Haruki Murakami - after the quake

“He found a boom box lying on the ground one day. He picked it up and brought it home.”

“How come all this stuff just happens to be lying around in the mountains?” Sala asked with a note of suspicion.

“Well, it’s a very, very steep mountain, and the hikers get all faint and dizzy, and they throw away tons of stuff they don’t need. Right there by the road, like, ‘Oh man, this pack is so heavy, I feel like I’m gonna die! I don’t need this bucket anymore. I don’t need this boom box anymore.’ Like that. So Masakichi finds everything he needs lying in the road.”

“Mommy knows just how they feel,” Sayoko said. “Sometimes you want to throw everything away.”

“Not me ,” Sala said.

“That’s ’cause you’re such a greedy little thing,” Sayoko said.

“I am not greedy,” Sala protested.

“No,” Junpei said, finding a gentler way to put it: “You’re just young and full of energy, Sala. Now hurry and drink your milk so I can tell you the rest of the story.”

“OK,” she said, wrapping her little hands around the glass and drinking the warm milk with great care. Then she asked, “How come Masakichi doesn’t make honey pies and sell them? I think the people in the town would like that better than just plain honey.”

“An excellent point,” Sayoko said with a smile. “Think of the profit margin!”

“Ah, yes, creating new markets through value added,” Junpei said. “This girl will be a real entrepreneur someday.”

It was almost two a.m. by the time Sala went back to bed. Junpei and Sayoko checked to make sure she was asleep, then shared a can of beer at the kitchen table. Sayoko wasn’t much of a drinker, and Junpei had to drive home.

“Sorry for dragging you out in the middle of the night,” she said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m totally exhausted, and you’re the only one who can calm her down. There was no way I was going to call Takatsuki.”

Junpei nodded, took a slug of beer, and ate one of the crackers on the plate between them.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m awake till the sun comes up, and the roads are empty this time of night. It’s no big deal.”

“You were working on a story?”

Junpei nodded.

“How’s it going?”

“Like always. I write ’em. They print ’em. Nobody reads ’em.”

“ I read them. All of them.”

“Thanks. You’re a nice person,” Junpei said. “But the short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule. Anyhow, let’s talk about Sala. Has she done this before?”

Sayoko nodded.

“A lot?”

“Almost every night. Sometime after midnight she gets these hysterical fits and jumps out of bed. She can’t stop shaking. And I can’t get her to stop crying. I’ve tried everything.”

“Any idea what’s wrong?”

Sayoko drank what was left of her beer, and stared at the empty glass.

“I think she saw too many news reports on the earthquake. It was too much for a four-year-old. She wakes up at around the time of the quake. She says a man woke her up, somebody she doesn’t know. The Earthquake Man. He tries to put her in a little box—way too little for anyone to fit into. She tells him she doesn’t want to get inside, but he starts yanking on her arm—so hard her joints crack—and he tries to stuff her inside. That’s when she screams and wakes up.”

“The Earthquake Man?”

“He’s tall and skinny and old. After she’s had the dream, she goes around turning on every light in the house and looks for him: in the closets, in the shoe cabinet in the front hall, under the beds, in all the dresser drawers. I tell her it was just a dream, but she won’t listen to me. And she won’t go to bed until she’s looked everywhere he could possibly hide. That takes at least two hours, by which time I’m wide awake. I’m so sleep-deprived I can hardly stand up, let alone work.”

Sayoko almost never spilled out her feelings like this.

“Try not to watch the news,” Junpei said. “Don’t even turn on the TV. The earthquake’s all they’re showing these days.”

“I almost never watch TV anymore. But it’s too late now. The Earthquake Man just keeps coming. I went to the doctor, but all he did was give me some kind of sleeping pill to humor me.”

Junpei thought for a while.

“How about we go to the zoo on Sunday? Sala says she wants to see a real bear.”

Sayoko narrowed her eyes and looked at him. “Maybe. It just might change her mood. Let’s do it—the four of us. It’s been ages. You call Takatsuki, OK?”

Junpei was thirty-six, born and bred in the city of Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, a quiet residential area in the Shukugawa district. His father owned a pair of jewelry stores, one in Osaka, one in Kobe. He had a sister six years his junior. After a time at a private high school in Kobe, he entered Waseda University in Tokyo. He had passed the entrance exams in both the business and the literature departments. He chose the literature department without the slightest hesitation and told his parents that he had entered the business department. They would never have paid for him to study literature, and Junpei had no intention of wasting four precious years studying the workings of the economy. All he wanted was to study literature, and then to become a novelist.

At the university, he made two friends, Takatsuki and Sayoko. Takatsuki came from the mountains of Nagano. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had been the captain of his high-school soccer team. It had taken him two years of studying to pass the entrance exam, so he was a year older than Junpei. Practical and decisive, he had the kind of looks that made people take to him right away, and he naturally assumed a leadership role in any group. But he had trouble reading books; he had entered the literature department because its exam was the only one he could pass. “What the hell,” he said in his positive way. “I’m going to be a newspaper reporter, so I’ll let them teach me how to write.”

Junpei did not understand why Takatsuki had any interest in befriending him. Junpei was the kind of person who liked to sit alone in his room reading books or listening to music, and he was terrible at sports. Awkward with strangers, he rarely made friends. Still, for whatever reason, Takatsuki seemed to have decided the first time he saw Junpei in class that he was going to make him a friend. He tapped Junpei on the shoulder and said, “Hey, let’s get something to eat.” And by the end of the day they had opened their hearts to each other.

Takatsuki had Junpei with him when he adopted the same approach with Sayoko. He tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hey, how about the three of us get something to eat?” And so their tight little group was born. Junpei, Takatsuki, and Sayoko did everything together. They shared lecture notes, ate lunch in the campus dining hall, talked about their future over coffee between classes, took part-time jobs at the same place, went to all-night movies and rock concerts and walked all over Tokyo, and drank so much beer they even got sick together. In other words, they behaved like first-year college students the world over.

Sayoko was a real Tokyo girl. She came from the old part of town where the merchant class had lived for centuries, and her father ran a shop selling the exquisite little accessories that went with traditional Japanese dress. The business had been in the family for several generations, and it attracted an exclusive clientele that included several famous Kabuki actors. Sayoko had two elder brothers. The first had been groomed to inherit the shop, and the second worked in architectural design. She had graduated from an exclusive girls’ prep school, entering the literature department of Waseda with plans to go on to graduate school in English Literature, and ultimately to an academic career. She read a lot, and she and Junpei were constantly exchanging novels and having intense conversations about them.