South of the Border, West of the Sun

by Haruki Murakami

  “Do you really like me?” Izumi asked me in a small voice.

  “Sure I do,” I replied. “Of course I like you.”

  Lips pursed, she looked straight into my face. She looked at me so long it made me uneasy.

  “I like you too, you know,” she said after a while.

  But, I thought.

  “But,” she said, sure enough, “there’s no need to rush.”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t be too impatient. I have my own pace. I’m not that clever a person. I need lots of time to prepare for things. Can you wait?”

  Once again I nodded silently.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “I promise.”

  “You won’t hurt me?”

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  She looked down at her shoes for a while. Plain black loafers. Compared to mine, lined up next to them, they were as tiny as toys.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “These days I feel like a snail without a shell.”

  “I’m scared too,” I said. “I feel like a frog without any webs.”

  She looked up and smiled.

  Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog. I held her close against me. Our tongues met lightly. I felt her breasts through her blouse. She didn’t resist. She just closed her eyes and sighed. Her breasts were small and fit comfortably in the palm of my hand, as if designed solely for that purpose. She placed her palm above my heart, and the feel of her hand and the beat of my heart became one. She’s not Shimamoto, I told myself. She can’t give me what Shimamoto gave. But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her?

  But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

  3

  Izumi and I went out for more than a year. We dated once a week, went to movies, studied together at the library, or just took long aimless walks. As far as sex goes, though, we never made it all the way. About twice a month I had her over to my house when my parents were out and we held each other on my bed. But she never took all her clothes off. You never know when someone might come back, she insisted. Overly cautious, you could call her. She wasn’t scared; she just hated to be pushed into some potentially embarrassing situation.

  So I always had to hold her with her clothes all on and fumble around as best I could beneath her underwear.

  “Slow down,” she told me whenever my disappointment showed. “I need more time. Please.”

  Actually, I wasn’t in that much of a rush myself. I was just confused, and disappointed by all sorts of things. Of course, I liked her and was grateful that she was my girlfriend. If she hadn’t been with me, my teenage years would have been completely stale and colorless. She was basically an honest, pleasant girl, someone people liked. But our interests were worlds apart. She couldn’t understand the books I read or the music I listened to, so we couldn’t talk as equals on these topics. In this sense, my relationship with her differed dramatically from that with Shimamoto.

  But when I sat beside her and touched her fingers, a natural warmth welled up inside me. I could tell her anything. I loved kissing her eyelids and just above her lips. I also liked to push her hair up and kiss those tiny ears of hers, which invariably sent her into a giggling fit. Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.

  She had her faults, for sure. She was pretty hard-headed and could have done with a bit more in the imagination department. She wasn’t about to take even one step outside the comfortable world she was raised in. She never got so involved in something that she’d totally forget about eating and sleeping. And she loved and respected her parents. The opinions she did put forth–the standard opinions of a sixteen-, seventeen- year-old girl–were, not surprisingly, pretty insipid. On the plus side, I never once heard her bad-mouth another person. And she never bored me with conceited talk. She liked me and was good to me. She listened carefully to what I had to say and cheered me up. I talked a lot about myself and my future, what I wanted to become, the kind of person I hoped to be. A young boy’s narcissistic fairy tales. But she listened intently. “I know you’ll be a wonderful person when you grow up. There is something special about you,” Izumi told me. And she was serious. No one had ever told me that before.

  And holding her–even with her clothes on–was fantastic. What confused and disappointed me, though, was that I could never discover within her something special that existed just for me. A list of her good qualities far outstripped a list of her faults, and certainly far outshone my own, yet there was something missing, something absolutely vital. If only I’d been able to pin down what that was, I know we would have ended up sleeping together. I wouldn’t have held back forever. Even if it had taken a long time, I would have persuaded her that it was absolutely necessary for her to sleep with me. But I lacked the confidence to see this through. I was just a rash seventeen-year-old whose head was crammed full of lust and curiosity. But in that head of mine I still knew that if she didn’t want to have sex, I shouldn’t try to force the issue. I had to wait patiently for the right time.

  I did, though, hold Izumi naked in my arms one time. I can’t stand holding you with your clothes on, I pleaded. If you don’t want to have sex, that’s okay. But I want to see your body, I want to hold you with nothing on. I have to, and I can’t bear it any longer.

  Izumi thought for a while and then said that if it was what I really wanted, she didn’t mind. “But promise me, okay?” She looked at me seriously. “That’s all you’ll do. Don’t do anything I don’t want to.”

  She came over to my house on a beautiful clear Sunday in the beginning of November. A bit chilly, though. My parents had to go to a memorial service for someone on my father’s side of the family, and actually I should have attended with them. I told them I had to study for a test, and stayed home alone. They weren’t supposed to return until that night. Izumi came over in the afternoon. We held each other in my bed, and I took her clothes off. She closed her eyes and let me undress her. It wasn’t easy. I’m all thumbs to begin with, and girls’ clothes are a pain. Halfway through, Izumi opened her eyes and took over. She had on light-blue panties and a matching bra. She probably bought these specially for the occasion; up till then her underwear was always the kind mothers bought their high-school-age girls. Finally I undressed myself.

  I held her naked body and kissed her neck and breasts. I stroked her smooth skin and breathed in its fragrance. Holding each other, naked like this, was out of this world. I felt if I didn’t go inside her I’d go insane. But she pushed me firmly away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Instead, she took my penis in her mouth and licked it all over. She’d never done that before. Over and over she drew her tongue over the tip of my penis, until I couldn’t think straight, and I came.

  Afterward, I held her close, caressing every inch of her body. Her body bathed in the autumn light was beautiful, and I kissed her all over. It was truly a gorgeous afternoon. We held each other tight many times, and I came again and again. Each time I came, she went to the bathroom to rinse her mouth.

  “What a weird sensation.” She laughed.

  I had gone out with Izumi for just over a year, but that was without a doubt the happiest time we ever spent together. Naked, we had nothing to hide. I felt I knew more about her than ever before, and she must have felt the same. What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.

  Izumi lay still for a long while, her head nestled on my chest as if she were listening to my heartbeat. I stroked her hair. I was seventeen, healthy, on the verge of becoming an adult. Wonderful is
the only word for it.

  Around four, just as she was getting dressed to leave, the doorbell rang. At first I just ignored it. I had no idea who it was; if I didn’t answer it whoever it was would surely give up and go away. But the doorbell rang on, insistent. Damn, I thought

  “Are your parents back?” Izumi asked, blanching. She was out of bed, hurriedly gathering up her clothes.

  “Don’t worry. They can’t be home this early. And they have a key, so they wouldn’t ring the doorbell.”

  “My shoes!” she said.

  “Shoes?”

  “My shoes are just inside the entrance.”

  I threw on my clothes, rushed downstairs, and tossed her shoes inside the entry closet. When I opened the door, my aunt was standing there. My mother’s younger sister, who lived about an hour’s train ride away and visited every once in a while.

  “What in the world were you doing? I’ve been ringing the bell forever,” she said.

  “I was listening to music with headphones, so I didn’t hear you,” I replied. “My parents are out—they went to a memorial service. They won’t be back till late tonight I guess you know that, though.”

  “They told me. I was running an errand in the neighborhood and I knew you were home studying, so I thought I’d cook dinner for you. I’ve already shopped.”

  “I can make dinner myself. I’m not a child, you know,” I said.

  “But I’ve bought everything. And you’re busy, right? I’ll just make dinner while you study.”

  Oh God, I thought I wanted to curl up and die. Now how was Izumi going to get home? In my house you had to pass through the living room in order to get to the front door, then pass by the kitchen window to get to the gate. Of course, I could introduce Izumi as a friend who came over to see me, but I was supposed to be studying hard for an exam. If it came out that I had a girl over, there’d be hell to pay. I couldn’t very well ask my aunt to keep it a secret from my parents. My aunt wasn’t a bad person, but keeping secrets was definitely not one of her strong points.

  While my aunt was in the kitchen getting her purchases out of the bags, I took Izumi’s shoes upstairs. She was completely dressed. I explained the situation to her.

  She turned pale. “What in the world am I supposed to do? What if I can’t get out of here? You know I have to be home every night by dinnertime. If I don’t, I’ll be in big trouble.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure something out,” I said, trying to calm her down. But actually I was just as clueless about the next step.

  “And I can’t find one of my garter belt clasps. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Your garter belt clasp?” I asked.

  “A little metal thing, about this big.”

  I scoured the room, from the floor to the top of my bed. But I couldn’t find it

  “Sorry. Couldn’t you skip wearing your stockings just this once?” I asked.

  I went into the kitchen, where my aunt was chopping vegetables. We need some salad oil, she said, and asked me to go out to buy some. I couldn’t refuse, so I rode my bike over to a nearby store. It was already growing dark outside. At this rate Izumi might be stuck in my house forever. I had to do something before my parents got home.

  “I think our only chance is for you to slip out while my aunt’s in the bathroom,” I told Izumi.

  “You really think it’ll work?”

  “Let’s give it a shot. We can’t sit around like this, twiddling our thumbs.”

  I’d wait downstairs till my aunt went to the bathroom, then clap my hands loudly twice. Izumi would come downstairs, put on her shoes, and leave. If she’d made her escape okay, she would call me from a nearby pay phone.

  My aunt sang happily as she sliced vegetables, made miso soup, and fried up some eggs. But no matter how much time passed, she didn’t take a bathroom break. For all I knew, she might be listed in the Guinness Book, under World’s Biggest Bladder. I was about to give up, when she took off her apron and left the kitchen. As soon as I saw she was in the bathroom, I raced to the living room and clapped twice, hard. Izumi tiptoed downstairs, shoes in hand, quickly slipped them on, and as quietly as she could snuck out the front door. I went to the kitchen to make sure she got out the front gate okay. A second later, my aunt came out of the bathroom. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Five minutes afterward, Izumi called me. Telling my aunt I’d be back in fifteen minutes, I went out. Izumi was standing in front of the pay phone.

  “I hate this,” she said before I could get out a word. “I don’t ever want to do this again.”

  I couldn’t blame her for being angry and upset. I led her to the park near the station and sat her down on a bench. And gently held her hand. Over her red sweater she had on a beige coat. I fondly recalled what lay beneath.

  “But today was beautiful. I mean until my aunt showed up. Don’t you think so?” I asked.

  “Of course I enjoyed it. Every time I’m with you I have a wonderful time. But every time, afterward, I get confused.”

  “About what?”

  “The future. After I graduate from high school you’ll go to college in Tokyo, and I’ll stay here. What’s going to happen to us?”

  I’d already decided to go to a college in Tokyo after I left high school. I was dying to get out of my hometown, to live on my own away from my parents. My GPA wasn’t that great, but in the subjects I did like I made pretty good grades without cracking a book, so getting into a private college would be no big deal, seeing as how their exams covered only a couple of subjects. But there was no way Izumi would be joining me in Tokyo. Her parents wanted to keep her close at hand, and she wasn’t exactly the rebellious type. So she wanted me to stay put. We have a good college here, she argued. Why do you have to go all the way to Tokyo? If I promised not to go to Tokyo, I’m sure she would have slept with me.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going off to a foreign country. It’s only three hours away. And college vacations are long, so three or four months of the year I’ll be here.” I’d explained it to her a dozen times.

  “But if you leave here you’ll forget all about me. And you’ll find another girlfriend,” she said. I’d heard these lines at least a dozen times too.

  I told her that wouldn’t happen. I like you a lot, I said, so how can I forget you that easily? But I wasn’t so sure. A simple change of scenery can bring about powerful shifts in the flow of time and emotions: exactly what had happened to Shimamoto and me. We might have been very close, but moving down the road a couple of miles was all it took for us to go our separate ways. I liked her a lot and she told me to come see her. But in the end I stopped going.

  “There’s one thing I just can’t understand,” Izumi said. “You say you like me. And you want to take care of me. But sometimes I can’t figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

  Izumi took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and wiped away her tears. With a start, I realized she’d been crying for some time. I had no idea what to say, so I sat waiting for her to continue.

  “You prefer to think things over all by yourself, and you don’t like people peeking inside your head. Maybe that’s because you’re an only child. You’re used to thinking and acting alone. You figure that as long as you understand something, that’s enough.” She shook her head. “And that makes me afraid. I feel abandoned.”

  Only child. I hadn’t heard those words in a long while. In elementary school the words had hurt me. But Izumi was using them in a different sense. Her “only child” didn’t mean a pampered, spoiled kid but spoke to my isolated ego, which kept the world at arm’s length. She wasn’t blaming me. The situation just made her very sad.

  “I can’t tell you how happy I was when we held each other. It gave me hope, and I thought, who knows, maybe everything will work out,” she said as we bade each other goodbye. “But life isn’t that easy, is it.”

  On the way back from the station, I mulled over what she’d said.
It made sense. I wasn’t used to opening up to others. She was opening up to me, but I couldn’t do the same. I really did like her, yet still something held me back.

  I’d walked the road from the train station home a thousand times, but now it was like a foreign town. I couldn’t shake the image of Izumi’s naked body: her taut nipples, her wisp of pubic hair, her soft thighs. And eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer. I bought some cigarettes from a vending machine, went back to the park where we’d talked, and lit a cigarette to calm down.

  If only my aunt hadn’t barged in on us, things might have worked out better. If nothing had disturbed us, we could have had a pleasanter goodbye. We would have been even happier. But if my aunt hadn’t come by, someday something similar was bound to happen. If not today, then tomorrow. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t convince her this was inevitable. Because I couldn’t convince myself.

  As the sun set, the wind grew cold. Winter was fast approaching. And when the new year came, there would be college entrance exams and the beginning of a brand-new life. Uneasy though I was, I yearned for change. My heart and body both craved this unknown land, a blast of fresh air. That was the year Japanese universities were taken over by their students and Tokyo was engulfed in a storm of demonstrations. The world was transforming itself right before my eyes, and I was dying to catch that fever. Even if Izumi wanted me to stay and would have sex with me to ensure that, I knew my days in this sleepy town were numbered. If that meant the end of our relationship, so be it. If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.