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

Next Sunday there’s a get-together at the swimming club, I told her. One of the members owned a large yacht, which we’d been on several times offshore, fishing and drinking. It was a little too cold to go out in a yacht in February, but my wife knew nothing about boats, so she didn’t have any objections. I hardly ever went out on Sundays, and she seemed to think it was good for me to meet people in other fields and be outdoors.

“I’ll be leaving really early in the morning. And I’ll be back by eight, I think. I’ll have dinner at home,” I said.

“All right. My sister’s coming over that Sunday anyway,” she said. “If it isn’t too cold, maybe we could take a picnic to Shinjuku Gyoen. Just us four girls.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

The next afternoon I went to a travel agency and made plane and rental car reservations. There was a flight arriving back in Tokyo at six-thirty in the evening. Looked like I would be back in time for a late dinner. Then I went to the bar and waited for Shimamoto’s call. She phoned at ten. “I’m a little busy, but I think I can make the time,” I told her. “Is next Sunday okay?”

That’s fine with me, she replied.

I told her the flight time and where to meet me at Haneda Airport.

“Thank you so much,” she said.

After hanging up, I sat at the counter for a while, with a book. The bustle of the bar bothered me, though, and I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the rest room and washed my face and hands with cold water, stared at my reflection in the mirror. I’ve lied to Yukiko, I told myself. Sure, I’d lied to her before, when I slept with other women. But I never felt I was deceiving her. Those were just harmless flings. But this time was wrong. Not that I was planning to sleep with Shimamoto. But even so, it was wrong. For the first time in a long while, I looked deep within my own eyes in the mirror. Those eyes told me nothing of who I was. I laid both hands on the sink and sighed deeply.

The river flowed swiftly past cliffs, in places forming small waterfalls, in others coming to a halt in pools. The surface of these pools faintly reflected the weak sun. An old iron bridge downstream spanned the river. The bridge was so narrow one car could barely squeeze across it. Its darkened, impassive metal frame sank deep into the chilled February silence. The only people who passed over the bridge were the hotel’s guests and employees, and the people in charge of caring for the woods. When we walked over it we passed no one going the other way, and looking back, we saw no one. After arriving at the hotel, we had had a light lunch, then we crossed the bridge and walked along the river. Shimamoto had on a heavy pea coat, the collar turned up, and a muffler wrapped around her up to her nose. She had on casual clothes, good for walking in the mountains, much different from her usual attire. Her hair was tied in back, and she wore a pair of rugged-looking work boots. A green nylon shoulder bag was slung over one shoulder. Dressed like that, she looked just like a high school girl. On either side of the river, hard patches of snow remained. Two crows squatted on top of the bridge, gazing down at the river below, every once in a while releasing grating, scolding caws. Those shrill calls echoed in the leaf-blanketed woods, crossed the river, and rang unpleasantly in our ears.

A narrow, unpaved path continued along the river, a terribly silent, deserted path leading who knows where. No houses appeared beside the path, only the occasional bare field. Snow-covered furrows inscribed bright white lines across the barren land. Crows were everywhere. As if signaling their comrades down the line of our approach, the crows let out short, sharp caws as we passed. They stood their ground, not trying to fly away. From close proximity I could see their sharp, weapon-like beaks and the vivid coloring of their claws.

“Do we still have time?” Shimamoto asked. “Can we walk a little farther?”

I looked at my watch. “We’re okay. We should be able to stay here another hour.”

“It’s so quiet,” she said, looking around slowly. Every time she opened her mouth, her hard white breath drifted into the air.

“Is this river what you were looking for?”

She smiled at me. “It’s like you could read my mind,” she replied. And reached out with her gloved hand to grasp mine, also in a glove.

“I’m glad,” I said. “If we came all this way and you said this wasn’t the place, then what’d we do?”

“Hey, have more confidence in yourself. You’d never make that kind of mistake,” she said. “But you know, walking like this, just the two of us, I remember the old days. When we used to walk home together from school.”

“Your leg isn’t like it was, though.”

She grinned at me. “You seem almost disappointed.”

“Maybe so.” I laughed.

“Really?”

“I’m just kidding. I’m very happy your leg’s better. Just a bout of nostalgia, I guess.”

“Hajime,” she said, “I hope you understand how very grateful I am to you for doing this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s like going on a picnic. Except we took a plane.”

Shimamoto walked on for a while, looking ahead. “But you had to lie to your wife.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“And that couldn’t have been easy. I’m sure you didn’t want to lie to her.”

I didn’t know how to respond. From the woods nearby, a crow let out another sharp caw.

“I’ve messed up your life. I know I have,” Shimamoto said in a small voice.

“Hey, let’s stop talking about it,” I said. “We’ve come all the way here, so let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

“Like what?”

“Dressed like that, you look just like a high school girl.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I wish I were.”

We walked slowly upstream. For a while we proceeded in silence, concentrating on our walking. She couldn’t walk very fast but was able to handle a slow but steady pace. She held my hand tight. The path was frozen solid, and our rubber soles hardly made a sound.

Just as she had implied, if only we could have walked this way when we were teenagers, or even in our twenties, how wonderful that would have been! A Sunday afternoon, just the two of us strolling along a river like this … I would have been ecstatic. But we were no longer high school kids. I had a wife and children, and a job. And I’d had to lie to my wife in order to be here. I had to drive back to the airport, take the flight that arrived in Tokyo at six-thirty, then hurry back to my home, where my wife would be waiting for me.

Finally Shimamoto stopped, rubbed her gloved hands together, and gazed all around. She looked upstream, then downstream. On the opposite shore there was a range of mountains, on the left-hand side a line of bare trees. We were utterly alone. The hot-springs hotel, where we’d had lunch, and the iron bridge, lay hidden in the shadow of the mountains. Every once in a while, as if remembering its duty, the sun showed its face through a break in the clouds. All we could hear were the screeches of the crows and the rush of water. Someday, somewhere, I will see this scene, I felt. The opposite of déjà vu—not the feeling that I’d already seen what was around me, but the premonition that I would some-day. This premonition reached out its long hand and grabbed my mind tight. I could feel myself in its grip. There at its fingertips was me. Me in the future, grown old. Of course, I couldn’t see what I looked like.

“This spot will be all right,” she said.

“To do what?” I asked.

She smiled her usual faint smile. “To do what I’m about to do,” she replied.

We went down to the riverbank. There was a small pool of water, covered by a thin sheet of ice. On the bottom of the pool several fallen leaves lay still, like the bodies of flat dead fish. I picked up a round stone and rolled it in my hand. Shimamoto took off her gloves and put them in her coat pocket. She undid her shoulder bag, opened it, and removed a small bag made out of a pretty cloth. Inside the bag was an urn. She undid the fastening on the lid and carefully opened the urn. For a while she gazed at what was inside.