Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

“Do I have to read them here?”

“Please take them home and read them. If you don’t want to read them, then do whatever you want with them.”

She nodded. She put the letters in her bag, which she fastened with a snap of the clasp. I lit up a second cigarette and ordered another whiskey. The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It’s just something to pour into your stomach.

“You came all the way from Tokyo for this reason?” she asked.

“Pretty much so.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I’ve never thought about it that way. A matter of habit. If the tables were turned, I’m sure he’d do the same for me.”

“Have you ever asked something like this of him?”

I shook my head. “No, but we go back a long time imposing our unrealities on each other. Whether we’ve managed to take care of things realistically or not is another question.”

“Maybe nobody really can.”

“Maybe not.”

She smiled and got up, whisking away the bill. “Let me take care of this. I was forty minutes late, after all.”

“If you’re sure, then by all means,” I said. “But one more thing, I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”

“Certainly.”

“Over the phone you said you could picture how I looked.”

“I meant there was something I could sense about you.”

“And that was enough for you to spot me right away?”

“I could tell in no time at all.”

The rain kept falling at the same rate. From my hotel window, through the neon signs of the building next door, a hundred thousand strands of rain sped earthward through a green glow. If I looked down, the rain seemed to pour straight into one fixed point on the ground.

I plopped down on the bed and smoked a couple cigarettes, then called the front desk to make a reservation for a train the following morning. There was nothing left for me to do in town.

The rain kept falling until midnight.

The black-suited secretary took his chair and looked at me without saying a word. He didn’t seem to be sizing me up, nor did his eyes betray any disdain, nor was his a pointed stare to bore right through me. Neither cool nor hot, not even in the mid-range. That gaze held no hint of any emotion known to me. The man was simply looking at me. He might have been looking at the wall behind me, but as I was situated in front of it, the end result was that the man was looking at me.

The man picked up the cigarette case from the table, opened the lid and withdrew a plain-cut cigarette, flicked the tip a few times with his fingernail, lit up with the tabletop lighter, and blew out the smoke at an oblique angle. Then he returned the lighter to the table and crossed his legs. His gaze did not waver one blink the whole time.

This was the same man my partner had told me about. He was overdressed, his fingers overly graceful. If not for the sharp curve of his eyelids and the glass-bead chill of his pupils, I would surely have thought him homosexual. Not with those eyes, though. So what did he look like? He didn’t resemble any sort, anything.

If you took a good look at his eyes, they were an arresting color. Dark brown with the faintest touch of blue, the hue of the left eye, moreover, different from the right. Each seemed to focus on a wholly different subject.

His fingers pursued scant movements on his lap. Hauntingly, as if separated from his hand, they moved toward me. Tense, compelling, nerve-racking, beautiful fingers. Slowly reaching across the table to crush out the cigarette not one-third smoked. I watched the ice melt in the glass, clear ice water mixing with the grape juice. An unequally variegated mix.

The room was utterly silent. Now there is the silence you encounter on entering a grand manor. And there is the silence that comes of too few people in too big a space. But this was a different quality of silence altogether. A ponderous, oppressive silence. A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient. A silence pregnant with the presentiment of death. The air faintly musty and ominous.

“Everyone dies,” said the man softly with downcast eyes. He seemed to have an uncanny purchase on the drift of my thoughts. “All of us, whosoever, must die sometime.”

Having said that, the man fell again into a weighty silence. There was only the frantic buzzing of the cicadas outdoors. Bodies scraping out their last dying fury against the ending season.

“Let me be as frank as possible with you,” the man spoke up. His speech had the ring of a direct translation from a formulaic text. His choice of phrase and grammar was correct enough, but there was no feeling in his words.

“Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously. Therefore, should I impart you with no truth at this juncture, that is through no fault of mine. Nor yours.”

How was one to respond to this? He acknowledged my silence and continued to speak.

“You’re probably wondering why I called you all this way here. It was to set the ship in forward motion. You and I shall move it forward. By discussing matters in all honesty, we shall proceed one step at a time closer to the truth.” At that point, he coughed and glanced over at his hand resting on the arm of the sofa. “But enough of these abstractions, let us begin with real concerns. The issue here is the newsletter you produced. I believe you have been told this much.”

“I have.”

The man nodded. Then after a moment’s pause, continued, “I’m sure all this came as quite a surprise to you. Anyone would be unhappy about having the product of his hard labors destroyed. All the more if it’s a vital link in his livelihood. It may mean a very real loss of no mean size. Isn’t that right?”

“That it is,” I said.

“I would like to have you tell me about such real losses.”

“In our line of work, real losses are part of business. It’s not like clients never suddenly reject what’s been produced. But for a small operation like ours, it can be a threat to our existence. So in order to prevent that, we honor the client’s views one hundred percent. In extreme cases, this means checking through an entire bulletin line by line together with the client. That way we avoid all risks. It’s not easy work, but that’s the lot of the lone wolf.”

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” sympathized the man. “Be that as it may, am I to interpret from what you say that your company has incurred a severe financial setback as a result of the cessation of your bulletin?”

“Yes, I guess you could say that. It was already printed and bound, so we have to pay for the paper and printing within the month. There’re also writers’ fees for articles we farmed out. In monetary terms that comes to about five million yen, and we had planned to use it to pay off our debt. We borrowed money to invest in our facilities a year ago.”

“I know,” said the man.

“Then there is the question of our ongoing contract with the client. Our position is very weak, and once there’s been trouble with an advertising agency, clients avoid you. We were under a one-year contract with the life insurance company, and if that’s scrapped because of this, then effectively our company is sunk. We’re small and without connections, but we’ve got a good reputation that’s spread by word of mouth. If one bad word gets out, we’re done for.”