Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

I don’t imagine there are many cases like this. First of all, there aren’t that many ugly women who realize they’re ugly, and those who do go on to take some pleasure in their ugliness are certainly a minuscule fraction. In that sense, I think she was unique . And it was that very uniqueness that drew people to her. Like a magnet attracts all sorts of metal to itself—some useful, some worthless.

TALKING ABOUT ugliness also means talking about beauty.

I know a few beautiful women, the kind that anyone would find lovely and charming. But to me those beautiful women, the majority of them at least, never seem able to truly, unconditionally, derive pleasure in being gorgeous. Kind of strange, I think. Women who are born beautiful are always the center of men’s attention. Other women are jealous of them and they get coddled no end. People give them expensive presents, and they have their pick of men. So why don’t they seem happier? Why do they sometimes even seem depressed?

What I’ve observed is that most of the beautiful women I know are dissatisfied, and irritated by tiny, inconsequential flaws—the kind inevitably found somewhere in any person’s physical makeup. They obsess over these little details. Their big toes are too big, or their nails are weirdly off center, or their nipples aren’t the same size. One gorgeous woman I know is convinced that her earlobes are too long, and always wears her hair long to hide them. I couldn’t care less about the length of someone’s earlobes (she showed me hers once and they struck me as perfectly normal). Maybe, though, all this stuff about earlobes was just a substitute, a way of expressing something else.

Compared to these women, isn’t a woman who is not beautiful—who is even considered to be ugly—and yet enjoys that fact, a far happier person? No matter how beautiful a woman might be, she always has imperfections, and likewise no matter how ugly a woman might be, there’s always a part of her that is beautiful. And they seem to freely revel in that part of themselves, unlike beautiful women. It’s not a substitute for anything, or a metaphor.

This might sound like a banal opinion, but the world can turn upside down, depending on the way we look at it. The way a ray of sunshine falls on something can change shadow to light, or light to shadow. A positive becomes a negative, a negative a positive. I don’t know if this is an essential part of the way the world works, or simply an optical illusion. But it’s in that way that F* was a sort of trickster with light.

A FRIEND OF MINE first introduced me to her. I was just past fifty then, and she was about ten years younger. But for her, age didn’t matter. Her looks surpassed any other personal factors. Age, height, the shape and size of one’s breasts, let alone the shape of big toenails or the length of one’s earlobes, all took a back seat to her spectacular lack of beauty.

I was at a concert in Suntory Hall when I ran across a male friend of mine having a glass of wine with F* during intermission. One of Mahler’s symphonies was on the program that evening (I forget which one). The first half of the program featured Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet . My friend introduced me to F* and the three of us had some wine and talked about Prokofiev’s music. All of us had come alone to the concert and my friend just happened to run across her there too. People who go to concerts by themselves always share a sense of solidarity, albeit a small one.

Naturally, when I met F* my first thought was that this was one singularly ugly woman. She was so friendly and straightforward, though, that I was embarrassed by my initial reaction. I’m not sure how to put it exactly, but as we chatted, I grew accustomed to her looks. They no longer seemed to matter. She was a pleasant person, and a good talker, able to converse widely. Add to this a quick mind, and good taste in music. When the buzzer sounded ending the intermission, and then when we said goodbye, I thought if only she were good-looking, or at least if her looks were a little better , she’d be a very appealing woman.

But later on, I learned the hard way how shallow and superficial my thinking had been. It was precisely because of her unusual looks that she was able to effectively engage her powerful personality—her power to draw people in, you might put it. What I mean is, it was precisely the gap between her physical appearance and her refinement that created her own special brand of dynamism. And she was fully aware of that power, and was able to use it as needed.

It’s next to impossible for me to describe exactly what it was about her looks that was so unappealing. No matter how I try to describe her, I’ll never be able to convey to the reader the idiosyncrasies of her appearance. One thing I can say for sure, though, is this: you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint any functional imperfections. So it wasn’t like—this part’s weird, or fix this part and she’d look a bit better. Yet combine them all and you wound up with an organically comprehensive ugliness. (It’s an odd comparison, but the process reminds me of the birth of Venus.) And it’s impossible for words or logic to explain that composite. Even supposing I could, it wouldn’t mean much anyway. What we have there is a choice between two alternatives, and only two—we either wholly accept it, unconditionally, as something that is what it is , or we completely reject it. Like a take-no-prisoners type of war.

In the opening of Anna Karenina , Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and I think the same applies to women’s faces in terms of beauty or ugliness. I believe (and please take this for what it is, just my personal view) that beautiful woman can be summed up by simply being “beautiful.” Each one of them is carrying around a single beautiful, golden-haired monkey on her back. There might be a slight difference in the luster and shade of their fur, but the brilliance they share makes them all seem one and the same.

In contrast, ugly women each carry around their own individual version of a shaggy monkey. There are small, but significant, differences in their monkeys—how worn their fur is, where their fur has thinned out, how dirty they are. There’s no brilliance at all, so unlike the golden-haired monkeys, our eyes are not dazzled by them.

The monkey that F* carried around on her back had a variety of expressions, and its fur—though never sparkling or shining—was a composite of several colors simultaneously. One’s impression of that monkey changed drastically depending on the angle you viewed it from, as well as by the weather, the wind, direction, the time of day. To put it another way, the ugliness of her features was the result of a unique force that compressed unattractive elements of all shapes and sizes and assembled them together in one place. And her monkey had quietly settled down, very comfortably, and unhesitantly, on her back, as if every possible cause and effect had embraced at the very center of the world.

I was aware of all this, to some extent, the second time I met F*, though certainly still unable to articulate it. I knew it would take some time to understand her ugliness, and doing so would require intuition, philosophy, morality, and a bit of real-life experience. And that spending time with her would, at a certain point, lead to a sort of feeling of pride. It was pride at the fact that we’d somehow managed to grab hold of the requisite intuition, philosophy, morality, and life experience.

THE SECOND TIME I saw her was also at a concert hall, a smaller venue than Suntory Hall. It was a concert by a French female violinist. As I recall, she played sonatas by Franck and Debussy. She was an amazing musician, and these pieces were part of her favorite repertoire, but on that particular day she wasn’t at her best. The two pieces by Kreisler she played for an encore, though, were quite charming.