After Dark

by Haruki Murakami

  “Think you can fix it in time?”

  “Of course. You’re talking to a top-seeded pro here. I score at least par on my worst days. And if we can’t have our meeting tomorrow morning, we might lose our last chance to buy out Microsoft.”

  “You’re gonna buy out Microsoft?!”

  “Just kidding,” Shirakawa says. “Anyhow, I think it’ll take me another hour. I’ll call a cab and be home by four thirty, maybe.”

  “I’ll probably be asleep by then. I’ve gotta get up at six and make the kids’ lunches.”

  “And when you get up, I’ll be sound asleep.”

  “And when you get up, I’ll be eating lunch at the office.”

  “And when you get home, I’ll be settling down to do serious work.”

  “Here we go again: never meeting.”

  “I should be getting back to a more reasonable schedule next week. One of the guys’ll be coming back from a business trip, and the kinks in the new system should be ironed out.”

  “Really?”

  “Probably,” Shirakawa says.

  “It may be my imagination, but I seem to recall you saying the exact same words a month ago.”

  “Yeah, I cut and pasted them in just now.”

  His wife sighs. “I hope it works out this time. I’d like to have a meal together once in a while, and maybe go to sleep at the same time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t work too hard.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll sink that last perfect putt, hear the crowd applaud, and come home.”

  “Okay, then…”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, wait a second.”

  “Huh?”

  “I hate to ask a top-seeded pro to do something like this, but on the way home can you stop by a convenience store for a carton of milk? Takanashi low-fat if they’ve got it.”

  “No problem,” he says. “Takanashi low-fat.”

  Shirakawa cuts the connection and checks his watch. He picks up the mug on his desk and takes a sip of cold coffee. The mug has an Intel Inside logo. He restarts the CD player and flexes his right hand in time to Bach. He takes a deep breath and sucks in a new lungful of air. Then he flicks a switch in his head and gets back to his interrupted work. Once again the single most important thing for him is how to get consistently from point A to point B over the shortest possible distance.

  The interior of a convenience store. Cartons of Takanashi low-fat milk line the dairy case. Young jazz musician Takahashi softly whistles “Five Spot After Dark” as he inspects the contents of the case. He carries only a shopping basket. His hand reaches out, grasps a carton of milk, but he notices that it is low-fat, and he frowns. This could well be a fundamental moral problem for him, not just a question of the fat content of milk. He returns the low-fat to its place on the shelf and picks up a neighboring regular. He checks the expiration date and puts the carton into his basket.

  Next he moves on to the fruit case and picks up an apple. This he inspects from several angles beneath the ceiling lights. It is not quite good enough. He puts it back and picks up another apple, subjecting it to the same kind of scrutiny. He repeats the process several times until he finds one that he can at least accept, if not be wholly satisfied with. Milk and apples seem to have a special significance for him. He heads for the checkout counter, but on the way he notices some vinyl-wrapped fish cakes and picks one up. After checking the expiration date printed on the corner of the bag, he puts it into his basket. He pays the cashier and, shoving the change into his pants pocket, leaves the store.

  Sitting on a nearby guardrail, he carefully polishes the apple with his shirttail. The temperature must have dropped: his breath is faintly white in the night air. He gulps the milk down, almost all in a single breath, after which he munches on the apple. He chews each mouthful with care, thinking. It takes time for him to eat the whole apple this way. He wipes his mouth with a wrinkled handkerchief, puts the milk carton and apple core into a vinyl sack, and goes over to throw them away in a trash bin outside the store. The fish cake he puts into his coat pocket. After checking the time on his orange Swatch, he reaches both arms straight up in a big stretch.

  When he is through with all this, he chooses a direction and begins walking.

  8

  Our viewpoint has returned to Eri Asai’s room. A quick scan reveals nothing changed. The night has deepened with the passage of time, however, and the silence is one degree heavier.

  No, something has changed. Greatly.

  The change is immediately obvious. The bed is empty. Eri Asai is gone. The bedding is undisturbed, but it is not as if she woke up and left while we were away. The bed is so perfectly made, there is no sign she was sleeping in it until a few moments before. This is strange. What could have happened?

  We look around.

  The TV is still on. It displays the same room it was showing before. A large, unfurnished room. Ordinary fluorescent lights. Linoleum floor. The picture, however, has stabilized, almost to the point of unrecognizability. The static is gone, and instead of bleeding into each other, the images have clear, sharp outlines. The channel connection—wherever it might be tuned in to—is steady. Like the light of the full moon pouring down on an uninhabited grassland, the TV’s bright screen illuminates the room. Everything in the room, without exception, is more or less under the influence of the magnetic force emitted by the television set.

  The TV screen. The Man with No Face is still sitting in the chair. Brown suit, black shoes, white dust, glossy mask adhering to his face. His posture, too, is unchanged since we last saw him. Back straight, hands on knees, face angled slightly downward, he stares at something straight ahead of him. His eyes are hidden by the mask, but we can tell they are locked on something. What could he be staring at with such intensity? As if responding to our thoughts, the TV camera begins to move along his line of vision. At the point of focus stands a bed, a single bed made of unadorned wood, and in it sleeps Eri Asai.

  We look at the empty bed in this room and at the bed on the TV screen. We compare them in detail. The conclusion is inescapable: they are the exact same bed. The covers are exactly the same. But one bed is on the TV screen and the other is in this room. And in the TV bed, Eri Asai lies asleep.

  We suppose that the other one is the real bed. It was transported, with Eri, to the other side while we were looking elsewhere (over two hours have passed since we left this room). All we have here is a substitute that was left in place of the real bed—perhaps as a sign intended to fill the empty space that should be here.

  In the bed in that other world, Eri continues sleeping soundly, as she did when she was in this room—just as beautifully, just as deeply. She is not aware that some hand has carried her (or perhaps we should say her body) into the TV screen. The blinding glare of the ceiling’s fluorescent lamps does not penetrate to the bottom of the sea trench in which she sleeps.

  The Man with No Face is watching over Eri with eyes that are themselves hidden from view behind their shroud. He aims hidden ears toward her with unwavering attention. Both Eri and the Man with No Face intently maintain their respective poses. Like animals hiding in camouflage, they curtail their breathing, lower their body temperature, maintain total silence, hold their muscles in check, and block out their portals of awareness. We seem to be looking at a picture that has been paused, which is not in fact the case. This is a live image being sent to us in real time. In both that room and this room, time is passing at the same uniform rate. Both are immersed in the same temporality. We know this from the occasional slow rising and falling of the man’s shoulders. Wherever the intention of each might lie, we are together being carried along at the same speed down the same river of time.

  9

  Skylark interior. Fewer customers than before. The noisy student group is gone. Mari is sitting by the window, reading again. Her glasses are off. Her hat is on the table. Her bag and varsity jacket are on the next seat. The table holds a plate of littl
e square sandwiches and a cup of herbal tea. The sandwiches are half gone.

  Takahashi comes in. He is not carrying anything. He looks around, sees Mari, and heads straight for her table.

  “Hey, how’s it goin’?”

  Mari looks up, registers that it is Takahashi, and gives him a little nod. She doesn’t say anything.

  “Okay if I join you?” he asks.

  “Fine,” she says, her voice neutral.

  He sits down facing her. He takes off his coat and yanks up the sleeves of his sweater. The waitress comes and takes his order: coffee.

  Takahashi looks at his watch. “Three a.m. This is the darkest part of the night—and the hardest part. You’re not sleepy?”

  “Not especially.”

  “I didn’t sleep much last night. Had a tough report to write.”

  Mari doesn’t say anything.

  “Kaoru told me you’d probably be here.”

  Mari nods.

  Takahashi says, “Sorry for putting you through that. The Chinese girl, I mean. I was practicing and Kaoru called me on my cell phone and asked me if I knew anybody who spoke Chinese. None of us could, of course, but then I thought of you. I told her she’d find this girl named Mari Asai in Denny’s, and what you look like and that you’re fluent in Chinese. I hope it wasn’t too big a pain for you.”

  Mari rubs the marks her glasses left on her skin. “No, don’t worry.”

  “Kaoru says you were a tremendous help. She was really grateful. I think she likes you.”

  Mari changes the subject. “You finished practicing?”

  “Taking a break,” Takahashi says. “I wanted to wake myself up with some hot coffee—and say thanks to you. I was worried about the interruption.”

  “What interruption?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I figured it must have interrupted something you were doing.”

  “Do you enjoy performing music?” Mari asks.

  “Yeah. It’s the next-best thing to flying through the air.”

  “Oh? Have you flown through the air?”

  Takahashi smiles. He holds the smile while inserting a pause. “Not all by myself, no,” he says. “It’s just a figure of speech.”

  “Are you planning to be a professional musician?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not that talented. I love to play, but I could never make a living at it. There’s a big difference between playing well and playing really creatively. I think I’m pretty good on my instrument. People say they like my playing, and I enjoy hearing that, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m gonna quit the band at the end of the month and basically cut my ties with music.”

  “What do you mean, ‘playing really creatively’? Can you give me a concrete example?”

  “Hmm, let’s see…You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It’s giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.”

  “Sounds hard.”

  “It is hard,” Takahashi says. “That’s why I’m getting off. I’m gonna change trains at the next station.”

  “You won’t even touch your instrument anymore?”

  He turns his hands palm-upward on the table. “Maybe not.”

  “Gonna take a job?”

  Takahashi shakes his head again. “No, that I’m not going to do.”

  After a pause, Mari asks, “Then what are you going to do?”

  “Study law seriously. Take the National Bar Exam.”

  Mari keeps silent, but her curiosity seems to have been piqued.

  “It’ll take a while, I suppose,” he says. “Officially, I’ve been in pre-law all along, but the band is all I’ve ever thought about. I’ve been studying law like it was just another subject. Even if I change my attitude and start studying hard now, it won’t be easy to catch up. Life’s not that simple.”

  The waitress brings his coffee. Takahashi adds cream, clanks his spoon around in the cup, and drinks.

  Then he says, “To tell you the truth, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever wanted to study something seriously. I’ve never had bad grades. They weren’t especially good, but they weren’t bad, either. I could always get the point of things where it really mattered, so I could always manage with the grades. I’m good at that. Which is why I got into a pretty good school, and if I keep up what I’m doing now, I can probably get a job at a pretty good company. So then I’ll probably make a pretty good marriage and have a pretty good home…you see? But now I’m sick of the whole thing. All of a sudden.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I suddenly start thinking I wanted to study seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  Holding his coffee cup between his hands, Takahashi narrows his eyes and looks at her as if peeking into a room through a crack in a window. “Are you asking because you really want an answer?”

  “Of course. Don’t people usually ask questions because they want answers?”

  “Logically, yes. But some people ask questions just to be polite.”

  “I don’t know. Why would I have to ask you questions just to be polite?”

  “Well, true.” Takahashi thought about this a moment and returned his cup to his saucer with a dry clink. “Okay. Do you want the long version or the short version?”

  “Medium.”

  “You got it. One medium-size answer coming up.”

  Takahashi took a moment to get his thoughts in order.

  “I attended a few trials this year between April and June. In the Tokyo District Court in Kasumigaseki. It was an assignment for a seminar: to sit in on a number of trials and write a report. Uh…have you ever been to a trial?”

  Mari shakes her head.

  Takahashi says, “The court is like a cinema complex. They’ve got this big board near the entrance where they list all the trials and their starting times like a program guide, and you pick one that looks like it might be interesting to you and you go and sit there as an observer. Anybody can get in. You just can’t bring in any cameras or tape recorders. Or food. And you’re not allowed to talk. Plus the seats are cramped, and if you doze off the bailiff gets after you. But you can’t complain: the admission is free.”

  Takahashi pauses before continuing.

  “I mostly attended criminal trials—assault and bodily injury, arson, robbery, and murder. Bad guys who did bad things and got caught and put on trial and punished. Those are the easy ones to understand, right? With economically or ideologically motivated crimes, you have to know the background, and things can get complicated. It’s hard to tell good from bad. All I wanted to do was write my paper, get a halfway decent grade, and that would be that. Like a grade-school kid’s summer home- work assignment: keep a morning-glory observation diary.”

  Takahashi breaks off talking at that point. His hands are on the table. He looks at his own palms.

  “After I’d been to the court a few times, though, and observed a few cases, I started to become strangely interested in viewing the events that were being judged and the people who were involved in the events. Maybe I should say I found myself less and less able to see these as other people’s problems. It was a very weird feeling. I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they’re a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there’s this thick, high wall. At least, that’s how I saw it at first. I mean, there’s no way I’m gonna commit those vicious crimes. I’m a pacifist, a good- natured guy, I’ve never laid a hand on anybody since I was a kid. Which is why I was able to view a trial from on high as a total spectator.”

  Takahashi raises his face and looks at Mari. Then he chooses his words carefully.

  “As I sat in court, though, and listened to the testimonies of the witnesses and the speeches of the prosecutors and the ar
guments of the defense attorneys and the statements of the defendants, I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mâché. The second I leaned on it, I’d probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe it’s that the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven’t noticed. That’s how I started to feel. It’s hard to put into words.”

  Takahashi ran his finger around the perimeter of his coffee cup.

  “So once I started having thoughts like this, everything began looking different to me. To my eyes, this system I was observing, this ‘trial’ thing itself, began to take on the appearance of some special, weird creature.”

  “Weird creature?”

  “Like, say, an octopus. A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean. I’m sitting there listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.”

  Mari’s eyes are locked on his.

  Takahashi takes a sip of his coffee. “Am I being a little too grim here?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m listening,” Mari says.

  Takahashi returns his cup to its saucer. “Two years ago, there was this case of arson and murder in Tachikawa. A guy killed an old couple with an axe, grabbed their bank- book, and set fire to their house to get rid of the evidence. It was a windy night, and four houses burned down. The guy was sentenced to death. In terms of current Japanese legal precedent, it was the obvious sentence for a case like that. Any time you murder two or more people, the death sentence is almost automatic. Hanging. And this guy was guilty of arson, too. Plus, he was a real bastard. He had been locked up any number of times, usually for something violent. His family had given up on him years ago. He was a drug addict, and every time they let him out of jail, he’d commit another crime. In this case, he didn’t show an ounce of remorse. An appeal would have been rejected for sure. His lawyer, a public defender, knew from the start he was going to lose. So no one could be surprised when they came back with a death sentence, and in fact nobody was surprised. I sat there listening to the judge read the verdict, taking notes, and thinking how obvious it was. After the trial, I took the subway home from Kasumigaseki, sat down at my desk, and started putting my notes in order when all of a sudden I got this absolutely hopeless feeling. I don’t know how to put it: it was like the whole world’s electricity supply suffered a voltage drop. Everything got one step darker, one step colder. Little tremors started going through my body, and I couldn’t stop shivering. Soon I even felt my eyes tearing up. Why should that be? I can’t explain it. Why did I have to lose it like that just because that guy got the death penalty? I mean, he was a total scumbag, beyond any hope of redemption. Between him and me, there shouldn’t have been anything in common, no link at all. And yet, I had this deep emotional upset. Why should that have been?”