Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

Incidentally, several years later—1968, as I recall, around the same time that Robert Kennedy was assassinated—the man who had been our homeroom teacher when we were in the same class hanged himself from the lintel in his house. He’d taught social studies. An ideological impasse was said to be the cause of his suicide.

An ideological impasse?

But it’s true—in the late sixties people sometimes took their own lives because they’d hit a wall, ideologically. Though not all that often.

I get a really strange feeling when I think that on that afternoon, as my girlfriend and I were clumsily making out on the sofa, with Percy Faith’s pretty music in the background, that social studies teacher was, step by step, heading toward his fatal ideological dead end, or, to put it another way, toward that silent, tight knot in the rope. I even feel bad about it sometimes. Among all the teachers I knew, he was one of the best. Whether he was successful or not is another question, but he always tried to treat his students fairly. I never spoke to him outside of class, but that was how I remembered him.

Like 1964, 1965 was the year of the Beatles. They released “Eight Days a Week” in February, “Ticket to Ride” in April, “Help!” in July, and “Yesterday” in September—all of which topped the U.S. charts. It seemed as if we were hearing their music almost all the time. It was everywhere, surrounding us, like wallpaper meticulously applied to every single inch of the walls.

When the Beatles’ music wasn’t playing, it was the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” or the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” or “My Girl” by the Temptations, or the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” or the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda.” Diana Ross and the Supremes also had one hit after another. A constant soundtrack of this kind of wonderful, joyful music filtered out through my little Panasonic transistor radio. It was truly an astounding year for pop music, one that took your breath away.

I’ve heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.

My girlfriend’s house was near the Kobe radio station that I always tuned in to. I think her father imported, or perhaps exported, medical equipment. I don’t know the details. At any rate, he owned his own company, which seemed to be doing well. Their home was in a pine grove near the sea. I heard that it used to be the summer villa of some businessman and that her family had bought and remodeled it. The pine trees rustled in the sea breeze. It was the perfect place to listen to “Theme from A Summer Place .”

YEARS LATER, I happened to see a late-night TV broadcast of the 1959 movie A Summer Place . It starred Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, and was a typical Hollywood film about young love, but nevertheless it held together well. Percy Faith had a hit with a cover version of the Max Steiner theme song of the same title. In the movie, there is a pine grove by the sea, which sways in the summer breeze in time to the horn section. That scene of the pine trees swaying in the wind struck me as a metaphor for the young people’s raging sexual desire. But that may just have been my take on it, my own biased view.

In the movie, Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee are swept up in that kind of overpowering sexual wind and, because of it, encounter all kinds of real-world problems. Misunderstandings are followed by reconciliations, obstacles are cleared up like fog lifting, and in the end the two come together and are married. In Hollywood in the fifties, a happy ending always involved marriage—the creation of an environment in which lovers could have sex legally. My girlfriend and I, of course, didn’t get married. We were still in high school, and all we did was clumsily grope and make out on the sofa with “Theme from A Summer Place ” playing in the background.

“You know something?” she said to me on the sofa, in a small voice, as if she were making a confession. “I’m the really jealous type.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“I wanted to make sure you knew that.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes it hurts a lot to be so jealous.”

I silently stroked her hair. It was beyond me at the time to imagine how burning jealousy felt, what caused it, what it led to. I was too preoccupied with my own emotions.

As a side note, Troy Donahue, that handsome young star, later got caught up in alcohol and drugs, stopped making movies, and was even homeless for a time. Sandra Dee, too, struggled with alcoholism. Donahue married the popular actress Suzanne Pleshette in 1964, but they divorced eight months later. Dee married the singer Bobby Darin in 1960, but they divorced in 1967. This is obviously totally unrelated to the plot of A Summer Place . And unrelated to my and my girlfriend’s fate.

My girlfriend had an older brother and a younger sister. The younger sister was in her second year of junior high but was a good two inches taller than her older sister. She wasn’t particularly cute. Plus, she wore thick glasses. But my girlfriend was very fond of her kid sister. “Her grades in school are really good,” she told me. I think my girlfriend’s grades, by the way, were only fair to middling. Like my own, most likely.

One time, we let her younger sister tag along with us to the movies. There was some reason that we had to. The film was The Sound of Music . The theater was packed, so we had to sit near the front, and I remember that watching that 70 mm wide-screen film so close up made my eyes ache by the end. My girlfriend, though, was crazy about the songs in the film. She bought the soundtrack LP and listened to it endlessly. Me, I was much more into John Coltrane’s magical version of “My Favorite Things,” but I figured that bringing that up with her was pointless, so I never did.

Her younger sister didn’t seem to like me much. Whenever we saw each other she looked at me with strange eyes, totally devoid of emotion—as if she were judging whether some dried fish at the back of the fridge was still edible or not. And, for some reason, that look always left me feeling guilty. When she looked at me, it was as though she were ignoring the outside (granted, it wasn’t much to look at anyway) and could see right through me, down to the depths of my being. I may have felt that way because I really did have shame and guilt in my heart.

My girlfriend’s brother was four years older than she was, so he would have been at least twenty then. She didn’t introduce him to me and hardly ever mentioned him. If he happened to come up in conversation, she deftly changed the subject. I can see now that her attitude was a bit unnatural. Not that I thought much about it. I wasn’t that interested in her family. What drew me to her was something very different, a much more urgent impulse.

The first time I met her brother and spoke with him was toward the end of autumn in 1965.

That Sunday, I went to my girlfriend’s house to pick her up. We went on dates pretending we were going to the library to study, so I always put various study-related items in my shoulder bag to keep up the facade. Like a novice criminal making up a flimsy alibi.

I rang the bell over and over, but no one answered. I paused for a while, then rang it again, repeatedly, until I finally heard someone moving slowly toward the door. It was my girlfriend’s older brother.

He was a shade taller than me and a bit on the hefty side. Not flabby, but more like an athlete who, for some reason, can’t exercise for a while and packs on a few extra pounds, just temporary fat. He had broad shoulders but a relatively long, thin neck. His hair was disheveled, sticking out all over the place, as if he’d just woken up. It looked stiff and coarse, and he seemed about two weeks overdue for a haircut. He had on a crew-neck navy-blue sweater, the neck loose, and gray sweats that were baggy around the knees. His look was the complete opposite of my girlfriend’s—she was always neat and clean and well groomed.