren’t you a little young to be, like, the voice of reason or something?”
“But you’ve been cramming for two years. Aren’t you getting tired of it?”
“For sure. Of course I wanna be in college as soon as I can and have fun. And go out on some real dates with my girlfriend.”
“Then why not study harder?”
“Yeah—well,” he said, drawing the words out. “If I could do that, I’d be doing it already.”
“College is a drag,” I said. “I was totally disappointed once I got in. But not getting in would be even more of a drag.”
“Fair enough,” Kitaru said. “I got no comeback for that.”
“So why don’t you study?”
“Lack of motivation,” he said.
“Motivation?” I said. “Shouldn’t being able to go out on dates with your girlfriend be all the motivation you need?”
“I guess,” Kitaru said. “Look, this could get pretty long if I get into it all. Thing is, it’s like I’m divided into two parts inside me, you know?”
—
There was a girl Kitaru had known since they were in elementary school together. A childhood girlfriend, you could say. They’d been in the same grade in school, but unlike him she had gotten into Sophia University straight out of high school. She was now majoring in French literature and had joined the tennis club. He’d shown me a photograph of her, and she was stunning. A beautiful figure and a lively expression. But the two of them weren’t seeing each other much these days. They’d talked it over and decided that it was better not to date until Kitaru had passed the entrance exams, so that he could focus on his studies. Kitaru had been the one who suggested this. “Okay,” she’d said, “if that’s what you want.” They talked on the phone a lot but met at most once a week, and those meetings were more like interviews than regular dates. They’d have tea and catch up on what they’d each been doing. They’d hold hands and exchange a brief kiss, but that was as far as it went. Pretty old school.
Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything, you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming. Even for me it was, at first, a little too much to handle.
“Hey, Tanimura, aren’t you lonely without a girlfriend?” Kitaru asked me the next day.
“I don’t deny it,” I told him.
“Then how about you go out with my girl?”
I couldn’t understand what he meant. “What do you mean—go out with her?”
“She’s a great girl. Pretty, honest, smart like all get-out. You go out with her, you won’t regret it. I guarantee it.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” I said. “But why would I go out with your girlfriend? It doesn’t make sense.”
“ ’Cause you’re a good guy,” Kitaru said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t suggest it.”
That didn’t explain anything. What kind of relationship could there possibly be between me being a good guy (assuming this was the case) and me going out with his girlfriend?
“Erika and I have spent almost our whole lives together so far. We’ve been in school together from the start. We sort of naturally became a couple, and everybody around us approved. Our friends, our parents, our teachers. A tight little couple, always together.”
Kitaru clasped his hands to illustrate.
“If we’d both gone straight into college, our lives would’ve been all warm and fuzzy, but I blew the entrance exam big time, and here we are. I’m not sure why, exactly, but things kept on getting worse. I’m not blaming anyone for that—it’s all my fault.”
I listened to him in silence.
“So I kinda split myself in two,” Kitaru said. He pulled his hands apart.
Split himself in two? “How so?” I asked.
He stared at his palms for a moment, and then spoke. “What I mean is part of me’s, like, worried, y’know? I mean, I’m going to some fricking cram school, studying for the fricking entrance exams, while Erika’s having a ball in college. Playing tennis, doing whatever. She’s got new friends, is probably dating some new guy, for all I know. When I think of all that, I feel left behind. Like my mind’s in a fog. You know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“But another part of me is, like—relieved? If we’d just kept going like we were, with no problems or anything, a nice couple smoothly sailing through life, it’s like—what’s gonna happen to us? We have that kind of choice, I was thinking. You follow?”
“I do and I don’t,” I said.
“It’s like, we graduate from college, get married, we’re this wonderful married couple everybody’s happy about, we have the typical two kids, put ’em in the good old Denenchofu elementary school, go out to the Tama River banks on Sundays, ‘Ob-la-di, ob-la-da’…I’m not saying that kinda life’s bad. But I wonder, y’know, if life should really be that easy, that comfortable. It might be better to go our separate ways for a while, and if we find out that we really can’t get along without each other, then we get back together.”
“So you’re saying that things being smooth and comfortable is a problem. Is that it?”
&nbs
I wasn’t exactly following what was wrong with things being smooth and comfortable, but pursuing that looked tricky, so I gave it up. “But why do I have to go out with your girlfriend?” I asked.
“I figure, if she’s gonna go out with other guys, it’s better if it’s you. ’Cause I know you. And you can gimme, like, updates and stuff.”
That didn’t make any sense to me, though I admit I was interested in the idea of meeting Erika. I also wanted to find out why a beautiful girl like her would want to go out with a weird character like Kitaru. I’ve always been a little shy around new people, but I never lack curiosity.
“How far have you gone with her?” I asked.
“You mean sex?” Kitaru said.
“Yeah. Have you gone all the way?”
Kitaru shook his head. “I just couldn’t. I’ve known her since she was a kid, and it’s kind of embarrassing, y’know, to act like we’re just starting out, and take her clothes off, fondle her, touch her, whatever. If it were some other girl, I don’t think I’d have a problem, but putting my hand in her underpants, even just thinking about doing it with her—I dunno—it just seems wrong. You know?”
I didn’t.
“I kiss her, of course, and hold her hand. I’ve touched her breasts, through her clothes. But it’s like we’re just fooling around, y’know, playing. Even when we get a little worked up, there’s never any sign like things’ll go any further.”
“Instead of waiting for signs or anything, shouldn’t you be the one to make things happen, and take the next step?” That’s what people call sexual desire.
“Naw, it’s like in our case things just don’t go that way. I can’t explain it well,” Kitaru said. “Like, when you’re jerking off, you picture some actual girl, yeah?”
“I suppose,” I said.
“But I can’t picture Erika. It’s like doing that’s wrong, y’know? So when I do it I think about some other girl. Somebody I don’t really like that much. What do you think?”
I thought it over but couldn’t reach any conclusion. Other people’s masturbation habits were beyond me. There were things about my own that I couldn’t fathom.
“Anyway, let’s all get together once, the three of us,” Kitaru said. “Then you can think it over.”
—
The three of us—me, Kitaru, and his girlfriend, whose full name was Erika Kuritani—met on a Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop near Denenchofu Station. She was almost as tall as Kitaru, nicely tanned, and decked out in a neatly ironed short-sleeved white blouse and a navy-blue miniskirt. Like the perfect model of a respectable uptown college girl. She was as attractive as in her photograph, but when I saw her in the flesh what really drew me was less her looks than the kind of effortless vitality that seemed to radiate from her. She was the opposite of Kitaru, who paled a bit in comparison.
Kitaru introduced us. “I’m really happy that Aki-kun has a friend,” Erika Kuritani told me. Kitaru’s first name was Akiyoshi. She was the only person in the world who called him Aki-kun.
“Don’t exaggerate. I got tons of friends,” Kitaru said.
“No, you don’t,” Erika said. “A person like you can’t make friends. You were born in Tokyo, yet all you speak is the Kansai dialect, and every time you open your mouth it’s one annoying thing after another about the Hanshin Tigers or shogi moves. There’s no way a weird person like you can get along well with normal people.”
“Well, if you’re gonna get into that, this guy’s pretty weird, too.” Kitaru pointed at me. “He’s from Ashiya but only speaks the Tokyo dialect.”
“That’s much more common,” Erika said. “At least more common than the opposite.”
“Hold on, now—that’s cultural discrimination,” Kitaru said. “Cultures are all equal, y’know. The Tokyo dialect’s no better than Kansai.”
“Maybe they are equal,” Erika insisted, “but since the Meiji Restoration the way people speak in Tokyo has been the standard for spoken Japanese. I mean, has anyone ever translated Franny and Zooey into the Kansai dialect?”
“If they did, I’d buy it, for sure,” Kitaru said.
I probably would, too, I thought, but kept quiet. Best to mind my own business.
“Anyway, that’s common knowledge now,” she said. “You’re narrow-minded, Aki-kun, and biased.”
“What are you talking about, narrow-minded and biased? To me, cultural discrimination is a much more dangerous kind of bias.”
Wisely, instead of being dragged deeper into that discussion, Erika Kuritani changed the subject.
“There’s a girl in my tennis club who’s from Ashiya, too,” she said, turning to me. “Eiko Sakurai. Do you happen to know her?”
“I do,” I said. Eiko Sakurai was a tall, gangly girl whose parents operated a large golf course. Stuck-up, flat-chested, with a funny-looking nose and a none-too-wonderful personality. Tennis was the one thing she’d always been good at. If I never saw her again, it would be too soon for me.
“He’s a nice guy, and he hasn’t got a girlfriend right now,” Kitaru said to Erika. He meant me. “His looks are okay, he has good manners, and he knows all kinds of things, reads these difficult books. He’s neat and clean, as you can see, and doesn’t have any terrible diseases. A promising young man, I’d say.”
“All right,” Erika said. “There are some really cute new members of our club I’d be happy to introduce him to.”
“Nah, that’s not what I mean,” Kitaru said. “Could you go out with him? I’m not in college yet and I can’t go out with you the way I’d like to. Instead of me, you could go out with him. And then I wouldn’t have to worry.”
“What do you mean, you wouldn’t have to worry?” Erika asked.
“I mean, like, I know both of you, and I’d feel better if you went out with him instead of some guy I’ve never laid eyes on.”
Erika stared at Kitaru as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. Finally, she spoke. “So you’re saying it’s okay for me to go out with another guy if it’s Tanimura-kun here? Because he’s a really nice guy, you’re seriously suggesting we go out, on a date?”
“Hey, it’s not such a terrible idea, is it? Or are you already going out with some other guy?”
“No, there’s no one else,” Erika said in a quiet voice.
“Then why not go out with him? It can be a kinda cultural exchange.”
“Cultural exchange,” Erika repeated. She looked at me.
It didn’t seem as though anything I said would help, so I kept silent. I held my coffee spoon in my hand, studying the design on it, like a museum curator scrutinizing an artifact from an Egyptian tomb.
“Cultural exchange? What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked Kitaru.
“Like, bringing in another viewpoint might not be so bad for us—”
“That’s your idea of cultural exchange?”
“Yeah, what I mean is—”
“All right,” Erika Kuritani said firmly. If there had been a pencil nearby, I might have picked it up and snapped it in two. “If you think we should do it, Aki-kun, then okay. A cultural exchange it is.”
She took a sip of tea, returned the cup to the saucer, turned to me, and smiled. “Since Aki-kun has recommended we do this, Tanimura-kun, let’s go on a date. Sounds like fun. When are you free?”
I couldn’t speak. Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems. A basic problem that changing locations and languages doesn’t solve.
Erika took a red leather planner from her bag, opened it, and checked her schedule. “How is this Saturday?” she asked.
“I have no plans,” I said.
“Saturday it is, then. Where shall we go?”
“He likes movies,” Kitaru told her. “His dream is to write screenplays someday. He’s in a screenwriting workshop.”
“Then let’s go see a movie. What kind of movie should we see? I’ll let you decide t
“She’s really a scaredy-cat,” Kitaru said to me. “When we were kids and went to the haunted house at Korakuen, she had to hold my hand and—”
“After the movie let’s have a nice meal together,” Erika said, cutting him off. She wrote her phone number down on a sheet from her notebook and passed it to me. “When you decide the time and place, could you give me a call?”
I didn’t have a phone back then (this was long before cell phones were even a glimmer on the horizon), so I gave her the number for the coffee shop where Kitaru and I worked. I glanced at my watch.
“I’m sorry but I’ve got to get going,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. “I have this report I have to finish up by tomorrow.”
“Can’t it wait?” Kitaru said. “We only just got here. Why don’t you stay so we can talk some more? There’s a great noodle shop right around the corner.”
Erika didn’t express an opinion. I put the money for my coffee on the table and stood up. “It’s an important report,” I explained, “so I really can’t put it off.” Actually, it didn’t matter all that much.
“I’ll call you tomorrow or the day after,” I told Erika.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” she said, a wonderful smile rising to her lips. A smile that, to me at least, seemed a little too good to be true.
I left the coffee shop, and as I walked to the station I wondered what the hell I was doing. Brooding over how things had turned out—after everything had already been decided—was another of my chronic problems.
—
That Saturday, Erika and I met in Shibuya and saw a Woody Allen film set in New York. Somehow I’d gotten the sense that she might be fond of Woody Allen movies. And I was pretty sure that Kitaru had never taken her to see one. Luckily, it was a good movie, and we were both in a good mood when we left the theater.