Vintage Murakami (2 page)

“I’ll come to see you again,” I said. “And what is the other wish?”

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

“Always,” I said. “I’ll always remember.”

She walked on ahead without speaking. The autumn light filtering through the branches danced over the shoulders of her jacket. A dog barked again, closer than before. Naoko climbed a small mound of a hill, stepped out of the pine wood, and hurried down a gentle slope. I followed two or three steps behind.

“Come over here,” I called toward her back. “The well might be around here somewhere.” Naoko stopped and smiled and took my arm. We walked the rest of the way side by side.

“Do you really promise never to forget me?” she asked in a near whisper.

“I’ll never forget you,” I said. “I
could
never forget you.”

EVEN so, my memory has grown increasingly distant, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Be that as it may, it’s all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones. This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko.

Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about Naoko. But I was never able to produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start—the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.

The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.

—Translated by Jay Rubin

BARN BURNING

I met her at the wedding party of an acquaintance and we got friendly. This was three years ago. We were nearly a whole generation apart in age—she twenty, myself thirty-one—but that hardly got in the way. I had plenty of other things to worry my head about at the time, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a spare moment to think about age difference. And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn’t matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one’s fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won’t change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point.

She was working as an advertising model to earn a living while studying pantomime under somebody-or-other, a famous teacher, apparently. Though the work end of things was a drag and she was always turning down jobs her agent lined up, so her money situation was really rather precarious. But whatever she lacked in take-home pay she probably made up for on the goodwill of a number of boyfriends. Naturally, I don’t know this for certain; it’s just what I pieced together from snippets of her conversation.

Still, I’m not suggesting there was even a glimmer of a hint that she was sleeping with guys for money. Though perhaps she did come close to that on occasion. Yet even if she did, that was not an essential issue; the essentials were surely far more simple. And the long and short of it was, this guileless simplicity is what attracted a particular kind of person. The kind of men who had only to set eyes on this simplicity of hers before they’d be dressing it up with whatever feelings they held inside. Not exactly the best explanation, but even she’d have to admit it was this simplicity that supported her.

Of course, this sort of thing couldn’t go on forever. (If it could, we’d have to turn the entire workings of the universe upside down.) The possibility did exist, but only under specific circumstances, for a specific period. Just like with “peeling mandarin oranges.”

“Peeling mandarin oranges?” you say?

When we first met, she told me she was studying pantomime.

Oh, really, I’d said, not altogether surprised. Young women are all into
something
these days. Plus, she didn’t look like your die-cast polish-your-skills-in-dead-earnest type.

Then she “peeled a mandarin orange.” Literally, that’s what she did: She had a glass bowl of oranges to her left and another bowl for the peels to her right—so went the setup—in fact, there was nothing there. She proceeded to pick up one imaginary orange, then slowly peel it, pop pieces into her mouth, and spit out the pulp one section at a time, finally disposing of the skin-wrapped residue into the right-hand bowl when she’d eaten the entire fruit. She repeated this maneuver again and again. In so many words, it doesn’t sound like much, but I swear, just watching her do this for ten or twenty minutes—she and I kept up a running conversation at the counter of this bar, her “peeling mandarin oranges” the whole while, almost without a second thought—I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away. Unnerving, to say the least. Back when Eichmann stood trial in Israel, there was talk that the most fitting sentence would be to lock him in a cell and gradually remove all the air. I don’t really know how he did meet his end, but that’s what came to mind.

“Seems you’re quite talented,” I said.

“Oh, this is nothing. Talent’s not involved. It’s not a question of making yourself believe there
is
an orange there, you have to forget there
isn’t
one. That’s all.”

“Practically Zen.”

That’s when I took a liking to her.

We generally didn’t see all that much of each other. Maybe once a month, twice at the most. I’d ring her up and invite her out somewhere. We’d eat out or go to a bar. We talked intensely; she’d hear me out and I’d listen to whatever she had to say. We hardly had any common topics between us, but so what? We became, well, pals. Of course, I was the one who paid the bill for all the food and drinks. Sometimes she’d call me, typically when she was broke and needed a meal. And then it was unbelievable the amount of food she could put away.

When the two of us were together, I could truly relax. I’d forget all about work I didn’t want to do and trivial things that’d never be settled anyway and the crazy mixed-up ideas that crazy mixed-up people had taken into their heads. It was some kind of power she had. Not that there was any great meaning to her words. And if I did catch myself interjecting polite nothings without really tuning in what she was saying, there still was something soothing to my ears about her voice, like watching clouds drift across the far horizon.

I did my share of talking, too. Everything from personal matters to sweeping generalities, I told her my honest thoughts. I guess she also let some of my verbiage go by, likewise with minimum comment. Which was fine by me. It was a mood I was after, not understanding or sympathy.

Then two years ago in the spring, her father died of a heart ailment, and she came into a small sum of money. At least, that’s how she described it. With the money, she said, she wanted to travel to North Africa. Why North Africa, I didn’t know, but I happened to know someone working at the Algerian embassy, so I introduced her. Thus she decided to go to Algeria. And as things took their course, I ended up seeing her off at the airport. All she carried was a ratty old Boston bag stuffed with a couple of changes of clothes. By the look of her as she went through the baggage check, you’d almost think she was returning from North Africa, not going there.

“You really going to come back to Japan in one piece?” I joked.

“Sure thing. ‘I shall return,’ ” she mocked.

Three months later, she did. Three kilos lighter than when she left and tanned about six shades darker. With her was her new guy, whom she presented as someone she met at a restaurant in Algiers. Japanese in Algeria were all too few, so the two of them easily fell in together and eventually became intimate. As far I know, this guy was her first real regular lover.

He was in his late twenties, tall, with a decent build, and rather polite in his speech. A little lean on looks, perhaps, though I suppose you could put him in the handsome category. Anyway, he struck me as nice enough; he had big hands and long fingers.

The reason I know so much about the guy is that I went to meet her when she arrived. A sudden telegram from Beirut had given a date and a flight number. Nothing else. Seemed she wanted me to come to the airport. When the plane got in—actually, it was four hours late due to bad weather, during which time I read three magazines cover to cover in a coffee lounge—the two of them came through the gate arm in arm. They looked like a happy young married couple. When she introduced us, he shook my hand, virtually in reflex. The healthy handshake of those who’ve been living a long time overseas. After that, we went into a restaurant. She was dying to have a bowl of tempura and rice, she said; meanwhile, he and I both had beer.

He told me he worked in trading but didn’t offer any more details. I couldn’t tell whether he simply didn’t want to talk business or was thoughtfully sparing me a boring exposition. Nor, in truth, did I especially want to hear about trading, so I didn’t press him. With little else to discuss, the conversation meandered between safety on the streets of Beirut and water supplies in Tunis. He proved to be quite well informed about affairs over the whole of North Africa and the Middle East.

By now she’d finished her tempura and announced with a big yawn that she was feeling sleepy. I half expected her to doze off on the spot. She was precisely the type who could fall asleep anywhere. The guy said he’d see her home by taxi, and I said I’d take the train as it was faster. Just why she had me come all the way out to the airport was beyond me.

“Glad I got to meet you,” he told me, as if to acknowledge the inconvenience.

“Same here,” I said.

THERE AFTER I met up with the guy a number of times. Whenever I ran into her, he was always by her side. I’d make a date with her, and he’d drive up in a spotless silver-gray German sports car to let her off. I know next to nothing about automobiles, but it reminded me of those jaunty coupes you see in old black-and-white Fellini films. Definitely not the sort of car your ordinary salary-man owns.

“The guy’s got to be loaded,” I ventured to comment to her once.

“Yeah,” she said without much interest, “I guess.”

“Can you really make that much in trading?”

“Trading?”

“That’s what he said. He works in trading.”

“Okay, then, I imagine so. . . But hey, what do I know? He doesn’t seem to do much work at all, as far as I can see. He does his share of seeing people and talking on the phone, I’ll say that, though.”

The young man and his money remained a mystery.

THEN one Sunday afternoon in October, she rang up. My wife had gone off to see some relatives that morning and left me alone at home. A pleasant day, bright and clear, it found me idly gazing at the camphor tree outside and enjoying the new autumn apples. I must have eaten a good seven of them that day—it was either a pathological craving or some kind of premonition.

“Listen,” she said right off, “just happened to be heading in your direction. Would it be all right if we popped over?”

“We?”
I threw back the question.

“Me and him,” came her self-evident reply.

“Sure,” I had to say, “by all means.”

“Okay, we’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said, then hung up.

I lay there on the sofa awhile longer before taking a shower and shaving. As I toweled myself dry, I wondered whether to tidy up around the house but canned the idea. There wasn’t time. And despite the piles of books and magazines and letters and records, the occasional pencil here or sweater there, the place didn’t seem particularly dirty. I sat back down on the sofa, looked at the camphor tree, and ate another apple.

They showed up a little past two. I heard a car stop in front of the house, and went to the front door to see her leaning out the window of the silver-gray coupe, waving. I directed them to the parking space around back.

“We’re here,” she beamed, all smiles. She wore a sheer blouse that showed her nipples, and an olive-green miniskirt. He sported a navy blazer, but there was something else slightly different about him; maybe it was the two-day growth of beard. Not at all slovenly looking, it even brought out his features a shade. As he stepped from the car, he removed his sunglasses and shoved them into his breast pocket.

“Terribly sorry to be dropping in on you like this on your day off,” he apologized.

“Not at all, don’t mind a bit. Every day might as well be a day off with me, and I was getting kind of bored here on my own,” I allowed.

“We brought some food,” she said, lifting a large white paper bag from the backseat of the car.

“Food?”

“Nothing extraordinary,” he spoke up. “It’s just that, a sudden visit on a Sunday, I thought, why not take along something to eat?”

“Very kind of you. Especially since I haven’t had anything but apples all morning.”

We went inside and set the groceries out on the table. It turned out to make quite a spread: roast beef sandwiches, salad, smoked salmon, blueberry ice cream—and good quantities at that. While she transferred the food to plates, I grabbed a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. It was like an impromptu party.

“Well, let’s dig in. I’m starved,” pronounced her usual ravenous self.

Midway through the feast, having polished off the wine, we tapped into my stock of beer. I can usually hold my own, but this guy could drink; no matter how many beers he downed, his expression never altered in the slightest. Together with her contribution of a couple of cans, we had in the space of a little under an hour racked up a whole tableful of empties. Not bad. Meanwhile, she was pulling records from my shelf and loading the player. The first selection to come on was Miles Davis’s “Airegin.”

“A Garrard autochanger like that’s a rare find these days,” he observed. Which launched us into audiophilia, me going on about the various components of my stereo system, him inserting appropriate comments, polite as ever.

The conversation had reached a momentary lull when the guy said, “I’ve got some grass. Care to smoke?”

I hesitated, for no other reason than I’d only just quit smoking the month before and I wasn’t sure what effect it would have. But in the end, I decided to take a toke or two. Whereupon he fished a foil packet from the bottom of the paper bag and rolled a joint. He lit up and took a few puffs to get it started, then passed it to me. It was prime stuff. For the next few minutes we didn’t say a word as we each took hits in turn. Miles Davis had finished, and we were now into an album of Strauss waltzes. Curious combination, but what the hell.

After one joint, she was already beat, pleading grass on top of three beers and lack of sleep. I ferried her upstairs and helped her onto the bed. She asked to borrow a T-shirt. No sooner had I handed it to her than she’d stripped to her panties, pulled on the T-shirt, and stretched flat out. By the time I got around to asking if she was going to be warm enough, she had already snoozed off. I went downstairs, shaking my head.

Back in the living room, her guy was busy rolling another joint. Plays hard, this dude. Me, I would have just as soon snuggled into bed next to her and conked right out. Fat chance. We settled down to smoke the second joint, Strauss still waltzing away. Somehow, I was reminded of an elementary-school play. I had the part of the old glove maker. A fox cub comes with money to buy gloves, but the glove maker says it’s not enough for a pair.

“ ’Tain’t gonna buy no gloves,” I say. Guess I’m something of a villain.

“But Mother’s so very c-c-cold. She’ll get chapped p-p-paws.
P-p-please,” says the fox cub.