Харуки Мураками: First Person Singular: Stories

What kind of job do you want to get? someone asked.

“I don’t care,” she said, rubbing the side of her nose. (Beside her nose there were two small moles, lined up like a constellation.) “I mean, whatever I wind up with isn’t going to be all that great anyway.”

I lived in Asagaya at the time, and her place was in Koganei. So we rode the high-speed train together on the Chuo line out of Yotsuya. We sat down side by side in the train. It was past eleven p.m., a bitterly cold night, with a biting wind. Before I’d known it we were in the season where you needed gloves and a muffler. As the train approached Asagaya I stood up, ready to get off, and she looked up at me and said, in a low voice, “If it’s okay, would you let me stay at your place tonight?”

“Okay—but how come?”

“It’s too far to go all the way back to Koganei.”

“I have to warn you, it’s a tiny apartment, and a real mess,” I said.

“That doesn’t bother me in the least,” she said, and took the arm of my coat.

So she came to my cramped, crummy place, and we drank some cans of beer. We took our time with the beer, and afterward, like it was a natural next step, she shed her clothes right in front of me. Just like that, she was naked, and snuggled into my futon. Following her lead, I took off my clothes and joined her in bed. I switched off the light, but the glow from the gas stove kept the room fairly bright. In bed we awkwardly warmed each other up. For a while, neither of us said a word. So quickly naked with each other, it was hard to know what to talk about. But as our bodies gradually warmed up, we literally felt the awkwardness loosen up through our skin. It was an oddly intimate sensation.

That’s when she asked, “I might yell another man’s name when I come. Are you okay with that?”

“Do you love him?” I asked her, after I’d gotten the towel ready.

“I do. A lot,” she said. “I love him so, so much. I’m always thinking of him, every minute. But he doesn’t love me that much. What I mean is, he has a girlfriend.”

“But you’re seeing him?”

“Um. He calls me whenever he wants my body,” she said. “Like ordering takeout over the phone.”

I had no clue how to respond, so I kept quiet. She traced a figure on my back with her fingertips. Or maybe she was writing something, in cursive.

“He told me that my face is plain but my body is the best.”

I didn’t think her face was particularly plain, though calling her beautiful was going too far. Looking back on it now, I can’t recall what kind of face she had, exactly, or describe it in any detail.

“But if he calls, you go?”

“I love him, so what else can I do?” she said, like nothing could be more natural. “No matter what he says to me, there are just times when I’m dying to have a man make love to me.”

I considered this. But back then it was beyond me to imagine what feelings this entailed—for a woman to want a man to make love to her. (And even now, come to think of it, I don’t entirely understand it.)

“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,” she said, in a flat tone, like she was reciting something written on the wall.

“I see,” I said, moved by her words.

“So it’s okay if you think of some other woman instead of me,” she said. “Don’t you have anybody you like?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So I don’t mind if you yell that person’s name when you come. It won’t bother me at all.”

There was a girl I liked at the time, but circumstances kept us from getting more deeply involved, and when the moment arrived, I didn’t call out her name. The thought crossed my mind, but in the middle of sex it seemed kind of stupid, and I ejaculated inside the woman without a word. She was about to yell a man’s name, like she said she would, and I had to hurriedly stuff the towel between her teeth. She had really strong, healthy-looking teeth. Any dentist would be properly impressed. I don’t even remember what name she yelled. All I recall is that it was some nothing, run-of-the-mill name, and that I was impressed that such a bland name was, for her, precious and important. A simple name can sometimes really jolt a person’s heart.

THE NEXT MORNING, I had an early class where I had to submit a major report in lieu of a midterm, but as you can imagine, I blew it off. (Which led to some huge problems later, but that’s another story.) We finally woke up in the late morning, and boiled water for instant coffee, and ate some toast. There were some eggs in the fridge, so I boiled them for us to eat. The sky was clear and cloudless, the morning sunlight dazzling, and I was feeling pretty lazy.

As she munched on buttered toast, she asked me what I was majoring in at college. I’m in the literature department, I said.

Do you want to be a novelist? she asked.

I’m not really planning to, I answered honestly. I had no plans whatsoever at the time of becoming a novelist. I’d never even considered it (though there were plenty of people in my class who’d announced that they were planning to become novelists). With this, she seemed to lose interest in me. Not that she had much interest to begin with. But still.

In the light of day, I could see that her teeth marks were imprinted on the towel, and it struck me as a little bizarre. She must have bitten down on it pretty hard. In the light of day, she seemed out of place. It was hard to believe that this girl—small, bony, with a not-so-great complexion—was the same girl who, the night before, had screamed out passionately in my arms, in the winter moonlight.

“I write tanka poems,” she said, out of the blue.

“Tanka?”

“You know tanka, right?”

“Sure,” I said. Even someone as naive as me knew that much. “But this is the first time I’ve met someone who actually writes them.”

She gave a happy laugh. “But there are people like that in the world, you know.”

“Are you in a poetry club or something?”

“No, it’s not like that,” she said. She gave a slight shrug. “Tanka are something you write by yourself. Right? It’s not like playing basketball.”

“What kind of tanka?”

“Do you want to hear some?”

I nodded.

“Really? You’re not just saying that?”

“Really,” I said.

And that was the truth. I was curious. I mean, what kind of poems would she write, this girl who, a few hours before, had moaned in my arms and yelled another man’s name?

She hesitated. “I don’t think I can recite any here. It’s embarrassing. And it’s still morning. But I did publish a kind of collection, so if you really want to read them, I’ll send it to you. Could you tell me your full name and address?”

I jotted down my address on a piece of memo paper and handed it to her. She glanced at it, folding it in four, then stuffed it in the pocket of her overcoat. A light green coat that had seen better days. On the rounded collar was a silver broach shaped like a lily of the valley. I remember how it glistened in the sunlight that was streaming in through the south-facing window. I know next to nothing about flowers, but for some reason I’ve always liked lilies of the valley.

“Thanks for letting me stay over. I truly didn’t want to ride back to Koganei on my own,” she said as she was leaving my place. “That happens with girls sometimes.”

We were both well aware of it then. That we would probably never see each other again. That night she simply didn’t want to ride the train all the way back to Koganei—that’s all there was to it.

A week later, her poetry collection arrived in the mail. Honestly, I really didn’t expect her to follow up and send it. I figured she’d totally forgotten about me by the time she got back to her place in Koganei (or perhaps she’d tried to forget me as soon as she could), and never imagined that she’d go to all the trouble to put a copy of the book in an envelope, write my name and address, stick on a stamp, and toss it in a mailbox—maybe even going all the way to the post office, for all I knew. So one morning, when I spied that package in my mail slot in the apartment, it took me by surprise.