Vintage Murakami

by Haruki Murakami

  Her left arm and left leg are almost completely paralyzed, especially the leg. Having parts of the body immobilized entails various problems: last summer she had to have a painful operation to cut the tendon behind her left knee in order to straighten her crooked left leg.

  She cannot eat or drink through her mouth. She cannot yet move her tongue or jaws. Ordinarily we never notice how our tongue and jaws perform complicated maneuvers whenever we eat or drink, wholly unconsciously. Only when we lose these functions do we become acutely aware of their importance. That is Shizuko’s situation right now.

  She can swallow soft foods like yogurt and ice cream. It has taken long months of patient practice to reach this stage. Shizuko likes strawberry yogurt, sour and sweet, but unfortunately most of her nutrition is still squeezed in by tube through her nose. The air valve that was implanted in her throat while she was hooked up to an artificial respirator still remains. It’s now covered with a round metal plate—a blank souvenir of her struggle with death.

  Her brother slowly pushes Shizuko’s wheelchair out into the lounge area. She’s petite, with hair cut short at the fringe. She resembles her brother. Her complexion is good, her eyes slightly glazed as if she has only just woken up. If it wasn’t for the plastic tube coming from her nose, she probably wouldn’t look handicapped.

  Neither eye is fully open, but there is a glint to them— deep in the pupils; a gleam that led me beyond her external appearance to see an inner something that was not in pain.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Hello,” says Shizuko, though it sounds more like ehhuoh.

  I introduce myself briefly, with some help from her brother. Shizuko nods. She has been told in advance I was coming.

  “Ask her anything you want,” says Tatsuo.

  I’m at a loss. What on earth can I say?

  “Who cuts your hair for you?” is my first question.

  “Nurse,” comes the answer, or more accurately, uh-err f, though in context the word is easy enough to guess. She responds quickly, without hesitation. Her mind is there, turning over at high speed in her head, only her tongue and jaws can’t keep pace.

  For a while at first Shizuko is nervous, a little shy in front of me. Not that I could tell, but to Tatsuo the difference is obvious.

  “What’s with you today? Why so shy?” he kids her, but really, when I think about it, what young woman wouldn’t be shy about meeting someone for the first time and not looking her healthy best? And if the truth be known, I’m a little nervous myself.

  Prior to the interview, Tatsuo had talked to Shizuko about me. “Mr. Murakami, the novelist, says he wants to write about you, Shizuko, in a book. What do you think about that? Is it all right with you? Is it okay if your brother tells him about you? Can he come here to meet you?”

  Shizuko answered straightaway, “Yes.”

  Talking with her, the first thing I notice is her decisive “Yes” and “No,” the speed with which she judges things. She readily made up her mind about most things, hardly ever hesitating.

  I brought her yellow flowers in a small yellow vase. A color full of life. Sadly, however, Shizuko can’t see them. She can make things out only in very bright sunlight. She made a small motion with her head and said, “ Uann-eyhh [Can’t tell].” I just hope that some of the warmth they brought to the room—to my eyes, at least—rubs off atmospherically on her.

  She wore a pink cotton gown buttoned to the neck, a light throw over her lap from under which a stiff right hand protruded. Tatsuo, by her side, took up that hand from time to time and patted it lovingly. The hand is always there when words fail.

  “Up to now, Shizuko, you’ve spoken in short words only,” says her brother with a smile, “so from our point of view, it’s been easier to understand. Recently, though, you seem to want to speak in longer sentences, so it’s a bit harder for us to follow. I suppose that means you’re making progress, but your mouth still can’t keep up.”

  I can scarcely make out half of what she says. Tatsuo, of course, can discern lots more. The nurses even more still. “The nurses here are all young and earnest and sincere. We owe them a show of gratitude,” says Tatsuo. “They’re nice people, isn’t that right?”

  “Aayiih-ee-uh [Nice people],” agrees Shizuko.

  “But sometimes,” Tatsuo continues, “when I don’t understand what Shizuko’s saying, she gets really angry. You don’t want me to leave before I get what you’re saying, do you? Like the last time. Isn’t that right, Shizuko?”

  Silence. Embarrassed silence.

  “Hey, what are you so shy about?” Tatsuo teases her. “You said so yourself, didn’t you? You wouldn’t let Brother go before he understood.”

  At that Shizuko finally breaks into a smile. And when she smiles she really lights up. She smiles a lot more than most people, though perhaps she simply has less control over her facial muscles. I’d like to imagine that Shizuko always smiled that way, it blends in so naturally with her face. It strikes me that she and her brother probably carried on this way as children.

  “Not long ago,” says Tatsuo, “Shizuko would cry and complain—‘No, don’t go!’—when it was time for me to leave. Each time I repeated the same thing until she gradually stopped fussing: ‘Brother has to go home or else the kids will be lonely from waiting. It’s not just you, you know, ——— and ——— get lonely too.’ Eventually Shizuko got what I was saying, which is great progress, isn’t it? Though it must get awfully lonely being left here, I admit.”

  Silence.

  “Which is why I’d like to visit the hospital more often and spend longer talking to my sister,” says Tatsuo. In actual fact, however, it’s hard enough for Tatsuo to visit the hospital every other day. He has to travel fifty minutes each way back and forth from work.

  After work Tatsuo sits with his sister for an hour and talks. He holds her hand, spoon-feeds her strawberry yogurt, coaches her in conversation, fills up the blank spaces in her memory little by little: “We all went there and this is what we did . . .”

  “When the memories we share as a family get cut off and lost like this,” he says, “that’s the hardest thing to accept. It’s as if it has been cut away with a knife. . . . Sometimes when I’m going back over the past with her, my voice starts to quaver, then Shizuko asks me, ‘Brother, you okay?’ ”

  Hospital visiting hours officially end at eight P.M., but they’re less strict with Tatsuo. After the visit, he collects Shizuko’s laundry, drives the car back to the office, walks five minutes to the subway, and travels another hour, changing three times before he gets back home. By the time he gets there the kids are asleep. He’s kept up this regimen for a year and eight months now. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t exhausted; and no one can honestly say how much longer he’ll have to continue.

  Hands on the steering wheel on the way back, Tatsuo says: “If this had been caused by an accident or something, I could just about accept it. There’d have been a cause or some kind of reason. But with this totally senseless, idiotic criminal act . . . I’m at my wits’ end. I can’t take it!” He barely shakes his head, silencing any further comment from me.

  “Can you move your right hand a little for me?” I ask Shizuko. And she lifts the fingers of her right hand. I’m sure she’s trying, but the fingers move very slowly, patiently grasping, patiently extending. “If you don’t mind, would you try holding my hand?”

  “O-eh [Okay],” she says.

  I place four fingers in the palm of her tiny hand— practically the hand of a child in size—and her fingers slowly enfold them, as gently as the petals of a flower going to sleep. Soft, cushioning, girlish fingers, yet far stronger than I had anticipated. Soon they clamp tight over my hand in the way that a child sent on an errand grips that “important item” she’s not supposed to lose. There’s a strong will at work here, clearly seeking some objective. Focused, but very likely not on me; she’s after some “other” beyond me. Yet that “other” goes on a long journey and see
ms to find its way back to me. Please excuse this nebulous explanation, it’s merely a fleeting impression.

  Something in her must be trying to break out. I can feel it. A precious something. But it just can’t find an outlet. If only temporarily, she’s lost the power and means to enable it to come to the surface. And yet that something exists unharmed and intact within the walls of her inner space. When she holds someone’s hand, it’s all she can do to communicate that “this thing is here.”

  She keeps holding my hand for a very long time, until I say, “Thank you,” and slowly, little by little, her fingers unfold.

  “Shizuko never says ‘hurt’ or ‘tired,’ ” Tatsuo tells me driving back later. “She does therapy every day: arm-and-leg training, speech-training, various other programs with specialists—none of it easy, it’s tough going—but when the doctor or nurses ask her if she’s tired, only three times has she ever said ‘Yes.’ Three times.

  “That’s why—as everyone involved agrees—Shizuko has recovered as much as she has. From being unconscious on an artificial respirator to actually talking, it’s like something out of a dream.”

  “What do you want to do when you get well?” I think to ask her.

  “Aeh-ehh,” she says. I don’t understand.

  “ ‘Travel,’ maybe?” suggests Tatsuo after a moment’s thought.

  “Ehf [Yes],” concurs Shizuko with a nod.

  “And where do you want to go?” I ask.

  “Ii-yu-nii-an.” This no one understands, but with a bit of trial and error it becomes clear she means “Disneyland.”

  “Ehf,” says Shizuko with an emphatic nod.

  It’s not easy to associate “travel” with “Disneyland.” Anyone who lives in Tokyo would not generally consider an outing to Tokyo Disneyland “travel.” But in her mind, lacking an awareness of distance, going to Disneyland must be like some great adventure. It’s no different, conceptually, than if we were to set out, say, for Greenland. For a fact, going to Disneyland would be a more difficult undertaking for her in practice than for us to travel to the ends of the earth.

  Tatsuo’s two children—eight and four—remember going to Tokyo Disneyland with their auntie and tell her about it each time they visit the hospital: “It was really fun,” they say. So Disneyland as a place has become fixed in her mind as something like a symbol of freedom and health. Nobody knows if Shizuko can actually remember having been there herself. It may only be a later implanted memory. After all, she doesn’t even remember her own room where she lived for so long.

  Real or imaginary, however, Disneyland is a distinct place in her mind. We can get close to that image, but we can’t see the view she sees.

  “You want to go to Disneyland with the whole family?” I ask her.

  “Ehf,” says Shizuko perkily.

  “With your brother and sister-in-law and the kids?”

  She nods.

  Tatsuo looks at me and says, “When she can eat and drink normally with her mouth instead of that tube through her nose, then maybe we can all drive together to Disneyland again.” He gives Shizuko’s hand a little squeeze.

  “I hope that’s very very soon,” I tell Shizuko.

  Shizuko gives another nod. Her eyes are turned in my direction, but she’s seeing “something else” beyond me.

  “Well, when you get to Disneyland, what ride will you go on?” Tatsuo prompts.

  “ ‘Roller coaster’?” I interpret.

  “Space Mountain!” Tatsuo chimes in. “Yeah, you always did like that one.”

  That evening when I visited the hospital, I’d wanted somehow to encourage her—but how? I’d thought it was up to me, but it wasn’t that way at all; no need even to think about giving her encouragement. In the end, it was she who gave me encouragement.

  In the course of writing this book, I’ve given a lot of serious thought to the Big Question: what does it mean to be alive? If I were in Shizuko’s place, would I have the willpower to live as fully as she? Would I have the courage, or the persistence and determination? Could I hold someone’s hand with such warmth and strength? Would the love of others save me? I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not so sure.

  People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, where are they to go for salvation? As I talked to Shizuko I tried to look into her eyes now and then. Just what did she see? What lit up those eyes? If ever she gets well enough to speak unhindered, that’s something I’d want to ask: “That day I came to visit, what did you see?”

  But that day is still far off. Before that comes Disneyland.

  —Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

  HONEY PIE

  1

  “So Masakichi got his paws full of honey—way more honey than he could eat by himself—and he put it in a bucket, and do-o-o-wn the mountain he went, all the way to the town to sell his honey. Masakichi was the all-time Number One honey bear.”

  “Do bears have buckets?” Sala asked.

  “Masakichi just happened to have one,” Junpei explained. “He found it lying in the road, and he figured it would come in handy sometime.”

  “And it did.”

  “It really did. So Masakichi the Bear went to town and found a spot for himself in the square. He put up a sign: Deeelicious Honey. All Natural. One Cup ¥ 200.”

  “Can bears write?”

  “No, of course not,” Junpei said. “There was a nice old man with a pencil sitting next to him, and he asked him to write it.”

  “Can bears count money?”

  “Absolutely. Masakichi lived with people when he was just a cub, and they taught him how to talk and count money and stuff. Anyway, he was a very talented bear.”

  “Oh, so he was a little different from ordinary bears.”

  “Well, yes, just a little. Masakichi was a kind of special bear. And so the other bears, who weren’t so special, tended to shun him.”

  “Shun him?”

  “Yeah, they’d go like, ‘Hey, what’s with this guy, acting so special?’ and keep away from him. Especially Tonkichi the tough guy. He really hated Masakichi.”

  “Poor Masakichi!”

  “Yeah, really. Meanwhile, Masakichi looked just like a bear, and so the people would say, ‘OK, he knows how to count, and he can talk and all, but when you get right down to it he’s still a bear.’ So Masakichi didn’t really belong to either world—the bear world or the people world.”

  “Poor, poor Masakichi! Didn’t he have any friends?”

  “Not one. Bears don’t go to school, you know, so there’s no place for them to make friends.”

  “I have friends,” Sala said. “In preschool.”

  “Of course you do,” Junpei said.

  “Do you have friends, Jun?” “Uncle Junpei” was too long for her, so Sala just called him “Jun.”

  “Your daddy is my absolute bestest friend from a long, long time ago. And so’s your mommy.”

  “It’s good to have friends.”

  “It is good,” Junpei said. “You’re right about that.”

  Junpei often made up stories for Sala when she went to bed. And whenever she didn’t understand something, she would ask him to explain. Junpei gave a lot of thought to his answers. Sala’s questions were always sharp and interesting, and while he was thinking about them he could also come up with new twists to the story.

  Sayoko brought a glass of warm milk.

  “Junpei is telling me the story of Masakichi the bear,” Sala said. “He’s the all-time Number One honey bear, but he doesn’t have any friends.”

  “Oh really? Is he a big bear?” Sayoko asked.

  Sala gave Junpei an uneasy look. “Is Masakichi big?”

  “Not so big,” he said. “In fact, he’s kind of on the small side. For a bear. He’s just about your size, Sala. And he’s a very sweet-tempered little guy. When he listens to music, he doesn’t listen to rock or punk or that kind of stuff. He likes to listen to Schubert all by himself.�
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  Sayoko hummed a little “Trout.”

  “He listens to music?” Sala asked. “Does he have a CD player or something?”

  “He found a boom box lying on the ground one day. He picked it up and brought it home.”

  “How come all this stuff just happens to be lying around in the mountains?” Sala asked with a note of suspicion.

  “Well, it’s a very, very steep mountain, and the hikers get all faint and dizzy, and they throw away tons of stuff they don’t need. Right there by the road, like, ‘Oh man, this pack is so heavy, I feel like I’m gonna die! I don’t need this bucket anymore. I don’t need this boom box anymore.’ Like that. So Masakichi finds everything he needs lying in the road.”

  “Mommy knows just how they feel,” Sayoko said. “Sometimes you want to throw everything away.”

  “Not me,” Sala said.

  “That’s ’cause you’re such a greedy little thing,” Sayoko said.

  “I am not greedy,” Sala protested.

  “No,” Junpei said, finding a gentler way to put it: “You’re just young and full of energy, Sala. Now hurry and drink your milk so I can tell you the rest of the story.”

  “OK,” she said, wrapping her little hands around the glass and drinking the warm milk with great care. Then she asked, “How come Masakichi doesn’t make honey pies and sell them? I think the people in the town would like that better than just plain honey.”

  “An excellent point,” Sayoko said with a smile. “Think of the profit margin!”

  “Ah, yes, creating new markets through value added,” Junpei said. “This girl will be a real entrepreneur someday.”

  I T was almost two A.M. by the time Sala went back to bed. Junpei and Sayoko checked to make sure she was asleep, then shared a can of beer at the kitchen table. Sayoko wasn’t much of a drinker, and Junpei had to drive home.

  “Sorry for dragging you out in the middle of the night,” she said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m totally exhausted, and you’re the only one who can calm her down. There was no way I was going to call Takatsuki.”