Lying there, I close my eyes for a time, then open them. I silently breathe in, then out. A thought begins to form in my mind, but in the end I think of nothing. Not that there was much difference between the two, thinking and not thinking. I find I can no longer distinguish between one thing and another, between things that existed and things that did not. I look out the window. Until the sky turns white, clouds float by, birds chirp, and a new day lumbers up, gathering together the sleepy minds of the people who inhabit this planet.
Once in downtown Tokyo I caught a glimpse of Miu. It was about half a year after Sumire disappeared, a warm Sunday in the middle of March. Low clouds covered the sky, and it looked like it would rain at any minute. Everyone carried umbrellas. I was on my way to visit some relatives who lived downtown and was stopped at a traffic light in Hiroo, at the intersection near the Meidi-ya store, when I spotted the navy-blue Jaguar inching its way forward in the heavy traffic. I was in a taxi, and the Jaguar was in the through lane to my left. I noticed the car because its driver was a woman with a stunning mane of white hair. From a distance, the woman’s white hair stood out starkly against the flawless navy-blue car. I had only seen Miu with black hair, so it took me a while to put this Miu and the Miu I knew together. But it was definitely her. She was as beautiful as I remembered, refined in a rare and wonderful way. Her breathtaking white hair kept one at arm’s length and had a resolute, almost mythical air about it.
The Miu before me, though, was not the woman I had waved goodbye to at the harbor on the Greek island. Only half a year had passed, yet she looked like a different person. Of course her hair color was changed. But that wasn’t all.
An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. Miu was like an empty room after everyone’s left. Something incredibly important—the same something that pulled in Sumire like a tornado, that shook my heart as I stood on the deck of the ferryboat—had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life but its absence. Not the warmth of something alive but the silence of memory. Her pure-white hair inevitably made me imagine the color of human bones, bleached by the passage of time. For a time, I couldn’t exhale.
The Jaguar Miu was driving sometimes got ahead of my taxi, sometimes fell behind, but Miu didn’t notice I was watching her. I couldn’t call out to her. I didn’t know what to say, but even if I had, the windows of the Jaguar were shut tight. Miu was sitting up straight, both hands on the steering wheel, her attention fixed on the scene ahead of her. She might have been thinking deeply about something. Or maybe she was listening to the “Art of the Fugue” on her car stereo. The entire time, her icy, hardened expression didn’t budge, and she barely blinked. Finally the light turned green and the Jaguar sped off in the direction of Aoyama, leaving behind my taxi, which sat there waiting to make a right turn.
So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us—that’s snatched right out of our hands—even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
Though she came back to Japan, Miu couldn’t get in touch with me for some reason. Instead, she kept her silence, clutching her memories close, seeking some nameless, remote place to swallow her up. That’s what I imagined. I didn’t feel like blaming Miu. Let alone hating her.
The image that came to mind at that moment was of the bronze statue of Miu’s father in the little mountain village in the northern part of Korea. I could picture the tiny town square, the low-slung houses, and the dust-covered bronze statue. The wind always blows hard there, twisting the trees into surreal shapes. I don’t know why, but that bronze statue and Miu, hands on the steering wheel of her Jaguar, melted into one in my mind.
Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost. Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover—drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each—what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting.
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams—just as Sumire said. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.
I wake up at 3:00 a.m., turn on the light, sit up, and look at the phone beside my bed. I picture Sumire in a phone booth, lighting up a cigarette and pushing the buttons for my number. Her hair’s a mess; she has on a man’s herringbone jacket many sizes too big for her and mismatched socks. She frowns, choking a bit on the smoke. It takes her a long time to push all the numbers correctly. Her head is crammed full of things she wants to tell me. She might talk until dawn, who knows? About the difference, say, between symbols and signs. My phone looks like it will ring any minute now. But it doesn’t ring. I lie down and stare at the silent phone.
But one time it did ring. Right in front of me, it actually rang. Making the air of the real world tremble and shake. I grabbed the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hey, I’m back,” Sumire said. Very casual. Very real. “It wasn’t easy, but somehow I managed it. Like a fifty-word précis of Homer’s Odyssey.”
“That’s good,” I said. I still couldn’t believe it. Being able to hear her voice. The fact that this was happening.
“ ‘That’s good’?” Sumire said, and I could almost hear the frown. “What the heck do you mean by that? I’ve gone through bloody hell, I’ll have you know. The obstacles I went through—millions of them, I’d never finish if I tried to explain them all—all this to get back, and that’s all you can say? I think I’m going to cry. If it isn’t good that I’m back, where would that leave me? That’s good. I can’t believe it! Save that kind of heartwarming, witty remark for the kids in your class—when they finally figure out how to multiply!”
“Where are you now?”
“Where am I? Where do you think I am? In our good old faithful telephone booth. This crummy little square telephone box plastered inside with ads for phony loan companies and escort services. A mold-colored half-moon’s hanging in the sky; the floor’s littered with cigarette butts. As far as the eye can see, nothing to warm the cockles of the heart. An interchangeable, totally semiotic telephone box. So, where is it? I’m not exactly sure. Everything’s just too semiotic—and you know me, right? I don’t know where I am half the time. I can’t give directions well. Taxi drivers are always yelling at me: Hey lady, where in the world ya trying to get to? I’m not too far away, I think. Probably pretty close by.”
“I’ll come get you.”
“I’d like that. I’ll find out where I am and call you back. I’m running out of change, anyway. Wait for a while, OK?”
“I really wanted to see you,” I said.
“And I really wanted to see you, too,” she said. “When I couldn’t see you anymore, I realized that. It was as clear as if the planets all of a sudden lined up in a row for me. I really need you. You’re a part of me; I’m a part of you. You know, somewhere—I’m not at all sure where—I think I cut something’s throat. Sharpening my knife, my heart a stone. Symbolically, like making a gate in China. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“Then come and get me.”
Suddenly the phone cuts off. Still clutching the receiver, I stare at it for a long time. Like the phone itself is some vital message, its very shape and color containing hidden meaning. Reconsidering, I hang up. I sit up in bed and wait for the phone to ring again. I lean back against the wall, my focus fixed on a single point in the space before me, and I breathe slowl
y, soundlessly. Making sure of the joints bridging one moment of time and the next. The phone doesn’t ring. An unconditional silence hangs in the air. But I’m in no hurry. There’s no need to rush. I’m ready. I can go anywhere.
Right?
Right you are!
I get up out of bed. I pull back the old, faded curtain and open the window. I stick my head out and look up at the sky. Sure enough, a mold-colored half-moon hangs in the sky. Good. We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it toward me.
I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren’t any. No scent of blood, no stiffness. The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside.
ALSO BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (nonfiction)
Norwegian Wood
South of the Border, West of the Sun
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Dance Dance Dance
The Elephant Vanishes
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
A Wild Sheep Chase
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2001 by Haruki Murakami
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Japan as Supuutoniku no koibito by Kodansha, Tokyo, in 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Haruki Murakami
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The quote from Pushkin is from Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated by Babette Deutsch (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1999).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murakami, Haruki, [date]
[Supuutoniku no koibito. English]
Sputnik sweetheart / Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
p. cm.
I. Gabriel, J. Philip. II. Title.
pl856.u673 s8713 2001
895.6’35—dc21 00-062004
This translation is dedicated to Mika. —P.G.
eISBN: 978-0-375-41346-9
v3.0
Sputnik Sweetheart Page 19
