| main | ongoing | archive | private |
- Standing there on the porch, I look at the bright spring sun slicing down into our tiny yard. Hardly the sort of yard that lingers fondly in the mind. The sun hits here only the briefest part of the day, so the soil is always dark and damp. Not much growing: just a couple of unremarkable hydrangeas. And I'm not terribly crazy about hydrangeas in the first place. (-) From a nearby stand of trees comes the periodic scree-ee-eech of a bird, sharp as a tightening spring. The "wind-up bird," we call it. My wife's name for it. I have no idea what it's really called. Nor even what it looks like. Nonetheless, this wind-up bird is there every morning in the trees of the neighborhood to wind things up. Us, our quiet little world, everything.
- When the hell did the compass needle get out of whack and lead my life astray? It's more than I can figure. There's nothing I can really put my finger on. No setbacks from student politics, no disillusionments with university, never really had much girl trouble. As near as I can tell, I've had a perfectly normal existence. Yet one day, when it came time for me to be graduating, I suddenly realized I wasn't the same guy I used to be. (-) Probably, the seed of a schism had been there all along, however microscopic. But in time the gap widened, eventually taking me out of sight of who I was supposed to be. In terms of the solar system, if you will, I should by now have reached somewhere between Saturn and Uranus. A little bit farther and I ought to be seeing Pluto. And beyond that -- let's see -- was there anything after that?
- ...when the telephone rings. It sounds positively irritated, the way it rings. ("The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," 12)
- "I have my reasons," the woman enunciates slowly, as if measuredly masticating a morsel of food.
- Blind spot, eh? Well, perhaps the woman does have a point. Somewhere, in my head, in my body, in my very existence, it's as if there were some long-lost-subterranean element that's been skewing my life ever so slightly off.
- Yet when I try to think, my head's filled to bursting with some gaseous substance. I didn't sleep well last night, plus the weather's too hot for the beginning of May, plus there was that unnerving phone call.
- The spring sun cuts clean and crisp through the ceiling of overhanging branches, scattering patches of shadow across the ground. With no wind, the shadows stay glued in place like fateful stains. Telltale stains sure to cling to the earth as it goes around and around the sun for millennia to come. (-) Shadows flit over my shirt as I pass under the branches, then return to the ground. All is still. You can almost hear each blade of grass respiring in the sunlight. A few small clouds float in the sky, vivid and well formed, straight out of a medieval engraving. Everything stands out with such clarity that I feel buoyant, as if somehow my body went on forever. That, and it's terribly hot.
- In some places, clothes actually hang over the passage, forcing me to inch past rows of still-dripping towels and shirts. I'm so close I can hear televisions playing and toilets flushing inside. I even smell curry cooking in one kitchen.
- Right away, I can see it's vacant. One look tells you that this is not your scant two- or three-months absence.
- The slender arms protruding from the openings are exceedingly well tanned for only May.
- "Say, you got a cigarette?" the girl asks. (-) I pull a pack of Hope regulars from my pocket and offer it to her. She withdraws her hand from her shorts, extracts a cigarette, and examines it a second before putting it to her mouth. Her mouth is small, with the slightest hint of a curl to her upper lip. I strike a match and give her a light. She leans forward, revealing an ear: a freshly formed, soap-smooth, pretty ear, its delicate outline glistening with a tracery of fine hairs.
- I see my face split into two reflections in her sunglasses. The lenses are so hideously dark, and even mirror-coated, that there's no way to make out her eyes.
- Only then does the girl smile. And as she lets down her facade, I can see she's much more of a child than I thought on first impression. The quirky curl of her upper lip shoots out at a strange angle.
- ...following the girl across the grass, and only then do I notice that she's dragging her left leg slightly. Her tiny shoulders sway with the periodic rhythm of a crank grinding mechanically to the left.
- "Tell me, do I ask too many questions?" the girl asks, peering into my eyes from behind her sunglasses. (-) "You've been told that?" I ask back. (-) "Sometimes." (-) "Nothing wrong with asking questions. Makes the other person think." (-) "Most people, though, don't give me much thought," she says, looking at the tips of her toes. "Everyone just gives the usual nothing-doing answers." (-) I shake my head vaguely and to realign my gaze onto the cat path. What the hell am I doing here?
- I shut my eyes for 20 or 30 seconds, arms folded across my chest. Lying there, I can feel the sweat bead up over different parts of my body. On my forehead, under my nose, around my neck, the slightest sensations, as if tiny moistened feathers had been floated into place here and there. My T-shirt clings to my chest like a drooping flag on a doldrum day. The sunlight has a curious weight as it seeps into me. I can hear the tinkling of ice as the girl jiggles her glass.
- "Death. People dying. It's all so fascinating," the girl begins. (-) She's whispering right by my ear, so the words enter my body in a warm, moist stream of breath.
- "I think about what it would be like to cut the thing open with a scalpel. That lump of death itself. There's got to be something like that in there somewhere, I just know it. Dull like a softball -- and pliable -- a paralyzed tangle of nerves. I'd like to remove it from the dead body and cut it open. I'm always thinking about t. Imagining what it'd be like inside. It'd probably be all gummy, like toothpaste that cakes up inside the tube, don't you think? That's okay, you don't have to answer. All gooey around the outside, getting tougher the further in. That's why the first thing I'd do once I cut through the outer skin is scoop out all the glop, and there inside where it starts to firm up would be this teeny little core. Like a superhard ball bearing, don't you think?" (-) "Lately, it's all I think about. Probably 'cause I've got so much free time every day. But really, I do think so. If I've got nothing to do, my thoughts just wander off far away. I get so far off in my thoughts, it's hard to find my way back."
- My body feels unseemingly heavy in the soft canvas curve of the deck chair.
- The sun is slanting westward and I'm up to my ankles in the shade of the pine trees. The hands of my watch point to 3:40. I shake my head a few times as if rattling an empty can, get up from the chair, and take a look around. Everything looks the same as when I first saw it. Big lawn, dried-up pond, hedge, stone bird, goldenrod, TV aerial, no cat. No girl, either. (...) I feel like I must have aged something awful in my sleep.
- At 5:30, the telephone rings 12 times, but I don't pick up the receiver. After the ringing has died away, a lingering hollowness hovers around the dark room like a drifting dust. The clock atop the TV strikes an invisible panel of space with its brittle claws. A regular wind-up bird has come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds. (-) I consider writing a poem about the wind-up bird. But no first lines come. Besides, I find it hard to believe that high-school girls would be terribly thrilled to read a poem about the wind-up bird. They don't even know that any such thing as a wind-up bird exists.
- What an impossible day it's been One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year. (-) Noboru Watanabe, where have you gone?, I think. Didn't the wind-up bird wind your spring?
- But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
- With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else.
- ...she searched the kitchen shelves like a squirrel in November...
- Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish's gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turned the pages of yesterday's paper. I used the postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs on the tabletop.
- While she hunted for more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had opened somewhere behind my solar plexus -- a hermetically sealed cavern that had neither entrance nor exit. Something about this weird sense of absence -- this sense of the existential reality of nonexistence -- resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the top of a very high steeple. This connection between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me.
- I drank the last of the beer. Now all six cans were gone. Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.
- The feeling of starvation was back, stronger than ever, and it was giving me a deep headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to the core of my head by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds of complicated machinery. (-) I took another look at my undersea volcano. The water was even clearer than before -- much clearer. Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely nothing to support it. I could see every little pebble on the bottom. All I had to do was reach out and touch them.
- "What kind of presence?" (-) "Like there's this heavy, dusty curtain that hasn't been washed for years, hanging down from the ceiling."
- Obviously, the McDonald's hospitality manual said nothing about how to deal with a situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that comes after "Welcome to McDonald's," but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the words wouldn't come out. Even so, like a crescent moon in the dark sky, the hint of a professional smile lingered at the edges of her lips.
- ...but the only customers there were a young couple -- students, probably -- and they were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned on the table like an avant-garde sculpture. They slept the sleep of the dead.
- They stood together behind the register, staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an Incan well.
- The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest corners, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, clinging to its pink walls.
- "We're stealing bread, nothing else," she said. The girl responded with a complicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea of how she felt.
- The customers at the table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?
- Our hunger -- that hunger that had felt as if it could go on forever -- vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building's filthy walls purple and made a giant SONY BETA ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed Forces radio was playing cowboy music. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.
- Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone. The water's calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves -- like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze -- lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else. (-) I stretched out in the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.
- Enough of trying to write this all down. It's going nowhere. Say I write the word "coincidence." What you read in the word "coincidence" could be utterly different -- even opposite -- from what the very same word means to me. This is unfair, if I may say so.
- It's all very odd. (-) The very same lines when spoken by one person will have you dying with laughter but when spoken by another won't seem funny in the least. Curious, don't you think? And the more I think about it, that difference just seems to be one of these things you're born with. See, it's like the curvature of the semi-circular canals of your ears having the edge over somebody else's, or... you know.
- Anyway, talking to you like this, I get the feeling I've become the Egyptian Sandman myself. And whatever I touch, it's sand sand sand.
- Sometimes, though, it'll strike you that each and every one of those passengers is a distinct individual entity. Like, what does this one do? Or why on earth do you suppose that one's riding the Ginza Line? Or whatever. By then it's too late. You let it get to you and you're a goner. (-) Looks like that businessman's hairline is receding, or the girl over there's got such hairy legs I bet she shaves at least once a week, or why is that young guy sitting across the aisle wearing that awful tie? Little things like that. Until finally you've got the shakes and you want to jump out of the car then and there.
- To talk about myself, then. (-) Actually, I'm extremely dissatisfied with being who I am. It's nothing to do with my looks or abilities or status or any of that. It simply has to do with being me. The situation strikes me as grossly unfair. (...) Shall I put it on the line? (-) I want to be able to be in two places at once. That is my one and only wish. Other than that, there's not a thing I desire. (-) Yet being who and what I am, my singularity hampers this desire of mine. An unhappy lot, don't you think? My wish, if anything, is rather unassuming. I don't want to be ruler of the world, nor do I want to be an artist of genius. I merely want to exist in two places simultaneously. Got it? Not three, not four, only two. I want to be roller-skating while I'm listening to an orchestra at a concert hall. I want to be a McDonald's Quarter Pounder and still be a clerk in the product-control section of the department store. I want to sleep with you and be sleeping with my girlfriend all the while. I want to lead a general existence and yet be a distinct, separate entity.
- I am angry at the fact that I am only myself and nothing else. Being a solitary entity is dreadfully depressing.
- The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep.
- ...and -- what I'd really like to do -- explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajaku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.
- Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.
- We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can't bring myself to speak to her.
- They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.
- ...came down with the season's terrible influenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D.H. Lawrence's piggy bank.
- ...and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.
- They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in the chest. And they knew: (-) She is the 100% perfect girl for me. (-) He is the 100% perfect boy for me. (-) But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of 14 years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever. (-) A sad story, don't you think? (-) Yes. That's it, that is what I should have said to her.
- This is my 17th day straight without sleep.
- My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was wide awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake.
- My head was always foggy.
- My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things.
- The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me. I'm in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or my classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep. (-) It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land that I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to. ("Sleep," 75)
- Anyhow, he smiles in this natural, innocent way, just like a child. Not many grown-up men can do that. And I guess you'd expect a dentist to have nice teeth, which he does.
- ...so the two of us would go to bed after lunch. Those were the loveliest times with him. Everything was hushed, and the soft afternoon sunshine would filter into the room.
- ...I'd lose track of what had happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I'd sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was -- very simply -- amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them. (-) Whenever I felt like that, I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror -- just look at it for 15 minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I'd stare at my face purely as a physical object, and gradually it would disconnect from the rest of me, becoming just some thing that happened to exist at the same time as myself. And a realization would come to me: This is happening here and now. It's got nothing to do with footprints. Reality and I exist simultaneously at this present moment. That's the most important thing.
- The moment I tried to focus on it, the shadow began to assume a definite shape, as if it had been waiting for me to notice it. Its outline became distinct, and began to be filled with substance, and then with details.
- My husband was sound asleep in his bed. Even his breathing was inaudible. He always sleeps like that, as if all mental activity in him had been obliterated. Almost nothing can wake him. ("Sleep," 84)
- Though the terror was leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop. It was in my skin, like the circular ripples on water after an earthquake. I could see the slight quivering. The scream had done it. The scream that had never found a voice was locked up in my body, making it tremble.
- In fact, I wanted to drink even more alcohol than that. I wanted to warm my body more, to calm my nerves down more, and to feel the strong, penetrating bouquet in my mouth again.
- (About _Anna Karenina_) I remembered just a few things about it: the first line, "All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and the heroine's throwing herself under a train at the end.
- Where had the old me gone, the one who used to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days -- and that almost abnormally intense passion -- meant to me?
- I remembered my ordeal with insomnia and how I had gone through each day back then, wrapped in a cloud.
- And that was that. I plunged into Anna Karenina and kept reading until the sun came up.
- Until that reading, I hadn't realized how little I remembered of what goes on in the book. I recognized virtually nothing -- the characters, scenes, nothing. I might as well have been reading a whole new book. How strange. I must have been deeply moved at the time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my noticing, the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away and vanished. (-) What then, of the enormous fund of time I had consumed back then reading books? What had all that meant?
- The luscious taste of milk chocolate spread through my mouth. I could feel the sweetness being absorbed directly into every part of my body. I continued eating in the elevator, steeping myself in the wonderful aroma that filled the tiny space.
- All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his characters so skillfully. He described them with such wonderful precision. But that very precision somehow denied them a kind of salvation. And this finally--
- I decided to go swimming. I don't know how to explain this, but I wanted to purge my body of something by exercising it to the limit. Purge it -- of what? I spent some time wondering about that. Purge it of what? (-) I didn't know. (-) But this thing, whatever it was, this mistlike something, hung there inside my body like a certain kind of potential. I wanted to give it a name, but the word refused to come to mind. I'm terrible at finding the right words for things. I'm sure Tolstoy would have been able to come up with exactly the right word.
- A bored-looking lifeguard was on duty. ("Sleep," 94)
- He fell asleep right away, practically the moment the light went out, as if there were some cord connecting the lamp with his brain. ("Sleep," 94)
- After 10 minutes of lying near him, I would go to the living room, turn on the floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy. Then I would sit on the sofa and read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and letting the smooth liquid glide over my tongue. (...) After a while, morning would come. When that happened, I would close my book and make myself a cup of coffee.
- While I was in the water, I concentrated my entire mind on swimming. I thought about nothing but how to move my body most effectively, and I inhaled and exhaled with perfect regularity.
- It was easy once I got the hang of it. All I had to do was break the connection between my mind and my body. While my body went about its business, my mind floated in its own inner space. I ran the house without a thought in my head, feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband. (-) After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.
- No one noticed that I had changed -- that I had given up sleeping entirely, that I was spending all my time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years -- and hundreds of miles -- from reality.
- The author maintained that human beings, by their very nature, are incapable of escaping from certain fixed idiosyncratic tendencies, both in their thought processes and in their own action- and thought- tendencies, which under normal circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in the prison cells of their own tendencies.
- I'm through with sleep! So what if I go mad? So what if I lose my "ground of being"? I will not be consumed by my "tendencies." If sleep is nothing more than a periodic repairing of the parts of me that are being worn away, I don't want it anymore. I don't need it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I'm keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don't want to be "repaired." I will not sleep.
- Now, at least, I was expanding my life, and it was wonderful. My hands weren't empty anymore. Here I was -- alive, and I could feel it. It was real. I wasn't being consumed any longer. Or at least there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed, and that was what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. A life without that feeling might go on forever but it would have no meaning at all. I saw that with absolute clarity now. (-) After checking to see that my husband was asleep, I would go sit on the living-room sofa, drink brandy by myself, and open my book. I read Anna Karenina three times. Each time, I made new discoveries. This enormous novel was full of revelations and riddles. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader. The old me had been able to understand only the tiniest fragment of it, but the gaze of this new me could penetrate the core with perfect understanding. I knew exactly what the great Tolstoy wanted to say, what he wanted the reader to get from his book; I could see how his message had organically crystallized as a novel, and what in that novel had surpassed the author himself. (...) And I responded with great emotion
- I felt that I had always been meant to be like this. By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one's eyes without seeing anything.
- One time, though, I was questioned by a policeman. It was 2:30 in the morning, and I was parked under a streetlamp near the pier, listening to the car stereo and watching the lights of the ships passing by. He knocked on my window. I lowered the glass. He was young and handsome, and very polite. I explained to him that I couldn't sleep.
- ...my son, who was always sound asleep, too. They didn't know a thing. They believed that the world was as it had always been, unchanging. But they were wrong. It was changing in ways they could never guess. Changing a lot. Changing fast. It would never be the same again.
- (Studying husband's face as he sleeps) I had done it a lot when we were first married. That was all it took to relax me and put me in a peaceful mood. I'll be safe as long as he goes on sleeping peacefully like this, I'd tell myself. Which is why I spent a lot of time watching him in his sleep.
- So there I stood, looking at him sleeping as soundly as always. One barefoot stuck out from under the covers at a strange angle -- so strange that the foot could have belonged to someone else. It was a big, chunky foot. My husband's mouth hung open, the lower lip drooping. Every once in a while, his nostrils would twitch. There was a mole under his eye that bothered me. It was so big and vulgar-looking. There was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed, the lids slack, covers made of faded human flesh. He looked like an absolute fool. This was what they meant by "dead to the world." How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly face! It's just too gruesome, I thought.
- If the state of death was not to be a rest for us, then what was going to redeem this imperfect life of ours, so fraught with exhaustion? Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever truly seen it? No one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what death is like. They can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe death is a kind of rest, but reasoning can't tell us that. They only way to find out what death is is to die. Death can be anything at all. (-) An intense terror overwhelmed me at the thought. ("Sleep," 106)
- I stared at the thick darkness that stood planted in front of me, a darkness as deep and hopeless as the universe itself. I was all alone. My mind was in deep concentration, and expanding. If I had wanted to, I could have seen into the uttermost depths of the universe. But I decided not to look. It was too soon for that. (-) If death was like this, if to die meant being eternally awake and staring into the darkness like this, what should I do? (-) At last, I managed to open my eyes. I gulped down the brandy that was left in my glass.
- This is biologically unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They just infer it inductively. I'm beyond that. A priori. An evolutionary leap. A woman who never sleeps. An expansion of consciousness.
- Stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth. I give up searching and listen to those. They make me feel 'm in a far-off place, far away from Mozart and Haydn.
- All the memories I have from before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with accelerating speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really mine. This is how people change. But nobody realizes it. Nobody notices. Only I know what happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn't understand. They wouldn't believe me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no idea what I'm feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive worldview. (-) I am changing, though. Really changing.
- Sandwiched between them, my Civic feels tiny -- like a little pastry box. It's being rocked from side to side. A fist is pounding on the right-hand window.
- ...and went out to the veranda to take in the laundry. The things on the line were all aflutter, whipping out loud, dry cracks, streaming their crazed comet tails off into space.
- That's pretty much what I wrote for the Thursday entry in my diary. 80% facts, 20% short comments, that's my diary policy.
- Yet when I picked up the receiver, all I could hear was this fierce wind blowing. A rummmmmmble full of fury, like the Indians all rising on the warpath in 1881, right there in the receiver. They were burning pioneer cabins, cutting telegraph lines, raping Candice Bergen. (-) "Hello?" I ventured, but my lone voice got sucked under the overwhelming tumult of history.
- "There's lots we don't know about the wind. Same as there's lots we don't know about ancient history or cancer or the ocean floor or outer space or sex."
- So until the hot pot was ready, I decided to pull together a few brief notes on the day's events so I could write them up in my diary next week. This is what I jotted down: - Fall of Roman Empire; - 1881 Indian Uprising; - Hitler's Invasion of Poland. (-) Just this, and even next week I'd be able to reconstruct what went on today. Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have managed to keep a diary for 22 years without missing a day. To every meaningful act, its own system. Whether the wind blows or not, that's the way I live.
- True, luck may rule over parts of a person's life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there's a will -- much less a strong will to swim 30 laps or run 20 kilometers -- there's a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around.
- And so she keeps on tutoring electric organ, devoting every free moment to sports, falling regularly in and out of unlucky love.
- It was a delightful early-summer afternoon and a quaint old-fashioned town. Through the middle of the town flowed a babbling brook, its banks lush and green. Cobblestone streets led into a cafe for a bite of Kasekuchen and coffee.
- __How wonderful it is to travel by onself, she thought as she walked along the cobblestones. In fact, this was the first time in her 55 years that she had traveled alone. During the whole trip, she had not once been lonely or afraid or bored. Every scene that met her eyes was fresh and new; everyone she met was friendly. Each experience called forth emotions that had been slumbering in her, untouched and unused. What she had held near and dear until then -- husband and home and daughter -- was on the other side of the earth. She felt no need to trouble herself over them.
- ...the monotone of sewing machines could be heard.
- "Very sorry, madame," said the old man, looking very sorry indeed. "Ve make no exception. Ziss vorld is very uncertain vorld. Trust is difficult sink to earn but easy sink to lose." ("Lederhosen," 126)
- "That's something even Mother herself didn't understand at the time. It made her feel defensive and confused. All she knew was, looking at that man in the lederhosen, she felt an unbearable disgust rising in her. Directed toward Father. And she could not hold it back. Mother's ledenhosen man, apart from the color of his skin, was exactly like Father, the shape of the legs, the belly, the thinning hair. The way he was so happy trying on those new lederhosen, all prancy and cocky like a little boy. As Mother stood there looking at this man, so many things she'd been uncertain of about herself slowly shifted together into something very clear. That's when she realized she hated Father."
- And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn't matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one's fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won'nt change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point.
- ...her "peeling mandarin oranges" the whole while, almost without a second thought -- I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away. (...) (-) "Talent's not involved. It's not a question of making yourself believe there is an orange there, you have to forget there isn't one. That's all." (-) "Practically Zen." (-) That's when I took a liking to her.
- When the two of us were together, I could truly relax. I'd forget all about work I didn't want to do and trivial things that'd never be settled anyway and the crazy mixed-up ideas that crazy mixed-up people had. Not that there was any great meaning to her words. And if I did catch myself interjecting polite nothings without really tuning in what she was saying, there still was something soothing to my ears about her voice, like watching clouds drift across the far horizon. (-) I did my share of talking, too. Everything from personal matters to sweeping generalities. I told her my honest thoughts. I guess she also let some of my verbiage go by, likewise with minimum comment. Which was fine by me. It was a mood I was after, not understanding or sympathy.
- All she carried was a ratty old Boston bag stuffed with a couple of changes of clothes. By the look of her as she went through the baggage check, you'd almost think she was returning from North Africa, not going there.
- When she introduced us, he shook my hand, virtually in reflex. The healthy handshake of those who've been living a long time overseas.
- By now she'd finished her tempura and announced with a big yawn that she was feeling sleepy. I half expected her to doze off on the spot. She was precisely the type who could fall asleep anywhere.
- "Sometimes I burn barns," the guy was saying.
- The smoke came streaming out of his mouth and into the air like ectoplasm. He passed me the roach. (...) "I brought it from India. Top of the line, the best I could find. Smoke this and, it's strange, I recall all kinds of things. Lights and smells and like that. The quality of memory..." He paused and snapped his fingers a few times, as if searching for the right words. "...completely changes. Don't you think?" (-) That it did, I concurred. I really was back in the school play, reexperiencing the commotion on stage, the smell of the paint on the cardboard backdrop.
- The guy spaced out a while. I could practically see his mind kneading like Silly Putty. Or maybe it was my mind that was squirming around.
- The guy extended his fingers of his left hand and stroked his cheek. The growth of his beard made a dry, rasping sound. Like a bug walking over a thin, taut sheet of paper.
- "This might be a strange way to put it," he took off again, spreading both hands, then bringing them slowly together before his eyes. "But there's a lot of barns in this world, and I've got this feeling that they're all just waiting to be burned. Barns built way off by the seaside, barns built in the middle of rice fields... well, anyway, all kinds of barns. But nothing that 15 minutes wouldn't burn down, nice and neat. It's like that's why there put there from the very beginning. No grief to anyone. They just... vanish. One, two, poof! (...) They're waiting to be burned. I'm simply obliging. You get it? I'm just taking on what's there. Just like the rain. The rain falls. Streams swell. Things get swept along. Does the rain judge anything? Well, all right, does this make me immoral? In my own way, I'd like to believe I've got my own morals. And that's an extremely important force in human existence. A person can't exist without morals. I wouldn't doubt it morals weren't the very balance to my simultaneity." (-) "Simultaneity?" (-) "Right, I'm here, and I'm there. I'm in Tokyo, and at the same time I'm in Tunis. I'm the one to blame, and I'm also the one to forgive. Just as a for instance. It's that level of balance. Without such balance, I don't think we could go on living. It's like the linchpin to everything. Lose it and we'd literally go to pieces."
- "It's an act by which to maintain those morals. But maybe we better just forget the morality. It's not essential. What I want to say is, the world is full of these barns. Me, I got my burns, and you got your barns. It's the truth. I've been almost everywhere in the world. Experienced everything. Came close to dying more than once. Not that I'm proud of it or anything. But okay, let's drop it. My fault for being the quiet type all the time. I talk too much when I do grass." (-) We fell silent, burned out. I had no idea what to say or how. I was sitting tight in my mental passenger seat, just watching one weird scene after the next slip past the car window. My body was so loose I couldn't get a good grasp on what the different parts were doing. Yet I was still in touch with the idea of my bodily existence. Simultaneity, if ever there was such a thing: Here I had me thinking, and here I had me observing myself think. Time ticked on in impossibly minute polyrhythms.
- Bluish gloom and a pungent marijuana odor covered everything. Oddly uneven, that darkness. Lying on the sofa, I tried to remember what came next in the elementary-school play, but it was long since irretrievable. Did the fox cub ever get the gloves?
- The third and fourth barns resembled each other like ugly twins.
- Sometimes, I could swear he was trying to get me to burn a barn. That is, to plant in my head the image of burning barns, so that it would swell up like a bicycle pumped with air.)
- December came and went, and the morning air pierced the skin. The barns stood their ground, their roofs white with frost. Wintering birds sent the echo of flapping wings through the frozen woods. The world kept in motion unchanged.
- I have this convenient tendency to rework my memories.
- The place was dark and thick with the strong aroma of coffee. There weren't many voices to be heard, only atmospheric baroque music.
- All the same, like water to the desert, the story didn't go anywhere before it dissipated.
- The trace of a smile came to his lips.
- Come December, the birds strafe overhead. And I keep getting older. (-) Although just now and then, in the depths of the night, I'll think about barns burning to the ground.
- Then it spoke, not with a stutter, but repeating certain words as if it were still trying to learn them.
- Its scales clicked against one another when it moved -- like crammed-together coffee cups rattling on a table when you nudge it.
- A look of sadness came over the monster's face as soon as I thought this, and its scales took on a purple tinge, as if to express what it was feeling. Its entire body seemed to shrink a little, too. I folded my arms to watch these changes occurring. Maybe something like this would happen whenever its feelings altered. And maybe its awful-looking exterior masked a heart that was as soft and vulnerable as a brand-new marshmallow. (...) The purple of the scales grew deeper, and the thing's eyes began to bulge as if they were sucking in the hatred I was sending them. They protruded from the creature's face like ripe green figs, and tears like red juice ran down from them, splattering on the floor.
- ...the bulging figs of its eyes.
- See then, you little monster, you have no idea what a woman is. There's no end to the number of things I can think of to do to you. But soon the monster's outlines began to fade, and even its strong green nose shriveled up until it was no bigger than a worm. Writhing on the floor, the monster tried to move its mouth and speak to me, struggling to open its lips as if it wanted to leave me some final message, to convey some ancient wisdom, some crucial bit of knowledge that it had forgotten to impart to me. Before that could happen, the mouth attained a painful stillness, and soon it went out of focus and disappeared. The monster now looked like nothing more than a pale evening shadow. All that remained, suspended in the air, were its mournful, bloated eyes. That won't do any good, I thought to it. You can look all you want, but you can't say a thing. You can't do a thing. Your existence is over, finished, done. Soon the eyes dissolved into emptiness, and the room filled with the darkness of night.
- "You've got such a narrow view of things," she said. (-) At the time, we were talking about spaghetti. She was telling me that I had a narrow view of spaghetti. (-) This was not all she had in mind, of course. Her fiance was lurking somewhere just beyond the spaghetti, and she was really talking about him. We were fighting over him by proxy.
- "Now, forgive me for repeating myself, but it just so happens that I have my own life. I know what I like and I know what I don't like. It's as simple as that." (-) "Okay, but you don't have to hurt people. Why don't you try a little harder? Why don't you look at the good side? Why don't you at least show some restraint? Why don't you grow up?"
- "Are you some kind of connoisseur of sunsets?"
- I sighed for what must have been the sixteenth time that day.
- She cried for two hours straight, never moving. I could hardly believe the body was capable of producing such quantities of tears.
- It was another beautiful, cloudless day, just like yesterday. In fact, it was like a continuation of yesterday, and my life seemed to be starting up again, too, after a halftime break.
- She was getting to be more and more like our mother. Women are like salmon: In the end, they all swim back to the same place.
- Noboru Watanabe came riding up at three. Astride his trusty cycle, he arrived with the gentle zephyrs of springtime.
- "Deep down, I'm really a shy person." (-) "No, you're just plain arrogant." (-) "I'm shy and arrogant," I explained to Noboru Watanabe as I poured myself more wine.
- There was something to be said for watching TV with the sound off.
- ...she went to sleep as if she couldn't wait to be unconscious.
- Outside, my alcoholic high tore through me like a midnight freight. I felt like shit. My joints creaked like the Tin Woodman's in The Wizard of Oz.
- What the hell was I doing these days? The same thing over and over. But each repetition was worse than the one before.
- For a while, neither of us said anything. We sat there, occasionally tipping back our beer cans. The leaves of the potted plants on the balcony fluttered in the breeze, and beyond them floated the misty semicircle of the moon.
- When I closed my eyes, sleep floated down on me like a dark, silent net.
- Greetings. The winter cold diminishes with each passing day, and now the sunlight hints at the subtle scent of springtime. I trust that you are well.
- (describing the other person's writing/letters) ...I felt: so rich with the genuine sense of daily living. How vividly it conveyed the warm aromas of the kitchen, the lively tapping of the knife against the cutting board as it sliced through the onion!
- Your angle on the problem is a good one, to be sure, but the reader can't vividly grasp the scene. Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing.
- And so it happened that I spent a part of my early 20s like a crippled walrus in a warmish harem of letters.
- And what amazingly varied letters they were! Boring letters, funny letters, sad letters. (...)but I do remember them as filled to overflowing with life in all its aspects, from the largest of questions to the tiniest of trivia. And the messages they were sending seemed to me -- to me, a 22-year-old-college student -- strangely divorced from reality, seemed at times to be utterly meaningless. Nor was this due solely to my own lack of experience. I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make. It is this that gives birth to meaning. I didn't know it then, of course, and neither did the women. This was surely one of the reasons that everything in their letters struck me as oddly two-dimensional.
- In spite of Society's rules, I decided to take her up on it. The curiosity of a young man of 22 is not to be denied.
- Once we had finished surprising each other, the usual tension of a first meeting was gone. We ate our hamburger steak and drank coffee, feeling much like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train. And speaking of trains, from the window of her 3rd-floor apartment one could see the electric train line below. The weather was lovely that day, and over the railings of the building's verandas hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance.
- Instead of answering, she smiled -- a tiny smile.
- A train passed below the window with a dry clatter.
- For a while, without speaking, she looked at the clock on the wall. She seemed almost to be examining the flow of time.
- 10 years have gone by, but whenever I pass her neighborhood on the Odakyu Line I think of her and of her crisply grilled hamburger steak. I look out at the buildings ranged along the tracks and ask myself which window and try to figure out where it could have been. But I can never remember. (-) Perhaps she doesn't live there anymore. But if she does, she is probably still listening to that same Burt Bacharach record on the other side of the window. (-) Should I have slept with her? (-) That's the central question of this piece. (-) The answer is beyond me. Even now, I have no idea. There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate. All I can do is look up from the train at the windows in the buildings that might be hers. Every one of them could be her window, it sometimes seems to me, and at other times I think that none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.
- I don't like Sunday evenings. Or, rather, I don't like everything that goes with them -- that Sunday-evening state of affairs. Without fail, come Sunday evening my head starts to ache. In varying intensity each time. Maybe a third to a half of an inch into my temples, the soft flesh throbs -- as if invisible threads lead out and someone far off is yanking at the other ends. Not that it hurts so much. It ought to hurt, but strangely, it doesn't -- it's like long needles probing anesthetized areas. (-) And I hear things. Not sounds, but thick slabs of silence being dragged through the dark.
- All the more reason for the TV People to single out Sunday evening as the time to come around. Like melancholy moods, or the secretive, quiet fall of rain, they steal into the gloom of that appointed time.
- The clock ticks in my ears. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. The sound erodes everything around me, little by little, like dripping rain. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. Little by little, Sunday afternoon wears down, shrinking in scale. Just like the TV People themselves.
- The clock was a wedding gift, big and heavy -- big and heavy as time itself -- with a loud sound, too. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. All through the house you can hear it.
- The TV is brand-new. It's not in its box, but one look tells you it's new. The instructions manual and guarantee are in a plastic bag taped to the side; the power cable shines, sleek as freshly caught fish.
- I watch their activities for the longest time, until I start to think maybe it's my proportions that are off. Almost as if I were riding backward on a roller coaster, wearing strong prescription glasses. The view is dizzying, the scale all screwed up. I'm thrown off balance, my customary world is no longer absolute. That's the way the TV People make you feel.
- The screen returns to its gray, natural state. The world outside is getting dark. I hear someone calling out to someone else. Anonymous footsteps pass by down the hall, intentionally loud as ever. KRRSPUMK DUWB KRRSPUMK DUWB. A Sunday evening.
- Not to excuse myself, but you have people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if you don't doubt whether you actually exist. I look at my hands half expecting to see clear through them. I'm devastated, powerless, in a trance. My body, my mind are vanishing fast. I can't bring myself to move. It's all I can do to watch the 3 TV People deposit their television in my apartment and leave. I can't open my mouth for fear of what my voice might sound like. (-) The TV People exit and leave my alone. My sense of reality comes back to me. These hands are once again my hands. It's only then I notice that the dusk has been swallowed by darkness. I turn on the light. Then I close my eyes. (...) Meanwhile, the clock keeps tucking away the minutes. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS.
- The conference room is a haze of cigarette smoke, so I eat at my own desk.
- When I get home from work, the apartment is dark. Outside, dark clouds have swept in. It's beginning to rain. The apartment smells like rain. Night is coming on.
- On and on, reduced right-hand fingers rubbing reduced left-hand fingers, no hurry. He has that all-the-time-in-the-world nonchalance. Like a veteran TV-show host. Then he looks me in the face. (...) His voice has no perspective to it. A curious, paper-thin voice.
- ...I say. Doesn't sound like my voice, either. Strangely brittle, as if the nutrients had been strained out through a thick filter. Have I grown so old all of a sudden?
- ...says the TV People rep in a voice like a plastic-card hotel key. Flat, uninflected, it slices into me as if it were sliding through a thin slit.
- All sorts of thoughts unravel inside me, then the frayed ends come together again)
- I look at the palms of my hands. They have shrunk slightly. Ever so slightly. Power of suggestion? Maybe the light's playing tricks on me. Maybe my sense of perspective has been thrown off. Yet, my palms really do look shriveled. Hey now, wait just a minute! Let me speak. There's something I should say, I must say. I'll dry up and turn to stone if I don't. Like the others.
- I look at the telephone; I think about the telephone cord. Endless lengths of phone cable linking one telephone to another. Maybe somewhere, at some terminal of that awesome megacircuit, is my wife. Far, far away, out of my reach. I can feel her pulse. Another five minutes, I tell myself. Which way is front, which way is back? I stand up and try to say something, but no sooner have I got to my feet than the words slip away
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +