Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing

However, when his mother died in 1938, he took a trip to New York City, climbed the Empire State Building, and jumped off the roof, splattering on the pavement like a frog.

His tombstone, in accordance with his will, bears the following Nietzsche-esque quotation:

“In the light of day, one can comprehend the depths of night’s darkness.”

Hartfield, once again… (instead of an afterword) To say that if I hadn’t come across a writer called Derek Hartfield I wouldn’t have started writing, no, I wouldn’t go that far. Still, my path to getting here would have probably been completely different. When I was in high school, in a secondhand bookstore in Kobe, looking as if they’d been put there by foreign sailors, there were some Hartfield books, and I rounded them up and bought them. One book was fifty yen. Had the place not been a bookstore, I wouldn’t have even recognized them as books. Riding on some freighter, or atop the bed of some junior officer’s bunk in a destroyer, these books had made the trip across the Pacific Ocean, and from far across time, they made their way to the top of my desk.

* * *

A few years later, I went over to America. It was a short trip; I went only to see Hartfield’s grave. I learned where it was from a letter sent to me by a Mr. Thomas McClure, the enthusiastic (and only) researcher of Derek Hartfield. ‘The grave is as small as the heel of a high-heeled shoe. Be sure not to overlook it,’ he wrote.

From New York I boarded a Greyhound bus resembling a giant coffin, and it arrived in that small town in Ohio at 7am. Not a single other passenger got off the bus with me. Crossing the fields outside of town, there was the graveyard. It was bigger than the town itself. Above my head, a bunch of skylarks were going round in circles while singing their flight songs. I spent a long hour searching for Hartfield’s grave. After plucking some dusty wild roses from nearby and placing them on his tombstone as an offering, I put my hand to the grave, sat down, and smoked a cigarette. Beneath the soft May sunlight, I felt that life and death were just as peaceful. Facing the sky, I closed my eyes and spent a few hours listening to the singing of the skylarks.

This story began there, at that graveyard. Where it eventually ended up, I have no idea.

“Compared to the complexity of the universe,”

Hartfield says, “our world’s like the brain tissue of an earthworm.”

I’d like to see it, that’s my request as well.

* * *

We’ve come to the end, but in regards to Hartfield’s diary, the aforementioned Mr. Thomas McClure’s laboriously-written work (The Legend of the Sterile Stars: 1968) provided me with many quotes. I am grateful.

May, 1979

Murakami Haruki