Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

As I followed this train of thought, gradually I began to feel a stranger to myself as well. I placed my hands on the table and studied them for a while. These were my hands, no doubt. Right and left a symmetrical pair. I used these hands to paint, to cook, to eat, sometimes to caress a woman’s body. But this morning, for some reason, they didn’t look like my hands at all. They had become a stranger’s hands—the palms, the backs, the fingernails.

I quit studying my hands. And thinking about the woman who had formerly been my wife. I got up from the table and went to the bath, where I removed my pajamas and took a hot shower. I carefully washed my hair and shaved in the bathroom sink. When I finished, I thought about the baby Yuzu was about to have—the baby who was not my child—again. I didn’t want to, but there was nothing I could do about it.

She was about seven months pregnant. Seven months ago had been the second half of April. Where was I then, and what was I doing? I had left home and set out on a long, solitary trip in mid-March, driving my antique Peugeot 205 more or less at random all across Hokkaido and northeastern Japan. By the time my trip ended and I returned to Tokyo it was already early May. In late April I had crossed over from Hokkaido to Aomori in northern Honshu on the ferry that ran from Hakodate to Oma on the Shimokita Peninsula.

I pulled the simple diary I had kept out of a desk drawer and checked. At that time I had been traveling in the mountains of Aomori, far from the sea. Although it was well into the second half of April, it was still cold, and snow was everywhere. Why on earth had I chosen such a cold place? I couldn’t remember the precise location, but I did recall a small, almost deserted lakefront hotel where I had stayed for a few days. It was an unprepossessing old building made of concrete, where they offered simple (but not bad) meals and amazingly cheap rates. There was even a small outdoor hot springs bath in a corner of the garden that was available twenty-four hours a day. The hotel had just reopened for the spring season, and I was practically the only guest.

For some reason, my recollections of that trip were vague. All I recorded in the notebook I used as a diary were the names of the places I visited, where I stayed, what I ate, the distance I had driven, and how much I spent. It was a brief, very hit-and-miss record. I could find no mention of my thoughts and feelings, or anything else along those lines. I guess there was nothing to write about. One day just flowed into another, with no distinction between them. I had jotted down the names of the places, but couldn’t remember much about any of them. Many times, even their names had been left out. Looking back, I could only recall that feeling of repetition: the same scenery day after day, the same food, the same weather (“cold” and “not so cold” were my only categories).

The little sketchbook I had carried did a better job of bringing the trip back to life. (I carried no camera, so I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Instead, I had sketched.) Even so, there weren’t that many sketches to look at. When I had spare time, I had just whipped off simple drawings of what was before my eyes with an old pencil or ballpoint pen. Flowers and plants on the roadside, dogs and cats, mountain peaks, things like that. Now and then I would sketch someone I met along the way, but I almost always gave those pictures to whomever I had drawn.

Beneath the diary entry for April 19 I had written the words “Dream last night.” That was all. I had been staying at the small lakefront hotel on that date. The words were underlined with a thick pencil. It must have been a special kind of dream to warrant such emphasis. It took me a while to remember what the dream had been about. When the memory returned, though, it arrived all at once.

The dream had come to me shortly before dawn that day. It was vivid, and very erotic.

In the dream I was back in the apartment in Hiroo. The one Yuzu and I had shared for six years. There was a bed, and my wife was sleeping in it. I was looking down at her from the ceiling. In other words, I was hovering above her. I didn’t find that at all out of the ordinary. In fact, the me in the dream found floating in the air to be perfectly normal. Nothing unnatural about it. Of course, I had no idea I was dreaming. What was happening felt totally real.

Quietly, so as not to wake Yuzu, I descended from the ceiling to stand at the foot of the bed. I was sexually aroused, powerfully so. I hadn’t made love to her for ages. Bit by bit, I peeled back the quilt covering her. She was fast asleep (had she taken a sleeping pill before retiring?) and showed no signs of waking up, even when I removed the quilt. She never even twitched. This made me more daring. Taking my time, I slipped off her pajama bottoms, then her panties. Her pajamas were a pale blue, her tiny cotton panties pure white. Still she did not wake. There was no resistance, no sound.

I gently parted her legs and caressed her vagina with my finger. It was warm and wet, and opened to my touch. As if it had been waiting for me. I couldn’t stand it any longer—I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter. Yuzu did not open her eyes, but she sighed and let out a small moan. As if she had been impatient for this to happen. Her nipples were as hard as cherry pits when I touched them.

She might be deep in a dream, I thought. If she was dreaming of someone, though, it was surely not me. For a long while now she had resisted sex with me. Whatever dream she might be having, though, whoever she was mistaking me for, it was too late to turn back, for I was already inside her. It could be a terrible shock if she woke up in the midst of the act and saw who it was. She might well be furious. If that were to happen, I would deal with it then. Now all I could do was take it to the limit. My desire raged like a river through a broken dam, carrying me along.

At the beginning, I moved my penis slowly, trying not to arouse her so much as to wake her up, but, naturally, the pace quickened as I went on. I could tell from the way her body welcomed me that she wanted me to be more forceful. Soon, though, I reached the moment of climax. I wanted to remain inside her, but I couldn’t control myself any longer. It had been ages since we had last had sex, and, though asleep, she was responding to our lovemaking with more passion than ever before.

My ejaculation was violent, and repeated. Again and again, semen poured from me, overflowing her vagina, turning the sheets sticky. There was nothing I could do to make it stop. If it continued, I worried, I would be completely emptied out. Yuzu slept deeply through it all without making a sound, her breathing even. Her sex, though, had contracted around mine, and would not let go. As if it had an unshakable will of its own and was determined to wring every last drop from my body.

I woke up at this point. I had indeed ejaculated. My underwear was drenched in semen. I quickly slipped it off to avoid soiling the bed, carried it to the sink, and washed it. Then I went out through the hotel’s back door to bathe in the hot springs. As the bath was entirely exposed to the elements, with no ceiling or walls, I was freezing by the time I reached it. Once I got in, however, the water warmed me to the core.

I soaked there alone in the predawn hush, listening to the water drip as steam melted the ice, replaying the dream over and over in my head. The memory was so vivid and physical it didn’t feel like a dream at all. I had actually visited the Hiroo apartment and had actually made love to Yuzu—that was the only way I could think about it. My hands remembered the touch of her silky skin and my penis could still feel her vagina. It had clung to my penis, had embraced it with a violent passion (true, Yuzu may have mistaken me for someone else, but it was me nonetheless). She had wrung me out, taking every last drop of my semen for her own.