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

If it were Shimamoto, there would be no confusion. The two of us, with no words spoken, would be totally accepting of the other. No uncomfortable feelings, no unease. But Shimamoto was no longer around. She was in a new world of her own, and so was I. Comparing Izumi and Shimamoto was pointless. The door that led to Shimamoto’s world had slammed shut behind me, and I needed to find my bearings in a new and different world.

I was up until the light shone faintly through the eastern sky. I slept for two hours, took a shower, and went to school. I had to find Izumi and talk to her about what had happened between us. I wanted to hear from her lips that her feelings were unchanged. The last thing she’d said was how happy she was, but in the cold light of dawn it seemed more like an illusion I’d dreamed up. School ended without my getting a chance to talk to her. At recess she was with her girlfriends, and when classes were over she went straight home. Just once, when we were in the hallway changing classes, we managed to exchange glances. She beamed when she caught sight of me, and I smiled back. That was all. But in her smile I caught an affirmation of the previous day’s events. It’s all right, her smile seemed to tell me. Yesterday really did happen . By the time I was riding the train home, my confusion was gone. I wanted her, and my desire won out over any doubts.

What I wanted was clear enough. Izumi naked, having sex with me. But that final destination was still a long way down the road. There was a certain order of events one had to follow. To arrive at sex, you first had to undo the fastener of the girl’s dress. And between dress fastener and sex lay a process in which twenty—maybe thirty—subtle decisions and judgments had to be made.

First of all I had to get hold of some condoms. Actually, that step was a bit further down the chain of events, but anyhow I had to get my hands on some. Never know when I might need them. But I couldn’t just duck into a drugstore, plunk down some money, and waltz out with a box of condoms. I’d never pass as anything other than what I was—a high school junior—not to mention that I was too much of a coward to make the attempt. I could have tried one of the vending machines in the neighborhood, but if anyone caught me red-handed, I’d be up the proverbial creek. For three or four days, I turned this quandary over endlessly in my mind.

In the end, things worked out more easily than expected. I asked a precocious friend of mine, who was sort of our local expert on these matters. See, the thing is, I asked him, I’d like to get some condoms, so what should I do? No sweat, he deadpanned. I can get you a whole box. My brother bought a ton of them through a catalog. I don’t know why he bought so many, but his closet’s full of them. One missing box isn’t gonna kill him. Fantastic, I enthused. The next day he brought the condoms to school in a paper bag. I treated him to lunch and asked him not to breathe a word. No problem, he said. Of course he spilled the beans, told a couple of people I was in the market for condoms. These people told some others, and it made the rounds of the school until Izumi heard about it After school, she asked me to come up to the school roof with her.

“Hajime, I heard you got some condoms from Nishida?” she asked. The word condoms didn’t exactly roll off her tongue. She made it sound like the name of some infectious disease.

“Uh … yeah,” I admitted. I struggled to find the right words. “It doesn’t really mean anything. I just thought, you know, maybe it’d be better to have some.”

“You got them because of me?”

“No, not really,” I said. “I was just curious about what they were like. But if it bothers you, I’m sorry. I’ll give them back, or throw them away.”

We were sitting on a small stone bench in a corner of the roof. It looked like it might rain at any minute. We were all alone. It was completely still. I’d never known the roof to be so silent.

Our school was on a hilltop, and we had an unboken view of the town and the sea. Once, my friends and I filched some records from the Broadcast Club room and flung them off the roof–like Frisbees, they sailed away in a beautiful arc. Off toward the harbor they flew, happily, as if life were breathed into them for a fleeting instant. But finally one of them failed to get airborne and wobbled clumsily straight down onto the tennis court, where some startled freshman girls were practicing their swings. It was detention for us. That had been more than a year before, and now here I was in the same spot, being grilled by my girlfriend about condoms. I looked up at the sky and saw a bird etching a slow circle in the sky. Being a bird, I imagined, must be wonderful. All birds had to do was fly in the sky. No need to worry about contraception.

“Do you really like me?” Izumi asked me in a small voice.

“Sure I do,” I replied. “Of course I like you.”

Lips pursed, she looked straight into my face. She looked at me so long it made me uneasy.

“I like you too, you know,” she said after a while.

But, I thought.

“But,” she said, sure enough, “there’s no need to rush.”

I nodded.

“Don’t be too impatient. I have my own pace. I’m not that clever a person. I need lots of time to prepare for things. Can you wait?”

Once again I nodded silently.

“Promise?” she asked.

“I promise.”

“You won’t hurt me?”

“I won’t hurt you.”

She looked down at her shoes for a while. Plain black loafers. Compared to mine, lined up next to them, they were as tiny as toys.

“I’m scared,” she said. “These days I feel like a snail without a shell.”

“I’m scared too,” I said. “I feel like a frog without any webs.”

She looked up and smiled.

Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog. I held her close against me. Our tongues met lightly. I felt her breasts through her blouse. She didn’t resist. She just closed her eyes and sighed. Her breasts were small and fit comfortably in the palm of my hand, as if designed solely for that purpose. She placed her palm above my heart, and the feel of her hand and the beat of my heart became one. She’s not Shimamoto, I told myself. She can’t give me what Shimamoto gave. But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her?

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

Izumi and I went out for more than a year. We dated once a week, went to movies, studied together at the library, or just took long aimless walks. As far as sex goes, though, we never made it all the way. About twice a month I had her over to my house when my parents were out and we held each other on my bed. But she never took all her clothes off. You never know when someone might come back, she insisted. Overly cautious, you could call her. She wasn’t scared; she just hated to be pushed into some potentially embarrassing situation.

So I always had to hold her with her clothes all on and fumble around as best I could beneath her underwear.

“Slow down,” she told me whenever my disappointment showed. “I need more time. Please.”

Actually, I wasn’t in that much of a rush myself. I was just confused, and disappointed by all sorts of things. Of course, I liked her and was grateful that she was my girlfriend. If she hadn’t been with me, my teenage years would have been completely stale and colorless. She was basically an honest, pleasant girl, someone people liked. But our interests were worlds apart. She couldn’t understand the books I read or the music I listened to, so we couldn’t talk as equals on these topics. In this sense, my relationship with her differed dramatically from that with Shimamoto.