Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

After a moment’s hesitation, I slipped the floppy disk into the pocket of my bag. If Sumire were to come back without incident, I’d just put it back where it belonged. The problem was what to do if she didn’t return. If somebody went through her belongings, they were bound to find the disk, and I couldn’t abide the thought of other eyes prying into what I had just read.

After I read the documents, I had to get out of the house. I changed into a new shirt, left the cottage, and clambered down the staircase to town. I exchanged $100-worth of traveller’s cheques, bought an English-language tabloid at the kiosk, and sat under a parasol at a cafe, reading. A sleepy waiter took my order for lemonade and melted cheese on toast. He wrote down the order with a stubby pencil, in no particular hurry. Sweat had seeped through the back of his shirt, forming a large stain. The stain seemed to be sending out a message, but I couldn’t decipher it.

I mechanically leafed through half the paper, then gazed absently at the harbour scene. A skinny black dog came out of nowhere, sniffed my legs, then, losing interest, padded away. People passed the languid summer afternoon, each in his own personal spot. The only ones who seemed to be moving were the waiter and the dog, though I had my doubts about how long they’d keep at it. The old man at the kiosk where I’d bought the paper had been fast asleep under a parasol, legs spread wide apart. The statue of the hero in the square stood impassively as always, back turned to the intense sunlight. I cooled my palms and forehead with the cold glass of lemonade, turning over and over in my mind any connections there might be between Sumire’s disappearance and what she’d written.

For a long time Sumire had not written. When she first met Miu at the wedding reception, her desire to write had flown out of the window. Still, here on this little island, she’d managed those two pieces in a short space of time. No mean feat to complete that much in a few days. Something must have driven Sumire to sit at her desk and write. Where was the motivation?

More to the point, what theme tied these two pieces of writing together? I looked up, gazed at the birds resting on the wharf, and gave it some thought.

It was far too hot to think about complicated matters. Admittedly I was confused and tired. Still, as if marshalling together the remnants of a defeated army—minus any drums and trumpets—I rallied my scattered thoughts. My mind focused, I began to piece it together.

“What’s really important here,” I whispered aloud to myself,

“is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself, have.” My standard maxim I taught my own students. But was it really true? It’s easy to say, but putting it into practice isn’t. One’s hard put to start with even the small things, let alone the Big Picture. Or maybe the smaller the notion, the harder it is to grasp? Plus it didn’t help that I was so far from home.

Sumire’s dream. Miu’s split.

These are two different worlds, I realized. That’s the common element here.

Document 1: This relates a dream Sumire had. She’s climbing a long staircase to go to see her dead mother. But the moment she arrives, her mother is already returning to the other side. And Sumire can’t stop her. And she’s left standing on the spire of a tower, surrounded by objects from a different world. Sumire’s had many similar dreams.

Document 2: This one concerns the strange experiences Miu had 14 years ago. She was stuck inside a Ferris wheel overnight in an amusement park in a small Swiss town, and looking through binoculars at her own room she saw a second self there. A doppelgänger. And this experience destroyed Miu as a person—or at least made this destruction tangible. As Miu put it, she was split in two, with a mirror in between each self. Sumire had persuaded Miu to tell the story and wrote it down as best she could.

This side—the other side. That was the common thread. The movement from one side to the other. Sumire must have been drawn by this motif and motivated enough to spend so much time writing it all down. To borrow her own word, writing all this helped her think.

The waiter came to clear away the remnants of my toast, and I ordered a refill of lemonade. “Put in lots of ice,” I asked him. When he brought the drink over I took a sip and used it again to cool my forehead.

“And if Miu doesn’t accept me, then what?” Sumire had written. “I’ll cross that bridge when the times comes. Blood must be shed. I’ll sharpen my knife, ready to slit a dog’s throat somewhere.”

What was she trying to convey? Was she hinting that she might kill herself? I couldn’t believe that. Her words didn’t have the acrid smell of death. What I sensed in them was rather the will to move forwards, the struggle to make a new start. Dogs and blood are just metaphors, like I’d explained to her on that bench at Inogashira Park. They get their meaning from magical, life-giving forces. The story about the Chinese gates was a metaphor of how a story captures that magic.

Ready to slit a dog’s throat somewhere.

Somewhere?

My thoughts slammed into a solid wall. A total dead end. Where could Sumire have gone to? Is there somewhere she had to go to on this island?

I couldn’t shake the image of Sumire falling down a well in some remote area and waiting, alone, for help to arrive. Injured, lonely, starving, and thirsty. The thought of this nearly drove me crazy.

The police had made clear that there wasn’t a single well on the island. They’d never heard of any holes either anywhere near town. If there were, we’d be the first to know, they declared. I had to grant them that.

I decided to venture a theory.

Sumire went over to the other side.

That would explain a lot. Sumire broke through the mirror and journeyed to the other side. To meet the other Miu who was there. If the Miu on this side rejected her, wouldn’t that be the logical thing to do?

I dredged up from memory what she’d written: “So what should we do to avoid a collision? Logically, it’s easy. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living there for the rest of time.”

One question remains, however. A major question. How are you supposed to go there?

Put in simple logical terms, it’s easy. Though explaining it isn’t.

I was right back where I started.

I thought about Tokyo. About my apartment, the school where I taught, the kitchen rubbish I’d stealthily tossed in a bin at the station. I’d only been away from Japan for two days, but already it seemed like a different world. The new term was going to start in a week. I pictured myself standing in front of 35 pupils. Seen from this distance, the thought of my teaching anyone—even ten-year-old kids—seemed absurd.

I removed my sunglasses, wiped my sweating brow with a handkerchief, and put them on again, then gazed at the seabirds.

I thought about Sumire. About the colossal hard-on I had the time I sat beside her when she moved into her new place. The kind of awesome, rock-hard erection I’d never experienced before. Like my whole body was about to explode. At the time, in my imagination—something like the world of dreams Sumire wrote of—I made love to her. And the sensation was far more real than any sex I’d ever had.

I gulped down some lemonade to clear my throat.

I returned to my hypothesis, taking it one step further. Sumire had somehow found an exit. What kind of exit that was, and how she discovered it, I had no way of knowing. I’ll put that on hold. Suppose it’s a kind of door. I closed my eyes and conjured up a mental image—an elaborate image of what this door looked like. Just an ordinary door, part of an ordinary wall. Sumire happened to find this door, turned the knob, and slipped outside—from this side to the other. Clad only in thin silk pyjamas and a pair of flip-flops.