Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Hey, no problem,” I replied. Truth be told, if he hadn’t mentioned her bad leg, I would have turned him down. I was sick to death of double dates and blind dates. But when I heard about her leg, I somehow couldn’t refuse.

You won’t really notice the leg. She drags it a bit is all.

The girl was a friend of the guy’s girlfriend. They had been classmates in high school. She was on the small side, with decent looks. Hers was a subdued sort of beauty, reminding me of some small animal deep in the woods who seldom showed its face. The four of us went to a movie one Sunday morning and then had lunch together. She hardly said a word. I tried my best to draw her out, but it was no go. She just smiled. Afterward, we split from the other couple. She and I went to take a walk in Hibiya Park, where we had some coffee. She dragged her right leg, not the left like Shimamoto. The way she twisted it too, was different. Whereas Shimamoto rotated her leg slightly as she moved it forward, this girl pointed the tip sideways a bit and dragged it straight ahead. Still, their way of walking was remarkably similar.

She had on a red turtleneck sweater and jeans, and a pair of desert boots. She wore hardly any makeup, and her hair was in a ponytail. Though she said she was a senior in college, she looked younger. I couldn’t decide if she was just a quiet person or was nervous meeting someone for the first time. Maybe she just didn’t have anything to talk about. Anyway, I wouldn’t exactly characterize our initial interaction as conversation. The only fact I was able to drag out of her was that she was at a private college, majoring in pharmacology.

“Pharmacology, huh? Is it interesting?” I asked. We were in the coffee shop in the park, having a cup.

She blushed.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “Making textbooks isn’t exactly the world’s most exciting activity. The world’s full of boring things. Don’t worry about it.”

She thought for a while and at long last opened her mouth. “It’s not that interesting. But my parents own a drugstore.”

“Could you teach me something about pharmacology? I don’t know the first thing about it For the past six years I don’t think I’ve swallowed a single pill.”

“You’re pretty healthy, then.”

“I don’t even get hangovers,” I said. “When I was a kid, though, I was pretty sickly. Took lots of medicine. I was an only child, so my parents were overprotective.”

She nodded, and stared into her coffee cup for a while. It was a long time before she spoke again.

“Pharmacology isn’t the most thrilling subject,” she began. “There’s got to be a million things more fun than memorizing the ingredients of different medicines. It isn’t romantic, like astronomy, or dramatic, like being a doctor. But there’s something intimate about it, something I can feel close to. Something down-to-earth.”

“I see,” I said. She could talk, after all. It just took her longer than most to find the right words.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

“Two older brothers. One’s already married.”

“So you’re studying pharmacology because you’ll be taking over the family store?”

She blushed again. And was silent for a good long time. “I don’t know. My brothers both have jobs, so maybe I will end up running the place. But nothing’s decided. If I don’t feel like it, that’s okay, my father said. He’ll run it as long as he can, then sell it.”

I nodded, and waited for her to continue.

“But I’m thinking maybe I should take it over. With this leg, it’d be hard to find another job.”

So we talked and passed the afternoon together. With plenty of pauses, and long waits for her to continue. Whenever I asked her a question, she blushed. I actually enjoyed our talk, which for me at the time was a real accomplishment. Sitting there in the coffee shop with her, I felt something close to nostalgia well up in me. She began to feel like someone I’d known all my life.

Not that I was attracted to her. I wasn’t. She was nice, all right, and I enjoyed our time together. She was a pretty girl and, like my friend said, quite pleasant. But all these good points aside, when I asked myself if there was something in her that would bowl me over, that would zoom straight to my heart, the answer was no. Nada.

Only Shimamoto ever did that to me. There I was, listening to this girl, all the time thinking of Shimamoto. I knew I shouldn’t be, but there it was. Just thinking of Shimamoto made me shiver all over, all these many years later. A slightly fevered excitement, as if I were gently pushing open a door deep within me. Walking with this pretty girl with a bad leg through Hibiya Park, though, that kind of excitement, that all-over shivery feeling, was missing. What I did feel for her was a certain sympathy, and a calmness.

Her home—the pharmacy, that is—was in Kobinata. I took her back on the bus. We sat side by side, and she hardly said a word.

A few days later, my friend from work came over and told me the girl really seemed to like me. Next vacation, he said, why don’t the four of us go somewhere together? I made some excuse and bowed out Not that I minded seeing her again and talking with her. Actually, I really did want to have a chance to talk with her sometime. Under different circumstances we might have ended up good friends. But it started with a double date, and the point of double dates is to find a partner. So if I did ask her out again, I’d be taking on a certain responsibility. And the last thing I wanted was to hurt her. All I could do was refuse.

I never saw her again.

During this period, one more woman with a lame leg figured in a strange incident whose meaning, even now, I can’t totally understand. I was twenty-eight when it happened.

I was in Shibuya, walking along in the end-of-year crowds, when I spied a woman dragging her leg exactly as Shimamoto used to do. She had on a long red overcoat and a black patent-leather handbag was tucked under one arm. On her left wrist she wore a silver watch, more like a bracelet really. Everything about her said money. I was walking along the opposite side of the street but when I saw her, I rushed across at the intersection. The streets were so crowded it made me wonder where all these people could possibly have come from, but it didn’t take long for me to catch up with her. With her bad leg, she walked fairly slowly, just like Shimamoto, rotating her left leg as she dragged it along. I couldn’t take my eyes off the elegant curve inscribed by her beautiful stockinged legs, the kind of elegance only long years of practice could produce.

I tailed her for a long while, walking a little ways behind her. It wasn’t easy keeping pace with her, walking at a speed quite the opposite of the crowd around. I adjusted my pace, stopping sometimes to stare into a store window, or pretending to rummage around in my pockets. She had on black leather gloves and carried a red department store shopping bag. Despite the overcast winter day, she wore a pair of sunglasses. From behind, all I could make out was her beautiful, neatly combed hair curled fashionably outward at shoulder length, and her back tucked away in that soft, warm-looking red coat Of course, if I really wanted to see if she was Shimamoto, I could have circled around in front and got a good look at her. But what if it was Shimamoto? What should I say to her—and how should I act? She might not even remember me, for one thing. I needed time to pull myself together. I took some deep breaths to clear my head.

Taking care not to overtake her, I followed her for a long time. She never once looked back or stopped. She hardly glanced around her. She looked as if she had a place to get to and was determined to get there as soon as she could. Like Shimamoto, she walked with her back erect and her head held high. Looking at her from the waist up, no one would ever have suspected that she had something wrong with her leg. She just walked slower than most people. The longer I looked at her, the more I remembered Shimamoto. If this wasn’t Shimamoto, it had to be her twin.