Haruki Murakami - Pinball, 1973

I used to love listening to stories about faraway places. It was almost pathological.

There was a time, a good ten years ago now, when I went around latching onto one person after another, asking them to tell me about the places where they were born and grew up. Times were short of people willing to lend a sympathetic ear, it seemed, so anyone and everyone opened up to me, obligingly and emphatically telling all. People I didn't even know somehow got word of me and sought me out.

It was as if they were tossing rocks down a dry well: they'd spill all kinds of different stories my way, and when they'd finished, they'd go home pretty much satisfied. Some would talk contentedly; some would work up quite an anger getting it out. Some would put things well, but just as often others would come along with stories I couldn't make head nor tail of from beginning to end. There were boring stories, pathetic tear-jerkers, jumbles of half-nonsense. Even so, I'd hold out as long as I could and give a serious listen.

Everyone had something they were dying to tell somebody or shout to the whole world – who knows why? I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there. They probably ended their days nibbling acorns somewhere. But that, after all, was their fate.

That was the thing about it. There was so little return on all the effort involved. Thinking back on it now, I'll bet if there had been a World's Most Earnest Listener contest that year, I'd have won hands down. And I'd probably have won a box of kitchen matches.

Among the people who talked to me were a guy from Saturn and another from Venus, one each. Their stories really got to me. First, the one about Saturn.

"Out there, it's . . . awful cold," he groaned. "Just thinking about it, g-gives me the willies."

He belonged to a political group that had staged a take-over of Building 9 in the university. Their motto was "Action Determines Ideology – Not the Reverse!" No one would tell him what determined action. No matter, Building 9 had a water cooler, a telephone, and boiler facilities; and upstairs they had a nice little music lounge complete with Altec A-5 speakers and a collection of two thousand records. It was paradise (compared to, say, Building 8, which smelled like a racetrack restroom). Every morning they'd shave themselves neat and clean with all the hot water they wanted, in the afternoon they'd make as many long-distance calls as they felt like, and when the sun went down they'd all get together and listen to records. By the end of autumn, every member had become a classical music fanatic.

Then one beautifully clear November afternoon, riot police forced their way into Building 9 while Vivaldi's L'Estro Armonico was blaring away full blast. I don't know how true all this is, but it remains one of the more heartwarming stories of 1969.

When I snuck past their "barricade" of stacked-up benches, Haydn's Piano Sonata in G Minor was playing softly. The atmosphere was as homey and inviting as a path along a bluff blooming with sansanquas bushes leading toward a girlfriend's house. The guy from Saturn offered me the best chair in the place, and poured lukewarm beer into beakers lifted from the science building.

"On top of that, the gravity is tremendous," he went on about Saturn. "There've been chumps who broke their instep spitting out a wad of gum. A r-real hell!"

"Well, I guess so," I prompted after a couple of seconds. By this time, I had command of nearly three hundred or so different small-talk phrases to throw in during awkward pauses.

"The sun's so small, too. J-just one of those things. Take me - as soon as I get out of school I'm going back to Saturn. And I'll start a gr-great nation. A r-rev-revolution!"

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know.

* * *

Naoko often spoke to me about these things. And I remember her every word.

"I really don't know how to put it." Naoko forced a smile, sitting in the sunlit university lounge, elbow on the table and cheek propped up on her palm. I waited patiently for her to continue. As always, she took her time, searching for just the right words.

We sat, red plastic tabletop between us on which a paper cup spilled over with cigarette butts. A high window let in a shaft of sunlight straight out of a Rubens painting, splitting the table down the middle into light and dark. My right hand rested on the table in light, the left in shadow.

The spring of 1969, you see, we were in our early twenties. And what with all the freshmen sporting brand-new shoes, carrying brand-new course descriptions, heads packed with brand-new brains, there was hardly room to walk in the lounge. On both sides of us, freshmen were perpetually bumping into one another, exchanging insults or greetings.

"I tell you, the town is really nothing to speak of," she resumed. "There's a straight stretch of track, and a station. A pitiful little station that the trainmen could easily miss on a rainy day."

I nodded. Then for a full thirty seconds the two of us gazed absently at the cigarette smoke curling up through the beam of light.

"A dog'll be walking from one end of the platform to the other. You know the kind of station."

I nodded.

"Right out in front of the station there's a bus stop and a circular drive so cars can pick up and drop off passengers. And some shops . . . real sleepy little shops. Straight ahead, you run into a park. A park with a slide and three swings."

"And a sandbox?"

"A sandbox?" She thought for a moment, then nodded in confirmation. "It's got one.

Once more we fell silent. I carefully put out the stub of my cigarette in the paper cup.

"A terribly boring town. I can't imagine what possible purpose there could have been for making such a dull place."

"God works in wondrous ways," I quipped.

Naoko shook her head and smiled to herself. It was a sort of straight-A coed smile, but it lingered in my mind an oddly long time. Long after she'd gone, her smile remained, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. And it occurred to me how much I wanted to see that dog pacing the length of the station platform.

* * *

Four years later, in May of 1973, I visited the station alone. Just to see that dog. I shaved for the occasion, put on a tie for the first time in six months, and brought out my Cordovan shoes.

* * *

Stepping down from the sorry two-car local train that seemed ready to rust up any minute, the very first thing to hit me was the familiar smell of open grassy spaces. The smell of picnics way back when. Nostalgic things, all blown my way on the May breeze. I cocked my head and strained to listen, and I could make out the twittering of sparrows.

Letting out a long yawn, I sat down on a station bench and dejectedly smoked a cigarette. That invigorating feeling I'd left the apartment with in the morning had utterly vanished. Nothing but more of the same, over and over. Or so it seemed. An endless deja vu, growing worse at every turn.

There had been a time when friends and I used to fall asleep sprawled out any which way on the floor together. At dawn, someone would invariably step on my head. Then it would be "Oops, sorry," followed by that same someone taking a leak. More of the same, over and over again.