First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (best books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.

My girlfriend’s house was near the Kobe radio station that I always tuned in to. I think her father imported, or perhaps exported, medical equipment. I don’t know the details. At any rate, he owned his own company, which seemed to be doing well. Their home was in a pine grove near the sea. I heard that it used to be the summer villa of some businessman and that her family had bought and remodeled it. The pine trees rustled in the sea breeze. It was the perfect place to listen to “Theme from A Summer Place.”

—

Years later, I happened to see a late-night TV broadcast of the 1959 movie A Summer Place. It starred Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, and was a typical Hollywood film about young love, but nevertheless it held together well. Percy Faith had a hit with a cover version of the Max Steiner theme song of the same title. In the movie, there is a pine grove by the sea, which sways in the summer breeze in time to the horn section. That scene of the pine trees swaying in the wind struck me as a metaphor for the young people’s raging sexual desire. But that may just have been my take on it, my own biased view.

In the movie, Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee are swept up in that kind of overpowering sexual wind and, because of it, encounter all kinds of real-world problems. Misunderstandings are followed by reconciliations, obstacles are cleared up like fog lifting, and in the end the two come together and are married. In Hollywood in the fifties, a happy ending always involved marriage—the creation of an environment in which lovers could have sex legally. My girlfriend and I, of course, didn’t get married. We were still in high school, and all we did was clumsily grope and make out on the sofa with “Theme from A Summer Place” playing in the background.

“You know something?” she said to me on the sofa, in a small voice, as if she were making a confession. “I’m the really jealous type.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“I wanted to make sure you knew that.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes it hurts a lot to be so jealous.”

I silently stroked her hair. It was beyond me at the time to imagine how burning jealousy felt, what caused it, what it led to. I was too preoccupied with my own emotions.

As a side note, Troy Donahue, that handsome young star, later got caught up in alcohol and drugs, stopped making movies, and was even homeless for a time. Sandra Dee, too, struggled with alcoholism. Donahue married the popular actress Suzanne Pleshette in 1964, but they divorced eight months later. Dee married the singer Bobby Darin in 1960, but they divorced in 1967. This is obviously totally unrelated to the plot of A Summer Place. And unrelated to my and my girlfriend’s fate.

My girlfriend had an older brother and a younger sister. The younger sister was in her second year of junior high but was a good two inches taller than her older sister. She wasn’t particularly cute. Plus, she wore thick glasses. But my girlfriend was very fond of her kid sister. “Her grades in school are really good,” she told me. I think my girlfriend’s grades, by the way, were only fair to middling. Like my own, most likely.

One time, we let her younger sister tag along with us to the movies. There was some reason that we had to. The film was The Sound of Music. The theater was packed, so we had to sit near the front, and I remember that watching that 70 mm wide-screen film so close up made my eyes ache by the end. My girlfriend, though, was crazy about the songs in the film. She bought the soundtrack LP and listened to it endlessly. Me, I was much more into John Coltrane’s magical version of “My Favorite Things,” but I figured that bringing that up with her was pointless, so I never did.

Her younger sister didn’t seem to like me much. Whenever we saw each other she looked at me with strange eyes, totally devoid of emotion—as if she were judging whether some dried fish at the back of the fridge was still edible or not. And, for some reason, that look always left me feeling guilty. When she looked at me, it was as though she were ignoring the outside (granted, it wasn’t much to look at anyway) and could see right through me, down to the depths of my being. I may have felt that way because I really did have shame and guilt in my heart.

My girlfriend’s brother was four years older than she was, so he would have been at least twenty then. She didn’t introduce him to me and hardly ever mentioned him. If he happened to come up in conversation, she deftly changed the subject. I can see now that her attitude was a bit unnatural. Not that I thought much about it. I wasn’t that interested in her family. What drew me to her was something very different, a much more urgent impulse.

The first time I met her brother and spoke with him was toward the end of autumn in 1965.

That Sunday, I went to my girlfriend’s house to pick her up. We went on dates pretending we were going to the library to study, so I always put various study-related items in my shoulder bag to keep up the facade. Like a novice criminal making up a flimsy alibi.

I rang the bell over and over, but no one answered. I paused for a while, then rang it again, repeatedly, until I finally heard someone moving slowly toward the door. It was my girlfriend’s older brother.

He was a shade taller than me and a bit on the hefty side. Not flabby, but more like