Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing

Those people digging around in the refrigerator at 3am, those are the only people I can write for. And that, is me.

This story begins on August 8th, 1970, and lasts for eighteen days, meaning it finishes on August 26th of that same year.

“All those rich fuckers can just go to hell!”

The Rat had his hands on the counter, looking depressed as he shouted this to me.

Or maybe he was shouting at the coffee grinder behind me. The Rat and I were sitting next to each other at the bar, and he had no reason to shout at me like that. But, at any rate, when he was finished yelling, he drank his seemingly delicious beer wearing an expression of contentment.

Naturally, nobody in the vicinity paid any attention to his shouting. The small bar was overflowing with customers, and each and every one of them were shouting at each other the same way. It was like being on a sinking ship.

“Parasites,” he said, shaking his head in what looked like revulsion. “Those guys can’t do shit. I look at those guys acting all rich, and it just pisses me off.”

With my lips on the thin rim of my beer glass, I nodded in silence.

On that note, the rat shut his mouth and gazed at his hands on the counter, turning them over and gazing at them intently, again and again, as if they’d been in a bonfire. I gave up and looked up at the ceiling. He inspected each of his fingers in turn, and we couldn’t start our next conversation. It was always like this.

Over the course of that summer, like men obsessed, we drank enough beer to fill a 25-meter swimming pool and our peanut shells would have carpeted the floor of J’s Bar at a depth of five centimeters. If we hadn’t done so, the tedium of the summer would have been unbearable.

On the counter of J’s Bar was a picture smeared by tobacco-stained fingers, and at those times when I was bored out of my mind, I never grew tired of staring at that picture for hours on end. Its pattern made it look like it was made to be one of those inkblot pictures they used in Rorschach tests, and to me it looked like two green monkeys pitching tennis balls that had fallen out of the sky.

When I said as much to J, he stared at it for a minute and nonchalantly said yes it did, when I put it that way.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“The monkey on the left is you, the monkey on the right is me. I toss out bottles of beer, and you toss me the money to pay for them.”

I drank my beer in admiration.

“They piss me off.”

After the Rat finished gazing at all his fingers, he said it again.

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the Rat badmouthing the rich, and again, he really did hate them. The Rat’s own family was fairly rich, but when I pointed that out to the Rat, he’d say, ‘It’s not my fault.’ At times (usually when I’d had too much to drink) I’d say, ‘It is your fault,’ and afterwards I’d feel pretty bad about it. Because he did have a point.

“Why do you think I hate rich people?”

Said the Rat one night, continuing his argument. It was the first time our conversation had advanced this far.

I shrugged my shoulders as if to say I didn’t know.

“I’ll just come right out and say it, rich people have no imagination. They can’t even scratch their own asses without a ruler and a flashlight.”

‘Coming right out and saying it’ was how the Rat often prefaced his statements.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They can’t think about anything important. They only pretend like they’re thinking about things…why do you think that is?”

“No idea.”

“They don’t need to. Sure you need a little brainpower to get rich, but to stay rich you don’t need any at all. The way satellites in space don’t need gasoline. It’s okay just to keep going round and round in the same place. But that’s not me, and that’s not you. We have to keep thinking if we want to survive. From the weather tomorrow to the stopper in the bathtub. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe that’s just how it is.”

Having said his piece, the Rat took a tissue out of his pocket and blew his nose loudly. I honestly had no way of knowing if he’d really said all he wanted to say.

“Still, in the end, we all die just the same,” I said, testing him out.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah. Everybody’s gotta die sometime. But until then we’ve still got fifty-some odd years to go, and a lot to think about while we’re living those fifty years, and I’ll just come right out and say it: that’s even more tiring than living five thousand years thinking about nothing. Don’t you think so?”

That’s how it went.

I’d first met the Rat three years before, in the spring. It was the year we both entered college, and the two of us were completely smashed. Why in the hell we were, at sometime after four in the morning, stuck in the Rat’s black Fiat 600, I almost can’t remember. We probably had some mutual friend. Anyway, we were sloppy drunk, and as an added bonus the speedometer was pointing at eighty kilometers-an-hour. Thanks to all that, we broke through the park’s immaculately-trimmed hedges, flattened a thicket of azaleas, and without thinking, not only smashed the car into a stone pillar, but came away without a single injury, which I can’t call anything but a stroke of luck.

Awakened by the shock, I kicked away the broken door and climbed out. The hood of the car was knocked ten meters away, coming to rest in front of the monkey cage, and the front end of the car bore the giant imprint of a stone pillar. The monkeys seemed to be terribly upset at being jarred awake by the noise.

The Rat, with his hands still on the steering wheel, was leaning forward, not because he was hurt, but because he was vomiting onto the dashboard the pizza he’d eaten just an hour before. I clambered up onto the roof of the car and peered through the sunroof onto the driver’s seat.

“You okay?”

“Mm, but I might’ve drank too much. You know, with the throwing up and all.”

“Can you get out?”

“Pull me up.”

The Rat cut the engine, took his pack of cigarettes from the dashboard and put it in his pocket, then slowly seized my hand and climbed up onto the roof of the car. Sitting side-by-side on the roof of the Fiat, we looked up at the dawning sky, silently smoking who knows how many cigarettes. For some reason, I was reminded of a tank movie starring Richard Burton. I have no idea what the Rat was thinking about.

“Hey, we’re pretty lucky,” said the Rat five minutes later. “Check it out, not a scratch on us. Can you believe it?”

I nodded. “The car’s busted, though.”

“Don’t worry about that. I can always buy another car, but luck I cannot buy.”

I stared at the Rat, shocked. “What are you, rich or somethin’?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, that’s great.”

To this, the Rat said nothing, just shaking his head a few times as if unsatisfied. “Still, anyway, we’re lucky.”

“Yep.”

The Rat crushed out his cigarette under the heel of his tennis shoe, throwing the butt towards the monkey cage.

“Say, how about the two of us become a team?

Together, we could do just about anything.”

“What should we do first?”

“Let’s drink beer.”

We went to a nearby vending machine and bought a half-dozen beers, then we walked to the beach. We layed ourselves down on the beach, and when we were finished drinking our beer, we gazed out at the ocean. It was incredibly good weather.

“You can call me ‘Rat,’” he said.

“How’d you get a name like that?”