Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

At times it would remind me of a tiny shriveled palm tree; at other times, a giant ear of corn. In fact, if not for the plaque—WHALE GENITAL: MALE—no one would have taken it to be a whale’s penis. More likely an artifact unearthed from the Central Asian desert than a product of the Antarctic Ocean. It bore no resemblance to my penis, nor to any penis I’d ever seen. What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness.

It came back to me, that giant whale’s penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what tortuous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room? My heart ached, thinking about it. I felt as if I didn’t have a hope in the world. But I was only seventeen and clearly too young to give up on everything. It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since.

Which is, that I am not a whale.

In bed now with my new girlfriend, running my fingers through her hair, I thought about whales for the longest time.

In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn. The glass of the tanks is cold. I’m wearing a heavy sweater. Through the large picture window of the exhibition room, the sea is dark as lead, the countless whitecaps reminiscent of lace collars on girls’ dresses.

“What’re you thinking about?” she asked.

“Something long ago,” I said.

She was twenty-one, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots, and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.

Nonetheless, sizing up her essential attributes, I would have to say her natural gifts ran to ear modeling. She agreed. Which was well and good until you considered how extremely limited are the opportunities for a commercial ear model, how abysmal the status and pay. To your typical P.R. man or makeup artist or cameraman, she was just an “earholder,” someone with ears. Her mind and body, apart from the ears, were completely out of the picture, disregarded, nonexistent.

“But you know, that’s not the real me,” she’d say. “ Iam my ears, my ears are me.”

Neither her proofreader self nor her call girl self ever, not for one second, showed her ears to others.

“That’s because they’re not really me,” she explained.

The office of her call girl club, registered as a “talent club” for appearances, was located in Akasaka and run by a gray-haired Englishwoman whom everyone called Mrs. X. She’d been living in Japan for thirty years, spoke fluent Japanese, and read most of the basic Chinese characters.

Mrs. X had opened an English-language tutorial school for women not five hundred yards from the call girl office and used the place to scout promising faces for the latter. Conversely, several of the call girls were also going to her English school. At reduced tuition, of course.

Mrs. X called all her call girls “dear.” Soft as a spring afternoon, her “dears.”

“Make sure to wear frilly undies, dear. And no pantyhose.” Or “You take your tea with cream, don’t you, dear?” She had a firm understanding of her market. Her clientele were wealthy businessmen in their forties and fifties. Two-thirds foreigners, the rest Japanese. Mrs. X expressed a dislike for politicians, old men, perverts, and the poor.

A dozen long-stemmed beauties she kept on call, but out of the whole bouquet my new girlfriend was the least attractive bloom. As a call girl, she seemed no more than ordinary. In fact, with her ears hidden, she was plain. I couldn’t figure out how Mrs. X had singled her out. Maybe she’d detected in her plainness some special glimmer, or maybe she thought one plain girl would be an asset. Either way, Mrs. X’s sights had been right on target, and my girlfriend quickly had a number of regular customers. She wore ordinary clothes, ordinary makeup, ordinary underwear, and an ordinary scent as she’d head out to the Hilton or Okura or Prince to sleep with one or two men a week, thereby making enough to live on for a month.

Half the other nights she slept with me for free. The other half I have no idea how she spent.

Her life as a part-time proofreader for the publishing house was more normal. Three days a week she’d commute to Kanda, to the third floor of a small office building, and from nine to five she’d proofread, make tea, run downstairs (no elevator in the building) and buy erasers. She’d be the one sent out, not because anyone held anything against her, but because she was the only unmarried woman in the company. Like a chameleon, she would change with place and circumstance, able, at will, to summon or control that glimmer of hers.

I first became acquainted with her (or rather, her ears) right after I broke up with my wife. It was the beginning of August. I was doing a subcontracted copywriting job for a computer software company, which brought me face-to-face, so to speak, with her ears.

The director of the advertising firm placed a campaign proposal and three large black-and-white photos on my desk, telling me to prepare three head copy options for them within the week. All three photos were giant close-ups of an ear.

An ear?

“Why an ear?” I asked.

“Who knows? What’s the difference? An ear it is. You’ve got a week to think about ears.”

So for one whole week I ear-gazed. I taped the three giant ears to the wall in front of my desk, and all day, while smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, clipping my nails, I immersed myself in those ears.

The job I finished in a week, but the ear shots stayed taped up on my wall. Partly it was too much trouble to take them down, partly I’d grown accustomed to those ears. But the real reason I didn’t take the photos down was that those ears had me in their thrall. They were the dream image of an ear. The quintessence, the paragon of ears. Never had any enlarged part of the human body (genitals included, of course) held such strong attraction for me. They were like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in.

One astonishingly bold curve cut clear across the picture plane, others curled into delicate filigrees of subtle shadow, while still others traced, like an ancient mural, the legends of a past age. But the supple flesh of the earlobe surpassed them all, transcending all beauty and desire.

A few days later, I rang up the photographer for the name and number of those ears.

“What’s this now?” asked the photographer.

“Just curious, that’s all. They’re such striking ears.”

“Well, I guess as far as the ears go, okay, but the girl herself is nothing special. If it’s a young piece you want, I can introduce you to this bathing-suit model I shot the other day.”

I refused, took down the name and number of the ears, thanked him, and hung up.

Two o’clock, six o’clock, ten o’clock, I kept trying her number, but got no answer. Apparently she was going about her own life.

It was ten the next morning before I finally got ahold of her. I introduced myself briefly, then added that I had to talk to her about some business related to the advertisement and could she see clear to having dinner with me.

“But I was told the job was finished,” she said.

“The job is finished,” I said.

She seemed a bit taken aback, but didn’t inquire further. We set a date for the following evening.

I called for a reservation at the fanciest French restaurant I knew. On Aoyama Boulevard. Then I got out a brand-new shirt, took my time selecting a tie, and put on a jacket I’d only worn twice before.