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

Of course, Izumi couldn’t understand what I meant. And she called me a dirty liar. She was right on target. Without a word, I’d slept with her cousin behind her back. Not just once or twice, but ten, twenty times. I betrayed her from the word go. If my actions had been proper, after all, why the need for deception? I wanted to tell Izumi this: I wanted to sleep with your cousin; I wanted to screw her till my brains fried—a thousand times, in every position imaginable. It has nothing to do with you, I should have insisted from the start. But in reality I couldn’t say these kinds of things. That’s why I lied—repeatedly. I’d make up some excuse to break a date with her, then zip on down to Kyoto to ball her cousin. There was no getting around it—I was the one to blame.

Izumi found out about us near the end of January, not long after my eighteenth birthday. In February I sailed through all the college entrance exams and was slated to move to Tokyo at the end of March. Before I left town, I called her, over and over. But she wouldn’t come to the phone. I wrote her long letters, waiting in vain for a reply. I can’t just leave like this, I thought I can’t just leave her here. But there was nothing I could do. Izumi wanted nothing to do with me.

On the bullet train to Tokyo, I gazed listlessly at the scenery outside and thought about myself—who I was. I looked down at my hands on my lap and at my face reflected in the window. Who the hell am I? I wondered. For the first time in my life, a fierce self-hatred welled up in me. How could I have done something like this? But I knew why. Put in the same position, I would do the same thing all over again. Even if I had to lie to Izumi, I would sleep with her cousin again. No matter how much it might hurt her. Recognizing this was painful. But it was the truth.

Izumi wasn’t the only one who got hurt. I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.

Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I’ve lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I’d committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I’d hit rock bottom, and I knew it.

My four years of college were pretty much a waste.

The first year, I was in a few demonstrations, even battled the police. I was out there with the student strikers and showed up at political rallies. I met some wild characters that way, but my heart was never in politics. Linking arms with strangers at demonstrations made me uneasy, and when we had to hurl rocks at the cops, I asked myself if this was really me. Was this what I wanted? I wondered. I couldn’t feel the requisite solidarity with the people around me. The scent of violence that hung over the streets, the powerful slogans of the day, soon lost their point. And the time Izumi and I had spent together grew more precious in my mind. But there was no going back. I’d bidden that world farewell.

Most of my classes were a complete bore. Nothing excited me. After a while, I was so busy with my part-time job that I hardly ever showed my face at school; luck alone allowed me to graduate in four years. When I was a junior, I had a girlfriend I lived with for half a year. But it didn’t work out. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I wanted out of life.

The next thing I knew, the season of politics was over. Like a drooping flag on a windless day, the gigantic shock waves that had convulsed society for a time were swallowed up by a colorless, mundane workaday world.

Once I was out of college, a friend helped me get a job on the editorial staff of a textbook company. I got a haircut, shined my shoes, and bought a suit. It wasn’t much of a company, but jobs for literature majors being few and far between that year, and considering my lousy grades and lack of connections, I had to settle for what I could get.

The job was a total bore. The company itself wasn’t such a bad place to work, but editing school textbooks didn’t brighten my day one bit. At first I thought: Okay, I’ll do my best, try to find something worthwhile in it; and for half a year I worked my butt off. Give it your best shot, and something good’s bound to happen, right? But I gave up. No matter how you sliced it this wasn’t the job for me. I felt as if the end of my life was staring me in the face. The months and years would drop away one by one, with me bored out of my skull. I had thirty-three years till retirement, chained day after day to a desk, staring at galley proofs, counting lines, checking spelling. I’d get married to some nice girl, have some kids, the usual twice-a-year bonus the one bright spot in an otherwise tedious existence. I remembered what Izumi had once told me. “I know you’ll be a wonderful person when you grow up. There is something special about you.” It pained me every time I remembered. Something special about me, Izumi? Forget it. But I’m sure you know that now. Ah, what the hell, everyone makes mistakes .

Mechanically, I did the work assigned me, and I spent my free time reading or listening to music. Work is just a boring obligation, I decided, and when I’m not working, I’m going to use my time the best way I can and enjoy myself. So I never went out drinking with the guys from work. Not that I was a loner who didn’t get along with people. I just didn’t make the effort to get to know my officemates on a personal level. I was determined that my free time was going to be mine .

Four or five years passed in a flash. I had several girlfriends, but nothing lasted. I’d date one for a few months, and then start thinking: This isn’t what I want. I couldn’t find within these women something that was waiting just for me. I slept with a couple of them, but it was no big deal. I consider this the third stage of my life—the twelve years between my starting college and turning thirty. Years of disappointment and loneliness. And silence. Frozen years, when my feelings were shut up inside me.

I withdrew into myself. I ate alone, took walks alone, went swimming alone, and went to concerts and movies alone. I didn’t feel hurt or sad. I often thought of Shimamoto and of Izumi, and wondered where they were now, what they were doing. For all I knew, they might be married, even have children. I would have given anything to see them, to talk with them, even for an hour. With Shimamoto and Izumi, I could be honest I racked my brains wondering how to get back together with Izumi, how to see Shimamoto again. How wonderful that would be, I imagined. Not that I actually took steps to see that it came true. The two of them were lost to me forever. The hands of a clock run in only one direction. I started talking to myself, drinking alone at night. I was sure I would never get married.

Two years after I started work, I had a date with a girl who had a bad leg. One of the guys from work set me up on a double date.

“Something’s wrong with one of her legs,” he told me reluctantly. “But she’s cute and has a great personality. I know you’ll like her. And you won’t really notice the leg. She drags it a bit is all.”