Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

He paused, then went on: “In other words, it’s a condition where the sequence of your memory gets messed up. One part of your memory—like the example I gave of part of a Mozart symphony—gets stashed away in the wrong drawer. And it’s next to impossible, or actually impossible, to ever find it again. That’s how they explained it to me. It’s not the kind of terrible disorder that can be fatal, or where you gradually lose your mind. But it does cause problems in daily life. They told me the name of the disorder and gave me some medication to take, but the pills don’t do a thing. They’re just a placebo.”

For a moment, my girlfriend’s brother was silent, studying me closely to see whether I understood. It was as if he were outside a house staring in through a window.

“I have these episodes once or twice a year now,” he finally said. “Not so often, but the frequency isn’t the issue. When it happens it causes real problems. Even if it’s only seldom, it’s pretty awful having that kind of memory loss and not knowing when it’ll happen. You get that, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I said vaguely. It was all I could do to follow his odd, rapid-fire story.

“Like, say it happens to me, my memory suddenly cuts out, and during that lapse I take a huge hammer and bash somebody’s head in, somebody I don’t like. No way you can just write that off by saying, ‘Well, now, that’s awkward.’ Am I right?”

“I’d say so.”

“The cops’ll get involved and if I tell them, ‘The thing is, my memory flew away,’ they’re not going to buy that, now, are they?”

I shook my head.

“There are actually a couple of people I don’t like at all. Guys who really piss me off. My dad’s one of them. But when I’m lucid I’m not about to bash my dad on the head with a hammer, am I? I’m able to control myself. But when my memory cuts out, I have no clue what I’m doing.”

I inclined my head a fraction, withholding any opinion.

“The doctor said there’s no danger of that happening. It’s not like, while my memory’s gone, somebody hijacks my personality. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’m always myself. Even when my memory cuts out, I act like I usually do. It’s just that the recorded part skips from the middle of the second movement to the middle of the third. So it’s impossible that during that interval I take out a hammer and smash somebody’s head. I’m always able to control who I am, and act normally for the most part. Mozart doesn’t suddenly transform into Stravinsky. Mozart remains Mozart—it’s just that one part disappears into a drawer somewhere.”

He clammed up at this point and took a sip from his biplane coffee cup. I was wishing I could have some coffee myself.

“At least, that’s what the doctor told me. But you gotta take what doctors tell you with a grain of salt. When I was in high school it scared the crap out of me, thinking I might, when I didn’t know what I was doing, bash one of my classmates on the head with a hammer. I mean, when you’re in high school you still don’t know who you are, right? It’s like you’re living in some pipe underground. Add the pain of memory loss to that and you can’t stand it.”

I nodded silently. He might be right.

“I pretty much stopped going to school because of all that,” my girlfriend’s brother went on. “The more I thought about it, the more frightened I got, and I couldn’t bring myself to go to school. My mom explained the situation to my teacher, and even though I had way too many absences, they made an exception for me and let me graduate. I imagine the school wanted to get rid of a problem student like me as soon as it could. But I didn’t go on to college. My grades weren’t so bad, and I could have gotten into some kind of college, but I didn’t have the confidence to go out. Ever since then, I’ve been loafing around at home. I take the dog for a walk, but otherwise I hardly ever leave the house. These days I don’t feel as panicky, or whatever. If things calm down a little more, I think maybe I’ll start going to college.”

He was silent then, and so was I. I had no idea what to say. I understood now why my girlfriend never wanted to talk about her brother.

“Thank you for reading that story to me,” he said. “ ‘Spinning Gears’ is pretty good. A dark story, for sure, but some of the writing really got to me. You sure you don’t want any coffee? It’ll just take a minute.”

“No, I’m fine, really. I’d better be going soon.”

He glanced again at the clock on the wall. “Why don’t you wait till twelve-thirty, and if nobody’s back by then you can leave. I’ll be in my room upstairs, so you can see yourself out. No need to worry about me.”

I nodded.

“Is it interesting, going out with Sayoko?” my girlfriend’s brother asked me one more time.

I nodded. “It’s interesting.”

“What part?”

“How there’s so much about her I don’t know,” I replied. A very honest answer, I think.

“Hmm,” he said, mulling it over. “Now that you mention it, I can see that. She’s my kid sister, blood related, the same genes and all, and we’ve been living together under the same roof since she was born, but there are still tons of things I don’t understand about her. I don’t get her—how should I put it? What makes her tick? So I’d like it if you could understand those things for me. Though there may be things it’s best not to try to figure out.”

Coffee cup in hand, he rose from the armchair.

“Anyway, give it your best shot,” my girlfriend’s brother said. He fluttered his free hand at me and left the room.

“Thanks,” I said.

At twelve-thirty, there was still no sign of anyone returning, so I went alone to the front door, slipped on my sneakers, and left. I walked past the pine forest to the station, jumped on the train, and went home. It was an oddly still and quiet Sunday autumn afternoon.

I got a call from my girlfriend after two p.m. “You were supposed to come next Sunday,” she said. I wasn’t totally convinced, but she was so clear about it that she was probably right. I must have messed up the days. I meekly apologized for going to her place a whole week early.

I didn’t mention that while I was waiting for her to come home her brother and I had a conversation—maybe conversation wasn’t the right word, since I basically just listened to him. I figured it was probably best not to say that I’d read Ryuˉnosuke Akutagawa’s “Spinning Gears” to him, and that he had revealed to me that he had an illness with memory lapses. I had a kind of hunch, too, that he hadn’t told my girlfriend anything about it. And if he hadn’t, there wasn’t any reason for me to.

Eighteen years later, I met her brother again. It was the middle of October. I was thirty-five then, living in Tokyo with my wife. After I graduated from college in Tokyo, I settled there. My work kept me busy, and I hardly ever went back to Kobe.

It was late afternoon, and I was walking up a hill in Shibuya to pick up a watch that was being repaired. I was heading along, lost in thought, when a man I’d passed turned and called out to me.

“Excuse me,” he said. He had an unmistakable Kansai intonation. I stopped, turned around, and saw a man I didn’t recognize. He looked a little older than me, and a tad taller. He had on a thick gray tweed jacket, a crew-neck, cream-colored cashmere sweater, and brown chinos. His hair was short, and he had the taut build of an athlete and a deep tan (a golf tan, it looked like). His features were unrefined, yet still attractive. Handsome, I suppose. I got the sense that this was a man who was pleased with his life. A well-bred person, was my guess.

“I don’t recall your name, but weren’t you my younger sister’s boyfriend for a while?” he said.