Sumire was living in a one-room apartment in Kichijoji where she made do with the minimum amount of furniture and the maximum number of books.
I must be in love with this woman, Sumire realized with a start. No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I’m in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current’s too overpowering; I don’t have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I’ve never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there’s no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I’ll be burned up, gone forever.
I was still young, certain that this kind of thrilling event happened all the time. Later in life I realized how wrong I was.
I find it hard to talk about myself. I’m always tripped up by the eternal who am I? paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as me. But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors—values, standards, my own limitations as an observer—make me, the narrator, select and eliminate things about me, the narratee. I’ve always been disturbed by the thought that I’m not painting a very objective picture of myself.
I imagined how wonderful it would be if indeed we could be lovers. I longed for the warmth of her skin on mine. I pictured us married, living together. But I had to face the fact that Sumire had no such romantic feelings for me, let alone sexual interest. Occasionally she’d stay over at my apartment after we’d talked until the wee hours, but there was never even the slightest hint of romance. Come 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and she’d yawn, crawl into bed, sink her face into my pillow, and fall fast asleep. I’d spread out some bedding on the floor and lie down, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep, my mind full of fantasies, confused thoughts, self-loathing. Sometimes the inevitable physical reactions would cause me grief, and I’d lie awake in misery until dawn.
At the Rhodes airport I asked at the information desk where I could catch the ferry to the island. The ferry was in a harbor nearby. If I hurried, I might be able to make the evening ferry. “Isn’t it sold out sometimes?” I asked, just to be sure. The pointy-nosed woman of indeterminate age at the information counter frowned and waved her hand dismissively. “They can always make room for one more,” she replied. “It’s not an elevator.”
When we left the restaurant, the sky was a brilliant splash of colors. The kind of air that felt like if you breathed it in, your lungs would be dyed the same shade of blue.
It was an impressive sight, something I wanted to clip out with scissors and pin to the wall of my memory.
There was nothing else we had to think about. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to just stay this way forever. I knew that was impossible—our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from. But until that time came I wanted to enjoy each day to the fullest, without worrying about anything.
And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
A strange jet-lag numbness filled my head. I couldn’t separate the boundary between what was real and what only seemed real. Here I was, on a small Greek island, sharing a meal with a beautiful older woman I’d met only the day before. This woman loved Sumire. But couldn’t feel any sexual desire for her. Sumire loved this woman and desired her. I loved Sumire and felt sexual desire for her. Sumire liked me but didn’t love me, and didn’t feel any desire for me. I felt sexual desire for a woman who will remain anonymous. But I didn’t love her. It was all so complicated, like something out of an existential play.
alright i’d expect murakami to be good enough of a writer to not have characters feel like mouthpieces. but i guess not. same with narration in wind up very strikingly
“I want you to tell me something, honestly,” Miu said in a serious tone, just before I boarded the ferry. “Do you believe Sumire is no longer alive?”
I shook my head. “I can’t prove it, but I feel like she’s still alive somewhere. Even after this much time, I just don’t have the sense that she’s dead.”
Miu folded her tanned arms and looked at me.
“Actually I feel exactly the same way,” she said. “That Sumire isn’t dead. But I also feel like I’ll never see her again. Though I can’t prove anything either.”
With nothing else to do, I wandered around the city, bought some souvenirs for no one in particular, and in the evening walked to the top of the Acropolis. I lay down on a slab of stone, the twilight breeze blowing over me, and gazed at the white temple floating up in the bluish floodlights. A lovely, dreamy scene.
But all I felt was an incomparable loneliness. Before I knew it, the world around was drained of color. From the shabby mountaintop, the ruins of those empty feelings, I could see my own life stretching out into the future. It looked just like an illustration in a science fiction novel I read as a child, of the desolate surface of a deserted planet. No sign of life at all. Each day seemed to last forever, the air either boiling hot or freezing. The spaceship that brought me there had disappeared, and I was stuck. I’d have to survive on my own.
All over again I understood how important, how irreplaceable, Sumire was to me. In her own special way she’d kept me tethered to the world. As I talked to her and read her stories, my mind quietly expanded, and I could see things I’d never seen before. Without even trying, we grew close. Like a pair of young lovers undressing in front of each other, Sumire and I exposed our hearts to each other, an experience I’d never have with anyone else, anywhere. We cherished what we had together, though we never put into words how very precious it was.
Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons—something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn’t going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.
I loved Sumire more than anyone else and wanted her more than anything in the world. And I couldn’t just shelve those feelings, for there was nothing to take their place.
I dreamed that someday there’d be a sudden, major transformation. Even if the chances of it coming true were slim, I could dream about it, couldn’t I? But I knew it would never come true.
We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. Like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever. What I’d lost was not just Sumire. I’d lost that precious flame.
Tomorrow I’ll get on a plane and fly back to Tokyo. Summer vacation is nearly over, and I have to step once more into that endless stream of the everyday. There’s a place for me there. My apartment’s there, my desk, my classroom, my pupils. Quiet days await me, novels to read. The occasional affair.
But tomorrow I’ll be a different person, never again the person I was. Not that anyone will notice after I’m back in Japan. On the outside nothing will be different. But something inside has burned up and vanished. Blood has been shed, and something inside me is gone. Head down, without a word, that something makes its exit. The door opens; the door shuts. The light goes out. This is the last day for the person I am right now. The very last twilight. When dawn comes, the person I am won’t be here anymore. Someone else will occupy this body.
Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
I turned faceup on the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought about all the man-made satellites spinning around the earth. The horizon was still etched in a faint glow, and stars began to blink on in the deep, wine-colored sky. I gazed among them for the light of a satellite, but it was still too bright out to spot one with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.
“Would you mind if I ask you something personal?” I said.
“Ask away.”
“If people aren’t equal, where would you fit in?”
Mr. Nakamura took a deep lungful of cigarette smoke, shook his head, and exhaled ever so slowly, as if he were forcing someone to do something. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Don’t you worry, though. The two of us won’t be sharing the same level.”
“You know what I’d really like to do the most right now? Climb up to the top of some high place like the pyramids. The highest place I can find. Where you can see forever. Stand on the very top, look all around the world, see all the scenery, and see with my own eyes what’s been lost from the world. I don’t know. . . . Maybe I really don’t want to see that. Maybe I don’t want to see anything anymore.”
So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us—that’s snatched right out of our hands—even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
I get up out of bed. I pull back the old, faded curtain and open the window. I stick my head out and look up at the sky. Sure enough, a mold-colored half-moon hangs in the sky. Good. We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it toward me.