Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

“You really don’t want any coffee?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No. I’m fine. Really.”

His sweater was festooned with bread crumbs. The knees of his sweats, too. He had probably been starving and had gobbled down the toast without caring about crumbs going everywhere. I could imagine that bugging my girlfriend, since she always looked so neat and tidy. I liked to be neat and tidy myself, a shared quality that was part of why we got along, I think.

Her brother glanced up at the wall. There was a clock on this wall. The hands of the clock showed nearly 11:30.

“SHE ISN’T BACK YET, is she? Where the heck could she have gone off to?”

I said nothing in response.

“What’re you reading?”

“A supplementary reader for our Japanese textbook.”

“Hmm,” he said, frowning slightly. “Is it interesting?”

“Not particularly. I just don’t have anything else to read.”

“Could you show it to me?”

I passed him the book over the low table. Coffee cup in his left hand, he took the book with his right. I was worried that he’d spill coffee on it. That seemed about to happen. But he didn’t spill. He put his cup down on the glass tabletop with a clink, and he held the book in both hands and starting flipping through.

“So what part were you reading?”

“Just now I was reading Akutagawa’s story ‘Spinning Gears.’ There’s only part of the story there, not the whole thing.”

He gave this some thought. “ ‘Spinning Gears’ is one I’ve never read. Though I did read his story ‘Kappa’ a long time ago. Isn’t ‘Spinning Gears’ a pretty dark story?”

“It is. Since he wrote it right before he died.”

“Akutagawa committed suicide, didn’t he?”

“That’s right,” I said. Akutagawa overdosed when he was thirty-five. My supplementary reader’s notes said that “Spinning Gears” was published posthumously, in 1927. The story was almost a last will and testament.

“Hmm,” my girlfriend’s brother said. “D’ya think you could read it for me?”

I looked at him in surprise. “Read it aloud, you mean?”

“Yeah. I’ve always liked to have people read to me. I’m not such a great reader myself.”

“I’m not good at reading aloud.”

“I don’t mind. You don’t have to be good. Just read it in the right order, and that’ll be fine. I mean, it doesn’t look like we have anything else to do.”

“It’s a pretty neurotic, depressing story, though,” I said.

“Sometimes I like to hear that kind of story. Like, to fight evil with evil.”

He handed the book back, picked up the coffee cup with the picture of the biplane and its Iron Crosses, and took a sip. Then he sank back in his armchair and waited for the reading to begin.

That was how I ended up that Sunday reading part of Akutagawa’s “Spinning Gears” to my girlfriend’s eccentric older brother. I was a bit reluctant at first, but I warmed to the job. The supplementary reader had the two final sections of the story—“Red Lights” and “Airplane”—but I just read “Airplane.” It was about eight pages long, and it ended with the line “Won’t someone be good enough to strangle me as I sleep?” Akutagawa killed himself right after writing this line.

I finished reading, but still no one in the family had come home. The phone didn’t ring, and no crows cawed outside. It was perfectly still all around. The autumn sunlight lit up the living room through the lace curtains. Time alone made its slow, steady way forward. My girlfriend’s brother sat there, arms folded, eyes shut, as if savoring the final lines I’d read: “I don’t have the strength to go on writing. It is painful beyond words to keep living when I feel like this. Won’t someone be good enough to strangle me as I sleep?”

Whether you liked the writing or not, one thing was clear: this wasn’t the right story to read on a bright, clear Sunday. I closed the book and glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was just past twelve.

“There must have been some kind of misunderstanding,” I said. “I think I’ll be going.” I started to get up from the sofa. My mother had drummed it into me from childhood that you shouldn’t bother people at home when it was time to have a meal. For better or for worse, this had seeped into my being and become a reflexive habit.

“You’ve come all this way, so how about waiting another thirty minutes?” my girlfriend’s brother asked. “How about you wait another thirty minutes, and if she’s not back by then you can leave?”

His words were oddly distinct, and I sat back down and rested my hands in my lap again.

“You’re very good at reading aloud,” he said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Has anybody ever told you that?”

I shook my head.

“Unless you really grasp the content, you can’t read like you did. The last part was especially good.”

“Oh,” I answered vaguely. I felt my cheeks redden a bit. The praise seemed misdirected, and it made me uncomfortable. But the sense I was getting was that I was in for another thirty minutes of conversation with him. He seemed to need someone to talk to.

He placed his palms firmly together in front of him, as if praying, then suddenly came out with this: “This might sound like a weird question, but have you ever had your memory stop?”

“Stop?”

“What I’m talking about is, like, from one point in time to the next you can’t remember at all where you were, or what you were doing.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that.”

“So you remember the time sequence and details of what you’ve done?”

“If it’s something that happened recently, yes, I’d say so.”

“Hmm,” he said, and scratched the back of his head for a moment, and then spoke. “I suppose that’s normal.”

I waited for him to continue.

“Actually, I’ve had several times where my memory has just slipped away. Like at three p.m. my memory cuts out, and the next thing I know it’s seven p.m. And I can’t remember where I was, or what I was doing, during those four hours. And it’s not like something special happened to me. Like I got hit on the head or got sloppy drunk or anything. I’m just doing my usual thing and without warning my memory cuts out. I can’t predict when it’s going to happen. And I have no clue for how many hours, how many days, even, my memory will vanish.”

“I see,” I murmured, to let him know I was following along.

“Imagine you’ve recorded a Mozart symphony on a tape recorder. And when you play it back the sound jumps from the middle of the second movement to the middle of the third, and what should be in between has just vanished. That’s what it’s like. When I say ‘vanished,’ I don’t mean that there’s a silent section of tape. It’s just gone. Like the day after today is two days from now. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“I guess so,” I said in an uncertain tone.

“If it’s music, it’s kind of inconvenient, but no real harm, right? But, if it happens in your real life, then it’s a pain, believe me… You get what I mean?”

I nodded.

“You go to the dark side of the moon and come back empty-handed.”

I nodded again. I wasn’t sure I completely grasped the analogy.

“It’s caused by a genetic disorder, and clear-cut cases like mine are pretty rare. One person out of tens of thousands will have the disorder. And even then there’ll be differences among them, of course. In my last year of junior high, I was examined by a neurologist at the university hospital. My mom took me. The condition has a name, some annoyingly long term. I forgot it a long time ago. Makes me wonder who came up with a name like that.”