Haruki Murakami - after the quake

When he woke up, he was in bed. He opened one eye, took a moment to survey his surroundings, and then opened the other eye. The first thing that entered his field of vision was a metal stand by the head of the bed and an intravenous feeding tube that stretched from the stand to where he lay. Next he saw a nurse dressed in white. He realized that he was lying on his back on a hard bed and wearing some strange piece of clothing, under which he seemed to be naked.

Oh yeah, he thought, I was walking along the sidewalk when some guy shot me. Probably in the shoulder. The right one. He relived the scene in his mind. When he remembered the small black gun in the young man’s hand, his heart made a disturbing thump. The sons of bitches were trying to kill me! he thought. But it looks as if I made it through OK. My memory is fine. I don’t have any pain. And not just pain: I don’t have any feeling at all. I can’t lift my arm…

The hospital room had no windows. He could not tell whether it was day or night. He had been shot just before five in the evening. How much time had passed since then? Had the hour of his nighttime rendezvous with Frog gone by? Katagiri searched the room for a clock, but without his glasses he could see nothing at a distance.

“Excuse me,” he called to the nurse.

“Oh, good, you’re finally awake,” the nurse said.

“What time is it?”

She looked at her watch.

“Nine-fifteen.”

“P.M.?”

“Don’t be silly, it’s morning!”

“Nine-fifteen a.m.?” Katagiri groaned, barely managing to lift his head from the pillow. The ragged noise that emerged from his throat sounded like someone else’s voice. “Nine-fifteen a.m. on February 18?”

“Right,” the nurse said, lifting her arm once more to check the date on her digital watch. “Today is February 18, 1995.”

“Wasn’t there a big earthquake in Tokyo this morning?”

“In Tokyo?”

“In Tokyo.”

The nurse shook her head. “Not as far as I know.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever had happened, the earthquake at least had been averted.

“How’s my wound doing?”

“Your wound?” she asked. “What wound?”

“Where I was shot.”

“Shot?”

“Yeah, near the entrance to the Trust Bank. Some young guy shot me. In the right shoulder, I think.”

The nurse flashed a nervous smile in his direction. “I’m sorry, Mr. Katagiri, but you haven’t been shot.”

“I haven’t? Are you sure?”

“As sure as I am that there was no earthquake this morning.”

Katagiri was stunned. “Then what the hell am I doing in a hospital?”

“Somebody found you lying in the street, unconscious. In the Kabukicho neighborhood of Shinjuku. You didn’t have any external wounds. You were just out cold. And we still haven’t found out why. The doctor’s going to be here soon. You’d better talk to him.”

Lying in the street unconscious? Katagiri was sure he had seen the pistol go off aimed at him. He took a deep breath and tried to get his head straight. He would start by putting all the facts in order.

“What you’re telling me is, I’ve been lying in this hospital bed, unconscious, since early evening yesterday, is that right?”

“Right,” the nurse said. “And you had a really bad night, Mr. Katagiri. You must have had some awful nightmares. I heard you yelling, ‘Frog! Hey, Frog!’ You did it a lot. You have a friend nicknamed ‘Frog’?”

Katagiri closed his eyes and listened to the slow, rhythmic beating of his heart as it ticked off the minutes of his life. How much of what he remembered had actually happened, and how much was hallucination? Did Frog really exist, and had Frog fought with Worm to put a stop to the earthquake? Or had that just been part of a long dream? Katagiri had no idea what was true anymore.

Frog came to his hospital room that night. Katagiri awoke to find him in the dim light, sitting on a steel folding chair, his back against the wall. Frog’s big, bulging green eyelids were closed in a straight slit.

“Frog!” Katagiri called out to him.

Frog slowly opened his eyes. His big white stomach swelled and shrank with his breathing.

“I meant to meet you in the boiler room at night the way I promised,” Katagiri said, “but I had an accident in the evening— something totally unexpected—and they brought me here.”

Frog gave his head a slight shake. “I know. It’s OK. Don’t worry. You were a great help to me in my fight, Mr. Katagiri.”

“I was?”

“Yes, you were. You did a great job in your dreams. That’s what made it possible for me to fight Worm to the finish. I have you to thank for my victory.”

“I don’t get it,” Katagiri said. “I was unconscious the whole time. They were feeding me intravenously. I don’t remember doing anything in my dreams.”

“That’s fine, Mr. Katagiri. It’s better that you don’t remember. The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats. Each and every one of us is a being of limited duration: all of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose. You and I together, Mr. Katagiri, were able to prevent the annihilation of Tokyo. We saved a hundred and fifty thousand people from the jaws of death. No one realizes it, but that is what we accomplished.”

“How did you manage to defeat Worm? And what did I do?”

“We gave everything we had in a fight to the bitter end. We—” Frog snapped his mouth shut and took one great breath, “—we used every weapon we could get our hands on, Mr. Katagiri. We used all the courage we could muster. Darkness was our enemy’s ally. You brought in a foot-powered generator and used every ounce of your strength to fill the place with light. Worm tried to frighten you away with phantoms of the darkness, but you stood your ground. Darkness vied with light in a horrific battle, and in the light I grappled with the monstrous Worm. He coiled himself around me, and bathed me in his horrid slime. I tore him to shreds, but still he refused to die. All he did was divide into smaller pieces. And then—”

Frog fell silent, but soon, as if dredging up his last ounce of strength, he began to speak again. “Fyodor Dostoevsky, with unparalleled tenderness, depicted those who have been forsaken by God. He discovered the precious quality of human existence in the ghastly paradox whereby men who had invented God were forsaken by that very God. Fighting with Worm in the darkness, I found myself thinking of Dostoevsky’s ‘White Nights.’ I…” Frog’s words seemed to founder. “Mr. Katagiri, do you mind if I take a brief nap? I am utterly exhausted.”

“Please,” Katagiri said. “Take a good, deep sleep.”

“I was finally unable to defeat Worm,” Frog said, closing his eyes. “I did manage to stop the earthquake, but I was only able to carry our battle to a draw. I inflicted injury on him, and he on me. But to tell you the truth, Mr. Katagiri…”

“What is it, Frog?”

“I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog.”

“Hmm, I don’t get that at all.”

“Neither do I,” Frog said, his eyes still closed. “It’s just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me. Inside me is the un-me. My brain is growing muddy. The locomotive is coming. But I really want you to understand what I’m saying, Mr. Katagiri.”

“You’re tired, Frog. Go to sleep. You’ll get better.”

“I am slowly, slowly returning to the mud, Mr. Katagiri. And yet… I…”