Харуки Мураками - First Person Singular - Stories

You’d think that a man seeing a woman ten years younger this frequently would cause some discord at home, but my wife didn’t worry about her at all. I won’t deny that F*’s unattractive looks played a major role in my wife’s disinterest. She didn’t have a bit of suspicion or doubt that F* and I might fall into a sexual relationship, a major benefit her looks afforded us. My wife just seemed to find us a pair of nerds. She wasn’t into classical music herself, as most concerts bored her. My wife dubbed F* “your girlfriend.” And sometimes, with a hint of sarcasm, “your lovely girlfriend.”

I never met F*’s husband. (She didn’t have any children). Maybe by coincidence, he was out whenever I visited her place, or else she specifically chose times he wouldn’t be there. Or maybe he was out most of the time. Which it was, I couldn’t say. While we’re on the subject, I couldn’t even tell for sure if she really had a husband. She never said a single thing about him, and as far as I recall, there wasn’t a trace of a man anywhere about the place. That said, she had announced that she had a husband, and wore a sparkling gold wedding ring on the ring finger of her left hand.

She also never said a word about her past. She never mentioned where she was from, what kind of family she had, which schools she went to, or what kind of jobs she’d had. If I asked her about personal things, all I got back was vague innuendo or a wordless smile. All I did know about her was that she worked in some specialized field and had quite an affluent lifestyle. She lived in the trendy Daikanyama neighborhood in Tokyo, in an elegant three-bedroom condo in a building surrounded by greenery, drove a brand-new BMW sedan, and had an expensive stereo system in her living room. It was a high-end Accuphase pre-main amp and CD player, with large, smart-looking Linn speakers. And she always dressed in attractive, neat outfits. I don’t know that much about women’s clothes, but even I could tell they were pricey, designer items.

When it came to music, she was eloquent. She had a sharp ear, and quickly chose the most precise way of describing what she’d heard. Her knowledge of music, too, was deep and broad. But when it came to anything other than music, she was pretty much an enigma. I tried my best to draw her out, but she would never open up.

One time she told me about Schumann.

“Like Schubert,” she said, “Schumann battled VD when he was young, and the disease gradually affected his mind. Plus, he had schizophrenic tendencies. He regularly suffered from terrible auditory hallucinations, and his body was seized by uncontrollable trembling. He was convinced he was being pursued by evil spirits, and believed in their literal existence. Pursued by endless, horrific nightmares, he tried numerous times to kill himself. Once he even flung himself into the Rhine River. Inner delusions and outer reality were intertwined within him. Carnaval was an early work, so the evil spirits of his weren’t showing their faces clearly yet. Since the piece is about the carnival festival, it’s full of figures wearing cheerful-looking masks, but this was not merely some happy carnival. Ultimately the evil spirits lurking within him do make an appearance in the piece, one after the other, as if introduced for a moment, wearing happy carnival masks. All around them, an ominous early-spring wind is blowing. Meat, dripping with blood, is served to everyone. Carnival is literally the festival of thankfulness for meat, and a farewell to it, as Lent begins. That’s exactly the kind of music it is.”

“So the performer has to express, musically, both the mask and the face that lies beneath it for all the characters who appear. Is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

She nodded. “That’s right. That’s exactly right. If you can’t express that sentiment, then what’s the point in performing it? The piece is the ideal of playful music, but within that playfulness, you can catch a glimpse of the specters lurking inside the psyche. The playful sounds lure them out from the darkness.”

She was silent for a while, and then continued.

“All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval . Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”

PERHAPS what she really wanted to say was an ugly mask and a beautiful face beneath it—a beautiful mask and an ugly face . This thought struck me at the time. Maybe she was really talking about some aspect of herself.

“For some people, the mask might become so tightly stuck that they can’t remove it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Maybe that’s true.” She gave a faint smile. “But even if a mask gets stuck and can’t be removed, that doesn’t change the fact that beneath it, the real face remains.”

“Though no one can ever see it.”

She shook her head. “There must be people who can. Surely there must be, somewhere.”

“But Robert Schumann could see them. And he was unhappy. Because of the syphilis, schizophrenia, and evil spirits.”

“He did leave behind this wonderful music, though,” she said. “The kind of amazing music that no one else could write.” She cracked each knuckle of both hands, loudly, in turn. “Because of the syphilis, schizophrenia, and evil spirits. Happiness is always a relative thing. Don’t you think?”

“Could be,” I said.

“Vladimir Horowitz once recorded Schumann’s F Minor Sonata for the radio,” she said. “Have you heard this story?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied. Listening to (and, I imagine) playing Schumann’s Piano Sonata no. 3 must be a laborious task.

“When he listened to this recording on the radio later, Horowitz sat there, his head in his hands, totally depressed. He said it was awful.”

She swirled the red wine around in her half-full glass and stared at it for a while.

“And this is what he said: ‘Schumann was crazy, but I ruined him.’ Don’t you love that?”

“I do,” I agreed.

I FOUND HER, in a way, an attractive woman, though I never really thought about her sexually. In that sense, my wife’s judgment was correct. But it wasn’t her unattractiveness that kept me from having sex with her. I don’t think her ugliness by itself would have prevented us from sleeping together. What kept me from making love with her—from actually ever feeling that I wanted to—wasn’t so much the beauty or ugliness of her mask, but more my fear of what I’d see lying beneath. Whether it was the face of evil, or the face of an angel.

IN OCTOBER F* stopped getting in touch with me. I’d gotten two new, rather intriguing CDs of Carnaval , and called her a few times, thinking we could listen to them together, but her cell phone always went to voice mail. I emailed her a few times, but got no response. A few autumn weeks passed, and October was over. November came, and people started wearing coats. This was the longest we’d gone without being in touch. I figured maybe she was on a long trip, or maybe wasn’t feeling well.

It was my wife who first spotted her on TV. I was at my desk in my room, working.

“I could be wrong, but I think your girlfriend’s on the TV news,” my wife said. Come to think of it, she’d never once used F*’s name. It was always “your girlfriend.” But by the time I got to the TV, the news had already switched to a report on a baby panda.