Харуки Мураками: First Person Singular: Stories

The title of the poetry collection was On a Stone Pillow . The author was listed as Chiho. It wasn’t clear if this was her real name or a pen name. At the restaurant I must have heard her name many times, but I couldn’t recall it. No one called her Chiho, though, that much I knew. The collection was in a plain brown business envelope, with no name or return address, and no card or letter included. Just one copy of a thin poetry collection, bound together with white string, silently resting inside. It wasn’t some cheap mimeograph, but nicely printed on thick, high-quality paper. I’m guessing the author arranged the pages in order, attached the cardboard cover, and carefully hand-bound each copy using a needle and string to save on bookbinding costs. I tried imagining her doing that sort of work, but couldn’t picture it. The number 28 was stamped on the first page. Must have been the twenty-eighth in a limited edition. How many were there altogether? There was no price indicated anywhere. Maybe there never was a price.

I didn’t open the poetry collection right away. I left it on top of my desk, casting the occasional glance at the cover. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, it’s just I felt that reading a poetry collection someone put together—especially a person who, a week before, has been naked in my arms—required a bit of mental preparation. A sort of respect toward it, I suppose. Finally, that weekend, in the evening, I opened the book. I leaned back against the wall next to the window and read it in the winter twilight. There were forty-two poems contained in the collection. One tanka per page. Not a particularly large number. There was no foreword, no afterword, not even a date of publication. Just printed tanka in straightforward black type on white pages with generous margins.

I certainly wasn’t expecting some monumental literary work or anything. Like I said, I was simply curious. What kind of poems would come from a woman who yelled some guy’s name in my ear as she bit on a towel? What I found as I read through the collection was that several of the poems really got to me.

Tanka were basically a mystery to me (and still are, even now). So I’m certainly not able to venture an objective opinion about which tanka are considered great, and which ones not so much. But apart from any judgments of literary value, several of the tanka she wrote—eight of them, specifically—struck a chord deep within me.

This one, for instance:

Strangely enough, as I opened the pages of the poetry collection, following the large, black printed words with my eyes and reading them aloud, the girl’s body I saw that night came back to my mind, exactly as it was. Not the less-than-impressive figure I saw in the morning light, but the way she was as I held her body, enveloped by smooth skin, in that moonlit night. Her shapely round breasts, the small hard nipples, the sparse pubic hair, her wet vagina. As she reached orgasm, she shut her eyes, bit down hard on the towel, and called out, again and again, another man’s name in my ear. The name of a man somewhere, a plain name I can’t even recall.

I have no idea, of course, whether she’s still writing tanka or not. As I said, I don’t even know her name, and hardly remember her face at all. What I do remember is the name Chiho on the cover of the collection, her defenseless, supple flesh in the pale winter moonlight shining through the window, and the mini-constellation of two small moles beside her nose.

Perhaps she’s not even alive anymore. Sometimes I think that. I can’t help but feel that maybe at some point she took her own life. I say this because most of her tanka—or at least most of the ones in that collection—depicted images of death. And for some reason these involved a head being severed with a blade. For her, that style might have been her own way of dying.

But in a corner of my heart, I’m still wishing she’s alive somewhere in this world. Sometimes I’ll catch myself, all of sudden, hoping that she’s survived, that she’s still composing poetry. Why? Why do I take the trouble to think about something like that? There’s not one thing that connects my life and hers. Even if, say, we passed each other on a street, or were seated at adjoining tables in a restaurant, I seriously doubt that we would even recognize each other. Like two straight lines overlapping, we momentarily crossed at a certain point, then went our separate ways.

Many years have passed since then. Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely), people age in the blink of an eye. Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?

If we’re blessed, though, a few words might remain by our side. They climb to the top of the hill during the night, crawl into small holes dug to fit the shape of their bodies, stay quite still, and let the stormy winds of time blow past. The dawn finally breaks, the wild wind subsides, and the surviving words quietly peek out from the surface. For the most part they have small voices—they are shy and only have ambiguous ways of expressing themselves. Even so, they are ready to serve as witnesses. As honest, fair witnesses. But in order to create those enduring, long-suffering words, or else to find them and leave them behind, you must sacrifice, unconditionally, your own body, your very own heart. You have to lay down your neck on a cold stone pillow illuminated by the winter moon.

Aside from me, maybe there’s not another soul in this world who remembers that girl’s poems, let alone someone who can recite them. With the exception of number 28, that slim little self-published book, bound together with string, is now forgotten, dispersed, sucked up somewhere into the benighted darkness between Jupiter and Saturn, vanished forever. Perhaps she herself (assuming she’s still alive) can’t recall a thing about those poems she wrote back when she was young. Maybe the only reason I recall some of her poetry even now is because it’s linked to memories of her teeth marks on that towel. Maybe that’s all it is. I don’t know how much meaning or value there is in still remembering all that, in sometimes pulling out that faded copy of the poetry collection from my drawer and reading it again. To tell the truth, I really don’t know.

At any rate, those remained. While other words and memories turned to dust and vanished.

BIRD IS BACK.

How fantastic that sounds! Yes indeed, the Bird you know and love has returned, his powerful wings beating the air. In every corner of this planet—from Novosibirsk to Timbuktu—people are going to gaze up in the sky, spy the shadow of that magnificent bird, and cheer. And the world will be filled once more with brilliant sunlight.