Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

The name’s Bond. James Bond.

Let me get back to what I was saying. Time’s limited—no room for detours. Forget Lotte Lenya. Sorry, metaphors—gotta split. As I said before, inside us what we know and what we don’t know share the same abode. For convenience’s sake most people erect a wall between them. It makes life easier. But I just swept that wall away. I had to. I hate walls. That’s just the kind of person I am.

To use the image of the Siamese twins again, it’s not like they always get along. They don’t always try to understand each other. In fact the opposite is more often true. The right hand doesn’t try to know what the left hand’s doing—and vice versa. Confusion reigns, we end up lost—and we crash smack-bang right into something. Thud.

What I’m getting at is that people have to come up with a clever strategy if they want what they know and what they don’t know to live together in peace. And that strategy—yep, you’ve got it!—is thinking. We have to find a secure anchor. Otherwise, no mistake about it, we’re on an awful collision course.

A question.

So what are people supposed to do if they want to avoid a collision (thud!) but still lie in the field, enjoying the clouds drifting by, listening to the grass grow—not thinking, in other words?

Sounds hard? Not at all. Logically, it’s easy. C’est simple. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites.

Reality, reality.

Way back when the Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch premiered, a woman journalist raised her hand at the press conference and asked the following: “Why in the world do you have to show so much blood all over the place?” She was pretty worked up about it. One of the actors, Ernest Borgnine, looked a bit perplexed and fielded the question. “Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?” This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War.

I love that line. That’s gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.

Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

Which explains my stance as a writer. I think—in a very ordinary way—and reach a point where, in a realm I cannot even give a name to, I conceive a dream, a sightless foetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension. Which must be why my novels are absurdly long and, up till now, at least, never reach a proper conclusion. The technical, and moral, skills needed to maintain a supply line on that scale are beyond me.

Of course I’m not writing a novel here. I don’t know what to call it. Just writing. I’m thinking aloud, so there’s no need to wrap things up neatly. I have no moral obligations. I’m merely—hmm— thinking. I haven’t done any real thinking for the longest time, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. But right now, at this very moment, I am thinking. And that’s what I’m going to do until morning. Think.

That being said, though, I can’t rid myself of my old familiar dark doubts. Aren’t I spending all my time and energy in some useless pursuit? Hauling a bucket of water to a place that’s on the verge of flooding? Shouldn’t I give up any useless effort and just go with the flow?

Collision? What’s that?

Let me put it a different way.

Okay—what different way was I going to use?

Oh, I remember—this is what it is.

If I’m going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself. That’s what I meant.

I love the curve of Miu’s rear end. The exquisite contrast between her jet-black pubic hair and snow-white hair, the nicely shaped arse, clad in tiny black panties. Talk about sexy. Inside her black panties, her T-shaped pubic hair, every bit as black. I’ve got to stop thinking about that. Switch off the circuit of pointless sexual fantasies (click) and concentrate on writing. Can’t let these precious pre-dawn moments slip away. I’ll let somebody else, in some other context, decide what’s effective and what isn’t. Right now I don’t have a glass of barley tea’s worth of interest in what they might say.

Right?

Right you are!

So—onward and upward.

They say it’s a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers—and I’m talking the most talented—are able to pull off the kind of irrational synthesis you find in dreams. Sounds reasonable. Still, I want to relate a dream, one I had recently. I want to record this dream simply as a fact that concerns me and my life. Whether it’s literary or not, I don’t care. I’m just the keeper of the warehouse.

I’ve had the same type of dream many times. The details differ, including the setting, but they all follow the same pattern. And the pain I feel upon waking is always the same. A single theme is repeated there over and over, like a train blowing its whistle at the same blind curve night after night.

(I’ve written this in the third person. It feels more authentic that way.)

Sumire is climbing a long spiral staircase to meet her mother, who died a long time ago. Her mother is waiting at the top of the stairs. She has something she wants to tell Sumire, a critical piece of information Sumire desperately needs in order to live. Sumire’s never met a dead person before, and she’s afraid. She doesn’t know what kind of person her mother is. Maybe—for some reason Sumire can’t imagine—her mother hates her. But she has to meet her. This is her one and only chance.

The stairs go on forever. Climb and climb and she still doesn’t reach the top. Sumire rushes up the stairs, out of breath. She’s running out of time. Her mother won’t always be here, In this building. Sumire’s brow breaks out in a sweat. And finally the stairs come to an end.

At the top of the staircase there’s a broad landing, a thick stone wall at the very end facing her. Right at eye level there’s a kind of round hole like a ventilation shaft. A small hole about 20 inches In diameter. And Sumire’s mother, as if she’d been pushed inside feet first, is crammed inside that hole. Sumire realizes that her time is nearly up.

In that cramped space, her mother faces outwards, towards her. She looks at Sumire’s face as if appealing to her. Sumire knows in a glance that It’s her mother. She’s the person who gave me life and flesh, she realizes. But somehow the woman here is not the mother in the family photo album. My real mother is beautiful, and youthful. So that person in the album wasn’t really my mother after all, Sumire thinks. My father tricked me.

“Mother!” Sumire bravely shouts. She feels a wall of sorts melt away inside her. No sooner does she utter this word than her mother is pulled deeper into that hole, as if sucked by some giant vacuum on the other side. Her mother’s mouth is open, and she’s shouting something to Sumire. But the hollow sound of the wind rushing out of the hole swallows up her words. In the next instant her mother is yanked into the darkness of the hole and vanishes. Sumire looks back, and the staircase is gone. She’s surrounded by stone walls. Where the staircase had been there’s a wooden door. She turns the knob and opens the door, and beyond is the sky. She’s at the top of a tall tower. So high it makes her dizzy to look down. Lots of tiny objects, like aeroplanes, are buzzing around in the sky. Simple little planes anybody could make, constructed of bamboo and light pieces of lumber. In the rear of each plane there’s a tiny fist-sized engine and propeller. Sumire yells out to one of the passing pilots to come and rescue her. But none of the pilots pays any attention.