Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

In order to ease the pain and, I hoped, eliminate any sexual tension between me and Sumire, I started sleeping with other women. I’m not saying I was a big hit with women; I wasn’t. I wasn’t what you’d call a ladies’ man, and laid no claim to any special charms. For whatever reason, though, some women were attracted to me, and I discovered that if I let things take their course it wasn’t so hard to get them to sleep with me.

These little flings never aroused much passion in me; they were, at most a kind of comfort.

I didn’t hide my affairs from Sumire. She didn’t know every little detail, just the basic outlines. It didn’t seem to bother her. If there was anything in my affairs that was troubling, it was the fact that the women were all older and either were married or had fiancés or steady boyfriends. My most recent partner was the mother of one of my pupils. We slept together about twice a month.

“That may be the death of you,” Sumire warned me once. And I agreed. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

One Saturday at the beginning of July my class had an outing. I took all 35 of my pupils mountain climbing in Okutama. The day began with an air of happy excitement, only to descend into total chaos. When we reached the summit, two children discovered they’d forgotten to pack their lunches in their backpacks. There weren’t any shops around, so I had to split my own nori-maki lunch the school had provided. Which left me with nothing to eat. Someone gave me some chocolate, but that was all I had the whole day. On top of which one girl said she couldn’t walk any more, and I had to carry her piggyback all the way down the mountain. Two boys started to scuffle, half in fun, and one of them fell and banged his head on a rock. He got a slight concussion and a heavy nosebleed. Nothing critical, but his shirt was covered in blood as if he’d been in a massacre. Like I said, total chaos.

When I got home I was as exhausted as an old railway sleeper. I took a bath, downed a cold drink, snuggled into bed too tired to think, turned off the light, and settled into a peaceful sleep. And then the phone rang: a call from Sumire. I looked at my bedside clock. I’d only slept for about an hour. But I didn’t grumble. I was too tired to complain. Some days are like that.

“Can I see you tomorrow afternoon?” she asked.

My woman friend was coming to my place at 6 p.m. She was supposed to park her red Toyota Celica a little way down the road. “I’m free till four,” I said.

Sumire had on a sleeveless white blouse, a navy-blue mini skirt, and a tiny pair of sunglasses. Her only accessory was a small plastic hairclip. An altogether simple outfit. She wore almost no make-up, exposed to the world in her natural state. Somehow, though, I didn’t recognize her at first. It had only been three weeks since we last met, but the girl sitting across from me at the table looked like someone who belonged to an entirely different world from the Sumire I knew. To put it mildly, she was thoroughly beautiful. Something inside her was blossoming.

I ordered a small glass of draught beer, and she asked for grape juice.

“I hardly recognize you these days,” I said.

“It’s that season,” she said disinterestedly, sipping at her drink through a straw.

“What season?” I asked.

“A delayed adolescence, I guess. When I get up in the morning and see my face in the mirror, it looks like someone else’s. If I’m not careful, I might end up left behind.”

“So wouldn’t it be better to just let it go, then?” I said.

“But if I lost myself, where could I go?”

“If it’s for a couple of days, you can stay at my place. You’d always be welcome—the you who lost you.”

Sumire laughed.

“All joking aside,” she said, “where in the world could I be heading?”

“I don’t know. Look on the bright side—you’ve stopped smoking, you’re wearing nice clean clothes—even your socks match now—and you can speak Italian. You’ve learned how to judge wines, use a computer, and at least for now go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. You must be heading somewhere.”

“But I still can’t write a line.”

“Everything has its ups and downs.”

Sumire screwed up her lips. “Would you call what I’m going through a defection?”

“Defection?” For a moment I couldn’t see what she meant.

“Defection. Betraying your beliefs and convictions.”

“You mean getting a job, dressing nicely, and giving up writing novels?”

“Right.”

I shook my head. “You’ve always written because you wanted to. If you don’t want to any more, why should you? Do you think your not writing is going to cause a village to burn to the ground? A ship to sink? The tides to get messed up? Or set the revolution back five years? Hardly. I don’t think anybody’s going to label that defection.”

“So what should I call it?”

I shook my head again. “The word defection’s too oldfashioned. Nobody uses it any more. Go to some leftover commune, maybe, and people might still use the word. I don’t know the details, but if you don’t want to write any longer, that’s up to you.”

“Commune? Do you mean the places Lenin made?”

“Those are called kolkhoz. There aren’t any left, though.”

“It’s not like I want to give up writing,” Sumire said. She thought for a moment. “It’s just that when I try to write, I can’t. I sit down at my desk and nothing comes—no ideas, no words, no scenes. Zero. Not too long ago I had a million things to write about. What in the world’s happening to me?”

“You’re asking me?”

Sumire nodded.

I took a sip of my cold beer and gathered my thoughts. “I think right now it’s like you’re positioning yourself in a new fictional framework. You’re preoccupied with that, so there’s no need to put your feelings into writing. Besides, you’re too busy.”

“Do you do that? Put yourself inside a fictional framework?”

“I think most people live in a fiction. I’m no exception. Think of it in terms of a car’s transmission. It’s like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything’s all nicely in sync. That’s how you keep your fragile body intact. Does this make any sense?”

Sumire gave a small nod. “And I’m still not completely adjusted to that new framework. That’s what you’re saying?”

“The biggest problem right now is that you don’t know what sort of fiction you’re dealing with. You don’t know the plot; the style’s still not set. The only thing you do know is the main character’s name. Nevertheless, this new fiction is reinventing who you are. Give it time, it’ll take you under its wing, and you may very well catch a glimpse of a new world. But you’re not there yet, which leaves you in a precarious position.”

“You mean I’ve taken out the old transmission, but haven’t quite finished bolting down the new one? And the engine still’s running. Right?”

“You could put it that way.”

Sumire made her usual sullen face and tapped her straw on the hapless ice in her drink. Finally she looked up.

“I understand what you mean by precarious. Sometimes I feel so—I don’t know—lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.”

“Like a little lost Sputnik?”

“I guess so.”

“But you do have Miu,” I said.