Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Some days went by like this-three or four days, I would say. And then, all of a sudden, everything quieted down, as if a wild wind had blown through and gone on its way. I looked around, and I examined myself, and I realized that I had become a new person, entirely different from what I had been until then. This was my third self. My first self had been the one that lived in the endless anguish of pain. My second self had been the one that lived in a state of pain-free numbness. The first one had been me in my original state, unable to release the heavy yoke of pain from my neck. And when I did attempt to release it-which is to say, when I tried to kill myself and failed-I became my second self: an interim me. True, the physical pain that had tortured me until then had disappeared, but all other sensations had retreated with it into the haze. My will to live, my physical vitality, my mental powers of concentration: all these had disappeared along with the pain. After I passed through that strange period of transition, what emerged was a brand-new me. Whether this was the me that should have been there all along I could not yet tell. But I did have the sense, however vague and undefined it might be, that I was at least heading in the right direction.

Creta Kano raised her eyes and looked directly at me, as if she wanted to hear my impressions of her story. Her hands still rested on the table. So, then, I said, what you're saying is that the man gave you a new self, am I right?

Perhaps he did, said Creta Kano, nodding. Her face was as expressionless as the bottom of a dried-up pond. Being caressed by that man, and held by him, and made to feel such impossibly intense sexual pleasure for the first time in my life, I experienced some kind of gigantic physical change. Why it happened, and why, of all people, it had to be that man who made it happen, I have no idea. Whatever the process may have been, the fact remains that at the end of it, I found myself in a whole new container. And once I had passed through the deep confusion I mentioned earlier, I sought to accept this new self as something truer-if for no other reason than that I had been enabled to escape from my profound numbness, which had been such a suffocating prison to me.

Still, the bad aftertaste remained with me for a long time, like a dark shadow. Each time I recalled those ten fingers of his, each time I recalled that thing he put inside me, each time I recalled that slimy, lumpish thing that came (or felt as if it came) out of me, I felt terribly uneasy. I felt a sense of anger-and despair-that I had no way to deal with. I tried to erase that day from my memory, but this I was unable to do, because the man had pried open something inside my body. The sensation of having been pried open stayed with me, inseparably bonded to the memory of that man, along with an unmistakable sense of defilement. It was a con- tradictory feeling. Do you see what I mean? The transformation that I had experienced was undoubtedly something right and true, but the transformation had been caused by something filthy, something wrong and false. This contradiction-this split-would torment me for a very long time.

Again Creta Kano stared at her hands atop the table.

After that, I stopped selling my body. There was no longer any point to it. Creta Kano's face remained expressionless.

You could quit just like that? I asked.

She nodded. Just like that, she said. I didn't say anything to anybody, just stopped selling myself, but this caused no problem. It was almost disappointingly easy. I had thought they would at least call me, and I was bracing myself for the day, but it never came. They never said a thing to me. They knew my address. They knew my phone number. They could have threatened me. But nothing happened.

And so, on the surface at least, I had become an ordinary girl again. By that time, I had repaid my parents everything I owed them, and I had put away a good deal of money. With what I gave him, my brother had bought another new car to waste his time driving around in, but he could never have imagined what I had done to pay him back.

I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of a being was this self of mine? How did it function? What did it feel-and how? I had to grasp each of these things through experience, to memorize and stockpile them. Do you see what I am saying? Virtually everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. At the same time that I was entirely new, I was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called I-or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

I was still officially a student, but I had no intention of returning to the university. I would leave the house in the morning, go to a park, and sit by myself on a bench all day, doing nothing. Or I would wander up and down the paths in the park. When it rained, I would go to the library, put a book on the table in front of me, and pretend to be reading. I sometimes spent the whole day in a movie theater or riding round and round the city on the Yamanote Circle Line. I felt as if I were floating in a pitch-dark space, all by myself. There was no one I could go to for advice. If my sister Malta had been there, I could have shared everything with her, but at that time, of course, she was in seclusion far away on the island of Malta, performing her austerities. I did not know her address. I had no way of contacting her. And so I had to solve these problems entirely by myself. No book explained the kind of thing that I had experienced. Still, although I was lonely, I was not unhappy. I was able to cling to myself. At least now I had a self to cling to.

My new self was able to feel pain, though not with that earlier intensity. I could feel it, but at the same time I had learned a method to escape from it. Which is to say, I was able to separate from the physical self that was feeling the pain. Do you see what I am saying? I was able to divide myself into a physical self and a nonphysical self. It may sound difficult when I describe it like this, but once you learn the method, it is not difficult at all. When pain comes to me, I leave my physical self. Its just like quietly slipping into the next room when someone you don't want to meet comes along. I can do it very naturally. I recognize that pain has come to my body; I feel the existence of the pain; but I am not there. I am in the next room. And so the yoke of the pain is not able to capture me.

And you can separate from yourself like that anytime you please? No, said Creta Kano, after thinking about it for a moment. At first I could do it only when my body was experiencing physical pain. Pain was the key to the splitting off of my consciousness. Later, with Malta Kano's help, I learned to do it at will to some extent. But that was much later.

Before long, a letter arrived from Malta Kano. She told me that she had finally finished three years of a kind of training she had been doing on Malta and within the week would be returning to Japan. She planned to live in Japan permanently from then on. I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing her again. We had been apart for nearly eight years. And as I mentioned earlier, Malta was the only person in the world to whom I could freely tell everything that was in my heart.

On the day she came back to Japan, I told Malta everything that had happened to me. She listened to my long, strange story to the very end without comment, without asking a single question. And when I was finished, she heaved a deep sigh and said to me, I know I should have been with you, I should have been watching over you all this time. For some reason, I never realized that you had such profound problems. Perhaps it was because you were simply too close to me. But in any case, there were things I had to do. There were places I had to go, alone. I had no choice in the matter.