Haruki Murakami - after the quake

There was no sign of human life here. The place looked like an imaginary stage set in a dream. Where the concrete wall ended, there was a scrap yard: a hill of cars surrounded by a chain-link fence. Under the flat light of a mercury lamp, the pile of withered metal was reduced to a single colorless mass. The man continued walking straight ahead.

Yoshiya wondered what the point could be of getting out of a cab in such a deserted place. Wasn’t the man heading home? Or maybe he wanted to take a little detour on the way. The February night was too cold for walking, though. A freezing wind would push against Yoshiya’s back every now and then as it sliced down the road.

Where the scrap yard ended, another long stretch of unfriendly concrete wall began, broken only by the opening to a narrow alley. This seemed like familiar territory to the man: he never hesitated as he turned the corner. The alley was dark. Yoshiya could make out nothing in its depths. He hesitated for a moment, but then stepped in after the man. Having come this far, he was not about to give up.

High walls pressed in on either side of the straight passageway. There was barely enough room in here for two people to pass each other, and it was as dark as the bottom of the nighttime sea. Yoshiya had only the sound of the man’s shoes to go by. The leather slaps continued on ahead of him at the same unbroken pace. All but clinging to the sound, Yoshiya moved forward through this world devoid of light. And then there was no sound at all.

Had the man sensed he was being followed? Was he standing still now, holding his breath, straining to see and hear what was behind him? Yoshiya’s heart shrank in the darkness, but he swallowed its loud beating and pressed on. To hell with it, he thought. So what if he screams at me for following him? I’ll just tell him the truth. It could be the quickest way to set the record straight. But then the alley came to a dead end, where it was closed off by a sheet-metal fence. Yoshiya took a few seconds to find the gap, an opening just big enough to let a person through where someone had bent back the metal. He gathered the skirts of his coat around him and squeezed through.

A big open space spread out on the other side of the fence. It was no empty lot, though, but some kind of playing field. Yoshiya stood there, straining to see anything in the pale moonlight. The man was gone.

Yoshiya was standing in a baseball field, somewhere way out in center field amid a stretch of trampled-down weeds. Bare ground showed through like a scar in the one place where the center fielder usually stood. Over the distant home plate, the backstop soared like a set of black wings. The pitcher’s mound lay closer to hand, a slight swelling of the earth. The high metal fence ringed the entire outfield. A breeze swept across the grass, carrying an empty potato chip bag with it to nowhere.

Yoshiya plunged his hands into his coat pockets and held his breath, waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened. He surveyed right field, then left field, then the pitcher’s mound and the ground beneath his feet before looking up at the sky. Several chunks of cloud hung there, the moon tinging their hard edges a strange color. A whiff of dog shit mixed with the smell of the grass. The man had disappeared without a trace. If Mr. Tabata had been here, he would have said, “So you see, Yoshiya, our Lord reveals Himself to us in the most unexpected forms.” But Mr. Tabata was dead.

He had died of urethral cancer three years ago. His final months of suffering were excruciating to see. Had he never once in all that time tested God? Had he never once prayed to God for some small relief from his terrible pain? Mr. Tabata had observed his own strict commandments with such rigor and lived in such intimate contact with God that he of all people was qualified to make such prayers (concrete and limited in time though they might be). And besides, thought Yoshiya, if it was all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?

Yoshiya felt a faint throbbing in his temples, but he could not tell if this was the remains of his hangover or something else. With a grimace, he pulled his hands from his pockets and began taking long, slow strides toward home base. Only seconds earlier, the one thing on his mind had been the breathless pursuit of a man who might well be his father, and that had carried him to this ball field in a neighborhood he’d never seen before. Now that the stranger had disappeared, however, the importance of the succeeding acts that had brought him this far turned unclear inside him. Meaning itself broke down and would never be the same again, just as the question of whether he could catch an outfield fly had ceased to be a matter of life and death to him anymore.

What was I hoping to gain from this? he asked himself as he strode ahead. Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now? Was I hoping to be woven into some new plot, to be given some new and better-defined role to play? No, he thought, that’s not it. What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I’m sure I’ll never see it again.

Yoshiya’s spirit now lingered in the stillness and clarity of one particular point in time and space. So what if the man was his father, or God, or some stranger who just happened to have lost his right earlobe? It no longer made any difference to him, and this in itself had been a manifestation, a sacrament: should he be singing words of praise?

He climbed the pitcher’s mound and, standing on its worn footrest, stretched himself to his full height. He intertwined his fingers, thrust his arms aloft and, sucking in a lungful of cold night air, looked up once more at the moon. It was huge. Why was the moon so big one day and so small another? Simple plank bleachers ran the length of the first- and third-base lines. Empty, of course: it was the middle of a February night. Three levels of straight plank seats ascended in long, chilly rows. Window-less, gloomy buildings—some kind of warehouses, probably— huddled together beyond the backstop. No light. No sound.

Standing on the mound, Yoshiya swung his arms up, over, and down in large circles. He moved his feet in time with this, forward and to the side. As he went on with these dancelike motions, his body began to warm and to recover the full senses of a living organism. Before long he realized that his headache was all but gone.

Yoshiya’s girlfriend throughout his college years called him “Super-Frog” because he looked like some kind of giant frog when he danced. She loved to dance and would always drag him out to clubs. “Look at you!” she used to say. “I love the way you flap those long arms and legs of yours! You’re like a frog in the rain!”

This hurt the first time she said it, but after he had gone with her long enough, Yoshiya began to enjoy dancing. As he let himself go and moved his body in time to the music, he would come to feel that the natural rhythm inside him was pulsing in perfect unison with the basic rhythm of the world. The ebb and flow of the tide, the dancing of the wind across the plains, the course of the stars through the heavens: he felt certain that these things were by no means occurring in places unrelated to him.

She had never seen a penis as huge as his, his girlfriend used to say, taking hold of it. Didn’t it get in the way when he danced? No, he would tell her: it never got in the way. True, he had a big one. It had always been on the big side, from the time he was a boy. He could not recall that it had ever been of any great advantage to him, though. In fact, several girls had refused to have sex with him because it was too big. In aesthetic terms, it just looked slow and clumsy and stupid. Which is why he always tried to keep it hidden. “Your big wee-wee is a sign,” his mother used to tell him with absolute conviction. “It shows that you’re the child of God.” And he believed it, too. But then one day the craziness of it struck him. All he had ever prayed for was the ability to catch outfield flies, in answer to which God had bestowed upon him a penis that was bigger than anybody else’s. What kind of world came up with such idiotic bargains?