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

“Your garter belt clasp?” I asked.

“A little metal thing, about this big.”

I scoured the room, from the floor to the top of my bed. But I couldn’t find it

“Sorry. Couldn’t you skip wearing your stockings just this once?” I asked.

I went into the kitchen, where my aunt was chopping vegetables. We need some salad oil, she said, and asked me to go out to buy some. I couldn’t refuse, so I rode my bike over to a nearby store. It was already growing dark outside. At this rate Izumi might be stuck in my house forever. I had to do something before my parents got home.

“I think our only chance is for you to slip out while my aunt’s in the bathroom,” I told Izumi.

“You really think it’ll work?”

“Let’s give it a shot. We can’t sit around like this, twiddling our thumbs.”

I’d wait downstairs till my aunt went to the bathroom, then clap my hands loudly twice. Izumi would come downstairs, put on her shoes, and leave. If she’d made her escape okay, she would call me from a nearby pay phone.

My aunt sang happily as she sliced vegetables, made miso soup, and fried up some eggs. But no matter how much time passed, she didn’t take a bathroom break. For all I knew, she might be listed in the Guinness Book , under World’s Biggest Bladder. I was about to give up, when she took off her apron and left the kitchen. As soon as I saw she was in the bathroom, I raced to the living room and clapped twice, hard. Izumi tiptoed downstairs, shoes in hand, quickly slipped them on, and as quietly as she could snuck out the front door. I went to the kitchen to make sure she got out the front gate okay. A second later, my aunt came out of the bathroom. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Five minutes afterward, Izumi called me. Telling my aunt I’d be back in fifteen minutes, I went out. Izumi was standing in front of the pay phone.

“I hate this,” she said before I could get out a word. “I don’t ever want to do this again.”

I couldn’t blame her for being angry and upset. I led her to the park near the station and sat her down on a bench. And gently held her hand. Over her red sweater she had on a beige coat. I fondly recalled what lay beneath.

“But today was beautiful. I mean until my aunt showed up. Don’t you think so?” I asked.

“Of course I enjoyed it. Every time I’m with you I have a wonderful time. But every time, afterward, I get confused.”

“About what?”

“The future. After I graduate from high school you’ll go to college in Tokyo, and I’ll stay here. What’s going to happen to us?”

I’d already decided to go to a college in Tokyo after I left high school. I was dying to get out of my hometown, to live on my own away from my parents. My GPA wasn’t that great, but in the subjects I did like I made pretty good grades without cracking a book, so getting into a private college would be no big deal, seeing as how their exams covered only a couple of subjects. But there was no way Izumi would be joining me in Tokyo. Her parents wanted to keep her close at hand, and she wasn’t exactly the rebellious type. So she wanted me to stay put. We have a good college here, she argued. Why do you have to go all the way to Tokyo? If I promised not to go to Tokyo, I’m sure she would have slept with me.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going off to a foreign country. It’s only three hours away. And college vacations are long, so three or four months of the year I’ll be here.” I’d explained it to her a dozen times.

“But if you leave here you’ll forget all about me. And you’ll find another girlfriend,” she said. I’d heard these lines at least a dozen times too.

I told her that wouldn’t happen. I like you a lot, I said, so how can I forget you that easily? But I wasn’t so sure. A simple change of scenery can bring about powerful shifts in the flow of time and emotions: exactly what had happened to Shimamoto and me. We might have been very close, but moving down the road a couple of miles was all it took for us to go our separate ways. I liked her a lot and she told me to come see her. But in the end I stopped going.

“There’s one thing I just can’t understand,” Izumi said. “You say you like me. And you want to take care of me. But sometimes I can’t figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

Izumi took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and wiped away her tears. With a start, I realized she’d been crying for some time. I had no idea what to say, so I sat waiting for her to continue.

“You prefer to think things over all by yourself, and you don’t like people peeking inside your head. Maybe that’s because you’re an only child. You’re used to thinking and acting alone. You figure that as long as you understand something, that’s enough.” She shook her head. “And that makes me afraid. I feel abandoned.”

Only child . I hadn’t heard those words in a long while. In elementary school the words had hurt me. But Izumi was using them in a different sense. Her “only child” didn’t mean a pampered, spoiled kid but spoke to my isolated ego, which kept the world at arm’s length. She wasn’t blaming me. The situation just made her very sad.

“I can’t tell you how happy I was when we held each other. It gave me hope, and I thought, who knows, maybe everything will work out,” she said as we bade each other goodbye. “But life isn’t that easy, is it.”

On the way back from the station, I mulled over what she’d said. It made sense. I wasn’t used to opening up to others. She was opening up to me, but I couldn’t do the same. I really did like her, yet still something held me back.

I’d walked the road from the train station home a thousand times, but now it was like a foreign town. I couldn’t shake the image of Izumi’s naked body: her taut nipples, her wisp of pubic hair, her soft thighs. And eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer. I bought some cigarettes from a vending machine, went back to the park where we’d talked, and lit a cigarette to calm down.

If only my aunt hadn’t barged in on us, things might have worked out better. If nothing had disturbed us, we could have had a pleasanter goodbye. We would have been even happier. But if my aunt hadn’t come by, someday something similar was bound to happen. If not today, then tomorrow. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t convince her this was inevitable. Because I couldn’t convince myself.

As the sun set, the wind grew cold. Winter was fast approaching. And when the new year came, there would be college entrance exams and the beginning of a brand-new life. Uneasy though I was, I yearned for change. My heart and body both craved this unknown land, a blast of fresh air. That was the year Japanese universities were taken over by their students and Tokyo was engulfed in a storm of demonstrations. The world was transforming itself right before my eyes, and I was dying to catch that fever. Even if Izumi wanted me to stay and would have sex with me to ensure that, I knew my days in this sleepy town were numbered. If that meant the end of our relationship, so be it. If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.

Izumi could never understand my dream. She had her own dreams, a vision of a far different place, a world unlike my own.

But even before my new life began, a crisis came to rip our relationship to shreds.

The first girl I ever slept with was an only child. Like Izumi, she wasn’t exactly the type to turn any heads; most people would hardly notice her. Still the first time I laid eyes on her, it was as if I were walking down the road one afternoon and a silent bolt of lightning struck me smack on the head. No ifs, ands, or buts—I was hooked.