Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

I studied his face again. But I had no memory of it.

“Your younger sister?”

“Sayoko,” he said. “I think you guys were in the same class in high school.”

My eyes came to rest on a small tomato-sauce stain on the front of his cream-colored sweater. He was neatly dressed, and that one tiny stain struck me as out of place. And then it hit me—the twenty-one-year old brother with sleepy eyes and a loose-necked navy-blue sweater sprinkled with bread crumbs. Old habits die hard. Those kinds of inclinations, or habits, don’t seem to ever change.

“I remember now,” I said. “You’re Sayoko’s older brother. We met one time at your home, didn’t we?”

“Right you are. You read Akutagawa’s ‘Spinning Gears’ to me.”

I laughed. “But I’m surprised you could pick me out in this crowd. We only met once, and it was so long ago.”

“I’m not sure why, but I never forget a face. Plus, you don’t seem to have changed at all.”

“But you’ve changed quite a lot,” I said. “You look so different now.”

“Well—a lot of water under the bridge,” he said, smiling. “As you know, things were pretty complicated for me for a while.”

“How is Sayoko doing?” I asked.

He cast a troubled look to one side, breathed in slowly, then exhaled. As if measuring the density of the air around him.

“Instead of standing here in the street, why don’t we go somewhere where we can sit down and talk? If you’re not busy, that is,” he said.

“I have nothing pressing,” I told him.

“SAYOKO PASSED AWAY,” he said quietly. We were in a nearby coffee shop, seated across a plastic table from each other.

“Passed away?”

“She died. Three years ago.”

I was speechless. I felt as if my tongue were swelling up inside my mouth. I tried to swallow the saliva that had built up, but couldn’t.

The last time I’d seen Sayoko she was twenty and had just gotten her driver’s license, and she drove the two of us to the top of Mt. Rokko, in Kobe, in a white Toyota Crown hardtop that belonged to her father. Her driving was still a bit awkward, but she looked elated as she drove. Predictably, the radio was playing a Beatles song. I remember it well. “Hello, Goodbye.” You say goodbye, and I say hello. As I said before, their music was everywhere then, surrounding us like wallpaper.

I couldn’t grasp the fact that she’d died and no longer existed in this world. I’m not sure how to put it—it seemed so surreal.

“How did she… die?” I asked, my mouth dry.

“She committed suicide,” he said, as if carefully picking his words. “When she was twenty-six she married a colleague at the insurance company she worked at, then had two children, then took her life. She was just thirty-two.”

“She left behind children?”

My former girlfriend’s brother nodded. “The older one is a boy, the younger a girl. Her husband’s taking care of them. I visit them every once in a while. Great kids.”

I still had trouble following the reality of it all. My former girlfriend had killed herself, leaving behind two small children?

“Why did she do it?”

He shook his head. “Nobody knows why. She didn’t act like she was troubled or depressed. Her health was good, things seemed good between her and her husband, and she loved her kids. And she didn’t leave behind a note or anything. Her doctor had prescribed sleeping pills, and she saved them up and took them all at once. So it does seem as though she was planning to kill herself. She wanted to die, and for six months she stashed away the medicine bit by bit. It wasn’t just a sudden impulse.”

I was silent for quite a while. And so was he. Each of us lost in our own thoughts.

On that day, in a café at the top of Mt. Rokko, my girlfriend and I broke up. I was going to a college in Tokyo and had fallen in love with a girl there. I came right out and confessed all this, and she, saying barely a word, grabbed her handbag, stood up, and hurried out of the café, without so much as a glance back.

I had to take the cable car down the mountain alone. She must have driven that white Toyota Crown home. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and I remember I could see all of Kobe through the window of the gondola. It was an amazing view. But this was no longer the city I used to know so well.

That was the last time I ever saw Sayoko. She went on to college, got a job at a major insurance company, married one of her colleagues, had two children, saved up sleeping pills, and took her own life.

I would have broken up with her sooner or later. But, still, I have very fond memories of the years we spent together. She was my first girlfriend, and I liked her a lot. She was the person who taught me about the female body. We experienced all sorts of new things together, and shared some wonderful times, the kind that are possible only when you’re in your teens.

It’s hard for me to say this now, but she never rang that special bell inside my ears. I listened as hard as I could, but never once did it ring. Sadly. The girl I knew in Tokyo was the one who did it for me. This isn’t something you can choose freely, according to logic or morality. Either it happens or it doesn’t. When it does, it happens of its own accord, in your consciousness or in a spot deep in your soul.

“You know,” my former girlfriend’s brother said, “it never crossed my mind, not once, that Sayoko would commit suicide. Even if everybody in the whole world had killed themselves, I figured—wrongly, it turns out—she’d still be standing, alive and well. I couldn’t see her as the type to be disillusioned or have some darkness hidden away inside. Honestly, I thought she was a bit shallow. I never paid much attention to her, and the same was true for her when it came to me, I think. Maybe we just weren’t on the same wavelength… Actually, I got along better with my other sister. But now I feel as though I did something awful to Sayoko, and it pains me. Maybe I never really knew her. Never understood a thing about her. Maybe I was too preoccupied with my own life. Perhaps somebody like me didn’t have the strength to save her life, but I should have been able to understand something about her, even if it wasn’t much. Whatever it was that led her to die. It’s hard to bear now. I was so arrogant, so self-centered, and it hurts so much I can’t stand it.”

There was nothing I could say. I probably hadn’t understood her at all, either. Like him, I’d been too preoccupied with my own life.

My former girlfriend’s brother said, “In that story you read me back then, Akutagawa’s ‘Spinning Gears,’ there was a part about how a pilot breathes in the air way up in the sky and then can’t stand breathing the air back here on earth anymore… ‘Airplane disease,’ they called it. I don’t know if that’s a real disease or not, but I still remember those lines.”

“Did you get over that condition where your memory flies away sometimes?” I asked him. I think I wanted to change the subject away from Sayoko.

“Oh, right. That,” he said, narrowing his eyes a bit. “It’s kind of weird, but that just spontaneously went away. It’s a genetic disorder and it should have gotten worse over time, the doctor said, but it just up and vanished, as if I’d never had it. As if an evil spirit had been expelled.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. And I really was.

“It happened not long after that time I met you. After that, I never experienced that kind of memory loss, not even once. I felt calmer, I was able to enter a halfway-decent college, graduate, and then take over my dad’s business. Things took a detour for a few years there, but now I’m just living an ordinary life.”