First Person Singular

by Haruki Murakami

  * * *

  —

  Perhaps what she really wanted to say was an ugly mask and a beautiful face beneath it—a beautiful mask and an ugly face. This thought struck me at the time. Maybe she was really talking about some aspect of herself.

  “For some people, the mask might become so tightly stuck that they can’t remove it,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Maybe that’s true.” She gave a faint smile. “But even if a mask gets stuck and can’t be removed, that doesn’t change the fact that beneath it, the real face remains.”

  “Though no one can ever see it.”

  She shook her head. “There must be people who can. Surely there must be, somewhere.”

  “But Robert Schumann could see them. And he was unhappy. Because of the syphilis, schizophrenia, and evil spirits.”

  “He did leave behind this wonderful music, though,” she said. “The kind of amazing music that no one else could write.” She cracked each knuckle of both hands, loudly, in turn. “Because of the syphilis, schizophrenia, and evil spirits. Happiness is always a relative thing. Don’t you think?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Vladimir Horowitz once recorded Schumann’s F Minor Sonata for the radio,” she said. “Have you heard this story?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I replied. Listening to (and, I imagine) playing Schumann’s Piano Sonata no. 3 must be a laborious task.

  “When he listened to this recording on the radio later, Horowitz sat there, his head in his hands, totally depressed. He said it was awful.”

  She swirled the red wine around in her half-full glass and stared at it for a while.

  “And this is what he said: ‘Schumann was crazy, but I ruined him.’ Don’t you love that?”

  “I do,” I agreed.

  * * *

  —

  I found her, in a way, an attractive woman, though I never really thought about her sexually. In that sense, my wife’s judgment was correct. But it wasn’t her unattractiveness that kept me from having sex with her. I don’t think her ugliness by itself would have prevented us from sleeping together. What kept me from making love with her—from actually ever feeling that I wanted to—wasn’t so much the beauty or ugliness of her mask, but more my fear of what I’d see lying beneath. Whether it was the face of evil, or the face of an angel.

  * * *

  —

  In October F* stopped getting in touch with me. I’d gotten two new, rather intriguing CDs of Carnaval, and called her a few times, thinking we could listen to them together, but her cell phone always went to voice mail. I emailed her a few times, but got no response. A few autumn weeks passed, and October was over. November came, and people started wearing coats. This was the longest we’d gone without being in touch. I figured maybe she was on a long trip, or maybe wasn’t feeling well.

  It was my wife who first spotted her on TV. I was at my desk in my room, working.

  “I could be wrong, but I think your girlfriend’s on the TV news,” my wife said. Come to think of it, she’d never once used F*’s name. It was always “your girlfriend.” But by the time I got to the TV, the news had already switched to a report on a baby panda.

  I waited until noon and watched the next news program then. F* appeared on the fourth news item. She was shown emerging from what looked like a police precinct, walking down the stairs, and getting into a black van. That slow journey was caught entirely on camera. No doubt about it, there was F*. There was no mistaking her face. It looked like she was handcuffed, for she had both hands in front of her, covered by a dark-colored coat. Female officers stood on either side of her, holding her arms. But she held her head high. Her lips were closed, and her gaze was calm as she looked straight ahead. Her eyes, however, were completely expressionless, like fish eyes. Other than a few strands of loose hair, she looked the same as usual. Still, her face on TV lacked that certain something that always gave it a lively quality. Or perhaps she was intentionally concealing it beneath a mask.

  The woman announcer gave F*’s real name and detailed how the precinct had arrested her as an accomplice in a large-scale fraud. According to the report, the principal offender was her husband, who’d been arrested a few days before. They played a video of when he’d been taken into custody. This was the first time I’d ever seen her husband, and frankly I was struck speechless by how handsome he was. He was a gorgeous man, almost unreal in his attractiveness, like a professional model. He was said to be six years younger than her.

  There wasn’t any reason, of course, for me to be shocked by the fact that she’d married a handsome man six years her junior. There are all kinds of ill-matched couples. I know a few myself. Still, when I tried to picture the details of their daily life—F* and this staggeringly attractive man, living under one roof in that tidy condo in Daikanyama—I couldn’t help but feel bewildered. I imagine most people seeing them on the news might be surprised by their pairing, but the sense of discomfort I felt then was far more individual, like an actual tingling pain on my skin. There was something unhealthy about it, like the feeling of helpless impotence you get when you’ve been taken in by a bizarre scheme.

  The crime they were accused of was asset management fraud. They’d created a bogus investment company, solicited funds from ordinary people, promising a high rate of return, but actually didn’t do any asset management whatsoever, simply shifting funds back and forth to offset shortfalls in any which way. It was obviously a scheme that would collapse. Why would such an intelligent woman, someone with such a deep appreciation of Schumann’s piano music, assist in such a senseless crime, something she’d always be stuck with? The whole thing was beyond me. Maybe some negative force in her relationship with that man had sucked her into some criminal vortex. Maybe her own evil spirit was quietly hidden at its center. That’s the only way I could fathom it.

  All told, they were responsible for more than $10 million in losses. Most of the victims were elderly pensioners. A few of them were interviewed on TV, and I learned that every penny of their precious retirement savings, all they had to live on, had been snatched away. I felt sorry for them, but it was done. The whole thing was a mediocre crime. For some reason lots of people seem drawn in by such banal lies. Maybe it’s the very mediocrity that attracts them, who knows? The world is swarming with hustlers, and with gullible people too. No matter how it was presented on TV, no matter who was at fault, this was a clear-cut fact, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

  “So what are you going to do?” my wife asked me after the news was over.

  “What do you mean? What can I do?” I said, switching off the TV with the remote.

  “But she’s your friend, isn’t she?”

  “We just get together once in a while and talk about music. I know nothing other than that.”

  “She never suggested you invest with them?”

  Silently, I shook my head. For what it’s worth, she never tried to get me involved in that sort of thing. That much I can say for sure.

  “I didn’t know her well, but I never thought she was someone who’d do something terrible like that,” my wife said. “I guess you never can tell.”

  No, I suddenly thought, that’s not exactly true. F* had a kind of special aura about her that drew people in. And within that—inside those peculiar, unusual features of hers—existed a kind of power that encroached on others’ minds and hearts. It aroused my curiosity about her. And when that special attractive force merged with her young husband’s spectacular looks, anything became possible and, perhaps, irresistible. An evil dynamic arose out of this, one that exceeded any common sense or logic. Though I had no way of ever knowing what had brought this unlikeliest of pairs together.

  For several days the TV news covered the incident, endlessly replaying the same clips. Her dead-fish eyes staring straight ahead, her handsome yo
unger husband confronting the banks of cameras. The corners of his thin lips were, perhaps instinctively, raised slightly. The kind of smile that professional movie stars have when they need it. It looked like he was sending out a smile to the whole world. There was something about his face that resembled a well-constructed mask. At any rate, a week later, the arrests were all but forgotten. At least, the TV stations were no longer interested. I continued to follow the story in newspapers and weekly magazines, but eventually these stories tapered off too, like a stream of water being sucked into the sand. Finally, they came to an end altogether.

  And then F* completely disappeared from my world. I had no clue where she was. There was no way of knowing if she was still in detention, or in jail, or was at home out on bail. There weren’t any articles about her being on trial, though there must have been one, for the fraud was large enough to warrant some sort of sentence. At least according to the newspaper and magazine articles I’d read, it was crystal clear that she’d actively helped her husband in breaking the law.

  * * *

  —

  A long time has passed since then, and still, whenever there’s a concert featuring a performance of Schumann’s Carnaval, I try to attend. And I scan the entire hall, and the lobby when I’m enjoying a glass of wine at intermission, looking for her. I’ve never found her, but I always feel that at any moment, she’ll appear in the midst of the crowd.

  I’ve kept on buying any new CDs of Carnaval. And I still rank them in my notebook. A lot of new recordings have appeared, yet my number one favorite is still the one by Rubinstein. Rubinstein’s piano doesn’t rip off people’s masks. Instead, his playing gently, lightly, wafts through the interstice between the mask and the reality.

  Happiness is always a relative thing. Don’t you think?

  * * *

  —

  This is something that happened long before any of this.

  Back when I was in college, I once had a date with a girl who was fairly unattractive. Actually, scratch the “fairly” part. It was a double date that a friend of mine set up, and she was the one who showed up as my date. She and my friend’s girlfriend were in the same college dorm, and they were a year behind me in school. We had a quick meal together, the four of us, then we paired off and went our own way. It was the end of autumn.

  She and I strolled around a park, then went into a café and talked over some coffee. She was short, with small eyes, and seemed like a nice person. She spoke in a quietly shy, distinct voice. She must have had excellent vocal cords. I’m in the tennis club in college, she told me. Her parents loved tennis, she added, and she’d played it with them since she was little. A healthy family, by the sound of it. And a family that probably got along well, too. But I’d hardly ever played tennis, so that put a damper on that subject. I loved jazz, but she knew next to nothing about it. So it was hard to find any subjects to talk about. Still, she said she’d like to hear more about jazz, so I launched into a monologue on Miles Davis and Art Pepper, and how I got interested in jazz, what drew me to it. She listened attentively, but I’m not sure how much she really got. Then I walked her to the train station and we said goodbye.

  As we said goodbye she gave me the phone number to her dorm. She wrote the number down on a blank page in her notebook, neatly tore it out, and handed it to me. But I never called her.

  A few days later I ran across my friend who’d invited me on the double date, and he apologized.

  “I’m sorry for hooking you up with that—how should I put it?—unattractive girl the other day,” he said. “I was planning on introducing you to someone really cute, but at the last minute something came up and she had to bail, so we asked the other girl to fill in. There was no one else in the dorm at the time. My girlfriend wanted to tell you she’s sorry, too. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

  After my friend said this, I felt like I should call the girl. Certainly she was no beauty, but she was more than just some “unattractive girl.” There was a slight difference between the two, and I didn’t want to leave it at that. I don’t know how to put it, but it seemed important to me. I couldn’t let it go. Most likely I’d never want her as my girlfriend. But I wouldn’t mind seeing her and talking again. I didn’t know what we’d talk about, but I was sure we’d find something. I couldn’t just file her away under “Ugly Girl” and walk away.

  But I couldn’t find the paper with her number. I remembered putting it in my coat pocket, but it was nowhere to be found. I might have accidentally tossed it away with some receipt I didn’t need. That’s probably what happened. The upshot was, I couldn’t phone her. If I’d asked my friend, he could have given me the dorm’s number, but I wasn’t wild about the idea of his reaction when I did, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  I forgot that whole incident for a long time, and never tried to replay it in my mind. But here, as I write about F* and the way she looked, the whole thing has suddenly come back to me. In every detail.

  In the end of autumn when I was twenty, I had a one-time-only date with a not-so-attractive girl, and we walked around a park as the day drew to an end. As we had a cup of coffee I explained the finer points of Art Pepper’s alto sax, how he’d make this amazing screeching sound with it sometimes. Which wasn’t just some musical breakdown, I went on, but an important expression of his state of mind (yes, I actually did use that expression, believe it or not). And then I lost, forever, her phone number. Forever, needless to say, is a very long time.

  * * *

  —

  These were both nothing more than a pair of minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Short side trips along the way. Even if they hadn’t happened, I doubt my life would have wound up much different from what it is now. But still, these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. And when they do, their unexpected power shakes me to the core. Like an autumn wind that gusts at night, swirling fallen leaves in a forest, flattening the pampas grass in fields, and pounding hard on the doors to people’s homes, over and over again.

  THE YAKULT SWALLOWS POETRY COLLECTION

  I’d like to make this clear from the start: I love baseball. And what I really love is actually going to a stadium and watching a live game played out right in front of me. I slap on my baseball cap and take along my glove in case I happen to catch a foul ball from the infield seats, or a home-run ball if I’m sitting in the outfield seats. Watching broadcasts of games on TV doesn’t do it for me. I always get the feeling I’m missing something vital. Like with sex, when you…hold on, let’s not go there. In any event, watching baseball on TV robs me of that heart-pounding excitement of a live game. At least that’s how I feel. Though if I were asked to list the reasons why and explain them all, I doubt I could.

  To be clear, I’m a fan of the Yakult Swallows. I wouldn’t say I’m a wildly enthusiastic, devout fan, but I do consider myself a pretty loyal supporter. At least, I’ve cheered on the team for a long time. I’ve been frequenting Jingu Stadium from back when the team was called the Sankei Atoms. That’s why I lived near the stadium. Actually, that still holds true. When it comes to finding places to live in Tokyo, that’s my main condition—that the condo be within walking distance of Jingu Stadium. And, unsurprisingly, I also own several team jerseys and baseball caps.

  * * *

  —

  Jingu Stadium has long been a peaceful, humble ballpark, not the sort of stadium setting any attendance records. What I mean to say is that the place is almost always a bit deserted. Except for rare occasions, it’s never been sold out and I can always get a ticket. By “rare occasions” I mean like when you’re out for a walk at night and encounter a lunar eclipse, or run across a friendly male calico cat at the neighborhood park—I mean it’s about as likely as those occurrences. But truthfully I kind of enjoy how sparsely populated it is. I’ve always disliked crowds, even as a child.
<
br />   I don’t mean to imply that the reason I became a Yakult Swallows fan is the half-deserted stadium. I’d feel sorry for the team if I said something like that. The poor Yakult Swallows. And poor Jingu Stadium. I mean, the section where the visiting team’s fans sit always seems to fill up faster than the Yakult Swallows fans’ section. You could search the entire world and I doubt you’d find another baseball stadium where that’s the case.

  So why did I become a fan of that team, anyway? What long and winding path led me to become a longtime supporter of the Swallows? What sort of galaxy did I cross to make that fleeting, dim star—the one that’s the hardest to locate in the night sky—my own lucky star? It’s kind of a long story, but under the circumstances maybe I should touch on it. Who knows, but it might end up being a kind of concise autobiography.

  * * *

  —

  I was born in Kyoto, but we soon moved to the Kansai-Kobe area, where I lived till I was eighteen, first in Shukugawa, and then in Ashiya. When I was free, I’d ride my bike, or sometimes take the Hanshin railway line, to see a game at Koshien Stadium, the home of the Hanshin Tigers. I was, as an elementary school student, naturally a member of the Hanshin Tigers Fan Club. (You got bullied at school if you weren’t.) I don’t care what anyone says, Koshien is the most beautiful stadium in all of Japan. Back when I was a boy, I’d rush to the stadium with my ticket in hand, pass through the ivy-covered entrance, and hurry up the dimly lit concrete stairs. And when the natural grass of the outfield leapt into view, and that brilliant ocean of green spread out before me, my little heart beat loudly with excitement, for all the world as if a group of lively dwarves were bungee-jumping inside my tiny ribs.