Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

So Sumire was often alone in the office, talking to no one for hours, but she never felt bored or lonely. She’d review her twice-a-week Italian lessons, memorizing the irregular verbs, checking her pronunciation with a tape recorder. She took some computer classes and got to where she could handle most simple glitches. She opened up the information in the hard drive and learned the general outlines of the projects Miu had going.

Miu’s main work was exactly as she had described it at the wedding reception. She contracted with small wine producers, mostly in France, and wholesaled their wine to restaurants and speciality shops in Tokyo. On occasion she arranged concert trips by musicians to Japan. Agents from large firms handled the complex business angles, with Miu taking care of the overall plan and some of the groundwork. Miu’s speciality was searching out unknown, promising young performers and bringing them to Japan.

Sumire had no way of knowing how much profit Miu made from her private business. Accounting records were kept on separate disks and couldn’t be accessed without a password. At any rate, Sumire was ecstatic, her heart aflutter, just to be able to meet Miu and talk to her. That’s the desk where Miu sits, she thought. That’s the ballpoint pen she uses; the mug she drinks coffee from. No matter how trivial the task, Sumire did her best.

Every so often Miu would invite Sumire out for dinner. Since her business involved wine, Miu found it necessary to regularly make the rounds of the better-known restaurants to stay in touch with the latest news. Miu always ordered a light fish dish or, on occasion, chicken, though she’d leave half, and would pass on dessert. She’d pore over every detail of the wine list before deciding on a bottle, but would never drink more than a glass. “Go ahead and have as much as you like,” she told Sumire, but there was no way Sumire could finish that much. So they always ended up with half a very expensive bottle of wine left, but Miu didn’t mind.

“It’s such a waste to order a whole bottle of wine for just the two of us,” Sumire said to Miu one time. “We can barely finish half.”

“Don’t worry.” Miu laughed. “The more we leave behind, the more people in the restaurant will be able to try it. The sommelier, the headwaiter, all the way down to the waiter who fills the water glasses. That way a lot of people will start to acquire a taste for good wine. Which is why leaving expensive wine is never a waste.”

Miu examined the colour of the 1986 Médoc and then, as if savouring some nicely turned out prose, carefully tasted it.

“It is the same with anything—you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.”

Taking a cue from Miu, Sumire picked up her glass and very attentively took a sip, held it in her mouth, and then swallowed it. For a moment an agreeable aftertaste remained, but after a few seconds this disappeared, like morning dew on a summer leaf. All of which prepared the palate for the next bite of food. Every time she ate and talked with Miu, Sumire learned something new. Sumire was amazed by the overwhelming number of things she had yet to learn.

“You know I’ve never thought I wanted to be somebody else,” Sumire blurted out once, perhaps urged on by the morethan-usual amount of wine she’d drunk. “But sometimes I think how nice it would be to be like you.”

Miu held her breath for a moment. Then she picked up her wineglass and took a sip. For a second, the light dyed her eyes the crimson of the wine. Her face was drained of its usual subtle expression.

“I’m sure you don’t know this,” she said calmly, returning her glass to the table. “The person here now isn’t the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole—that would have been wonderful. But it’s pointless to think about that now.”

Sumire was so taken aback she was speechless. And missed the chance to ask the obvious questions. What had happened to Miu 14 years ago? Why had she become half her real self? And what did she mean by half, anyway? This enigmatic announcement, in the end, only made Sumire more and more smitten with Miu. What an awesome person, she thought.

Through fragments of conversation Sumire was able to piece together a few facts about Miu. Her husband was Japanese, five years older and fluent in Korean, the result of two years as an exchange student in the economics department of Seoul University. He was a warm person, good at what he did, in point of fact the guiding force behind Miu’s company. Even though it was originally a family-run business, no one ever said a bad word about him.

Ever since she was a little girl, Miu had had a talent for playing the piano. Still in her teens she had won the top prize at several competitions for young people. She went on to a conservatoire, studied under a famous pianist and, through her teacher’s recommendation, was able to study at a music academy in France. Her repertoire ran mainly from the late Romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, to Poulenc, Ravel, Bartók, and Prokofiev. Her playing combined a keen, sensuous tone with a vibrant, impeccable technique. In her student days she held a number of concerts, all well received. A bright future as a concert pianist looked assured. During her time abroad, though, her father fell ill, and Miu shut the lid of her piano and returned to Japan. Never to touch a keyboard again.

“How could you give up the piano so easily?” Sumire asked hesitantly. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. I just find it—I don’t know—a little unusual. I mean, you had to sacrifice a lot of things to become a pianist, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t sacrifice a lot of things for the piano,” Miu said softly.

“I sacrificed everything. The piano demanded every ounce of flesh, every drop of blood, and I couldn’t refuse. Not even once.”

“Weren’t you sorry to give up? You’d almost made it.”

Miu gazed into Sumire’s eyes searchingly. A deep, steady gaze. Deep within Miu’s eyes, as if in a quiet pool in a swift stream, wordless currents vied with one another. Only gradually did these clashing currents settle.

“I’m sorry,” Sumire apologized. “I’ll mind my own business.”

“It’s all right. I just can’t explain it well.”

They didn’t talk about it again.

Miu didn’t allow smoking in her office and hated people to smoke in front of her, so after she began the job Sumire decided it was a good chance to quit. Being a two-packs-of-Marlboro-aday smoker, though, things didn’t go so smoothly. After a month, like some animal that’s had its furry tail sliced off, she lost her emotional grip on things—not that this was so firm to begin with. And as you might guess, she started calling me all the time in the middle of the night.

“All I can think about is having a smoke. I can barely sleep, and when I do sleep I have nightmares. I’m constipated. I can’t read, can’t write a line.”

“Everybody goes through that when they try to stop. In the beginning at least,” I said.

“You find it easy to give opinions as long as it’s about other people, don’t you?” she snapped. “You’ve never had a cigarette in your life.”

“Hey, if you can’t give your opinion about other people, the world would turn into a pretty scary place, wouldn’t it? If you don’t think so, just look up what Joseph Stalin did.”

On the other end of the line Sumire was silent for a long time. A heavy silence like dead souls on the Eastern Front.

“Hello?” I asked.