Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Writing it out as graphically as this is probably going to hurt you, but I believe that, in the long run, an honest, detailed account will be the best thing. It may be hard, but I want you to bear the pain and read on.

What I did with him had virtually nothing to do with love. All I wanted was to be held by him and have him inside me. Never in my life had I experienced such a suffocating need for a mans body. I had read about unbearable desire in books, but until that day I could never really imagine what such a phrase meant.

Why this need arose in me so suddenly, why it happened not with you but with someone else, I have no idea. But the desire I felt then was impossible to suppress, nor did I even try. Please understand: not for a moment did it occur to me that I was betraying you in any way. The sex I had in that hotel bed with him was something close to madness. To be totally honest, I had never in my life felt anything so good. No, it wasn't that simple: it didn't just feel good. My flesh was rolling in hot mud. My mind sucked in the sheer pleasure to the point of bursting-and then it burst. It was absolutely miraculous. It was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me.

And then, as you know, I kept it hidden all that time. You never realized that I was having an affair. You never doubted me, even when I began coming home late. I'm sure you trusted me completely. You thought I could never betray you. And for betraying this trust of yours, I had no sense of guilt. I would call you from the hotel room and say that work was going to keep me out late. I piled one lie on top of another, but they caused me no pain. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. My heart needed my life with you. The home I shared with you was the place where I belonged. It was the world I belonged to. But my body had this violent need for sex with him. Half of me was here, and half there. I knew that sooner or later the break would have to come, but at the time, it felt as if this double life would go on forever. Over here I was living peacefully with you, and over there I was making violent love with him.

I want you to understand one thing, at least. This was never a matter of your being sexually inferior to him or lacking in sex appeal, or my being tired of sex with you. It was just that, at that time, my body experienced this violent, irrepressible hunger. I could do nothing to resist it. Why such things happen I have no idea. All I can say is that it did happen. A few times during the weeks that I was sleeping with him, I thought about having sex with you too. It seemed unfair to me, for your sake, that I would sleep with him but not with you. But in your arms, I had ceased to feel anything at all. You must have noticed. For close to two months, I made up all kinds of excuses to avoid having sexual relations with you.

But then one day, he asked me to leave you for him. We were so perfectly matched, he said, that there was no reason for us not to be together. He would leave his family, he said. I asked him to give me time to think about it. But on the train home after I left him that night, I realized that I no longer felt a thing for him. I don't understand it myself, but the moment he asked me to join him, that special something inside me disappeared as if a strong wind had come up and blown it away. My desire for him was gone without a trace.

That was when I started to feel guilty toward you. As I wrote earlier, I had felt nothing of the sort the whole time I was feeling intense desire for him. All 1 had felt was how convenient it was that you had noticed nothing. I thought I could get away with anything, as long as you failed to notice. My connection with him belonged to a different world from my connection with you. After my desire for him evaporated, though, I no longer knew where I was.

1 have always thought of myself as an honest person. True, I have my faults. But where important things were concerned, I had never lied to anyone or deceived myself. 1 had never hidden anything from you. That had been one small source of pride for me. But then, for months, 1 went on telling you those fatal lies without a twinge of regret.

That very fact is what started to torment me. It made me feel as if I were an empty, meaningless, worthless person. And in fact, that is probably what I am. But there is one other thing, in addition, that continues to bother me, and that is: how did I suddenly come to feel such intense, abnormal sexual desire for a man I didn't even love? This is what I simply cannot grasp. If it hadn't been for that desire, I would still be enjoying my happy life with you. And that man would still be a nice friend to chat with on occasion. But that feeling, that incredible, overwhelming lust, tore down everything we had built up over the years. It took away everything that was mine: it took away you, and the home that we had made together, and my work. Why did such a thing have to happen?

After I had my abortion three years ago, I told you that there was something I had to say to you. Do you remember? Perhaps I should have done it. Perhaps I should have told you everything that was in my heart before things came to this. This might never have happened if I had done so. But now that it has happened- even now-I don't believe that I would be able to tell you what I was feeling then. And that is because it seems to me that once I put it into words, things would be even more decisively ruined than they are now. Which is why 1 came to feel that the best thing I could do was to swallow it all and disappear.

I am sorry to have to tell you this, but the fact is that I was never able to have true sexual pleasure with you, either before or after we were married. I loved it when you held me in your arms, but all I ever felt was a vague, far-off sense that almost seemed to belong to someone else. This is in no way your fault. My inability to feel was purely and simply my own responsibility. There was some kind of blockage inside me, which would always hold any sexual feeling 1 had in check. When, for reasons I cannot grasp, that blockage was swept away by sex with him, I no longer had any idea what I should do.

There was always something very close and delicate between us, you and me. It was there from the very beginning. But now it has been lost forever. That perfect meshing of the gears, that mythical something, has been destroyed. Because I destroyed it. Or more accurately, some kind of something made me destroy it. I am terribly sorry it ever happened. Not everyone is lucky enough to have such a chance as I had with you. I hate the thing that caused all this to happen. You have no idea how much I hate it. I want to know precisely what it is. I have to know precisely what it is. I have to search out its roots and judge and punish it. Whether I actually have the strength to do so, I cannot be sure. One thing is certain, however: this is my problem alone. It has nothing to do with you.

I have only one thing to ask of you, and that is this: please don't concern yourself about me anymore. Please don't try to find me. Just forget about me and think about beginning a new life. Where my family is concerned, I will do the proper thing: I will write to them and explain that this is all my fault, that you are in no way responsible. They will not cause you any trouble. Formal divorce proceedings will begin fairly soon, I think. That will be best for both of us. So please don't protest. Just go along with them. As far as the clothing and other things I have left behind are concerned, I'm sorry, but please just dispose of them or donate them somewhere. Everything belongs to the past now. Anything I ever used in my life with you I have no right to use now.

Goodbye.

I read the letter one more time from beginning to end and returned it to its envelope. Then I took another can of beer from the refrigerator and drank it.