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

my ears. I listened as hard as I could, but never once did it ring. Sadly. The girl I knew in Tokyo was the one who did it for me. This isn’t something you can choose freely, according to logic or morality. Either it happens or it doesn’t. When it does, it happens of its own accord, in your consciousness or in a spot deep in your soul.

“You know,” my former girlfriend’s brother said, “it never crossed my mind, not once, that Sayoko would commit suicide. Even if everybody in the whole world had killed themselves, I figured—wrongly, it turns out—she’d still be standing, alive and well. I couldn’t see her as the type to be disillusioned or have some darkness hidden away inside. Honestly, I thought she was a bit shallow. I never paid much attention to her, and the same was true for her when it came to me, I think. Maybe we just weren’t on the same wavelength…Actually, I got along better with my other sister. But now I feel as though I did something awful to Sayoko, and it pains me. Maybe I never really knew her. Never understood a thing about her. Maybe I was too preoccupied with my own life. Perhaps somebody like me didn’t have the strength to save her life, but I should have been able to understand something about her, even if it wasn’t much. Whatever it was that led her to die. It’s hard to bear now. I was so arrogant, so self-centered, and it hurts so much I can’t stand it.”

There was nothing I could say. I probably hadn’t understood her at all, either. Like him, I’d been too preoccupied with my own life.

My former girlfriend’s brother said, “In that story you read me back then, Akutagawa’s ‘Spinning Gears,’ there was a part about how a pilot breathes in the air way up in the sky and then can’t stand breathing the air back here on earth anymore…‘Airplane disease,’ they called it. I don’t know if that’s a real disease or not, but I still remember those lines.”

“Did you get over that condition where your memory flies away sometimes?” I asked him. I think I wanted to change the subject away from Sayoko.

“Oh, right. That,” he said, narrowing his eyes a bit. “It’s kind of weird, but that just spontaneously went away. It’s a genetic disorder and it should have gotten worse over time, the doctor said, but it just up and vanished, as if I’d never had it. As if an evil spirit had been expelled.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. And I really was.

“It happened not long after that time I met you. After that, I never experienced that kind of memory loss, not even once. I felt calmer, I was able to enter a halfway-decent college, graduate, and then take over my dad’s business. Things took a detour for a few years there, but now I’m just living an ordinary life.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I repeated. “So you didn’t wind up bashing your father over the head with a hammer.”

“You remember some dumb things, too, don’t you,” he said, and laughed out loud. “Still, you know, I don’t come to Tokyo on business very often, and it seems strange to bump into you like this in this huge city. I can’t help but feel that something brought us together.”

“For sure,” I said.

“So how about you? Have you been living in Tokyo all this time?”

“I got married right after I graduated from college,” I told him, “and have been living here in Tokyo ever since. I’m making a living of sorts as a writer now.”

“A writer?”

“Yeah. After a fashion.”

“Well, you were really great at reading aloud,” he said. “It might be a burden to you for me to tell you this, but I think Sayoko always liked you best of all.”

I didn’t reply. And my ex-girlfriend’s brother didn’t say anything more.

And so we said goodbye. I went to get my watch, which had been repaired, and my former girlfriend’s older brother slowly set off down the hill to Shibuya station. His tweed-jacketed figure was swallowed up in the afternoon crowd.

I never saw him again. Chance had brought us together a second time. With nearly twenty years between encounters, in cities three hundred miles apart, we’d sat, a table between us, sipping coffee and talking over a few things. But these weren’t subjects you just chatted about over coffee. There was something more significant in our talk, something that seemed meaningful to us, in the act of living out our lives. Still, it was merely a hint, delivered by chance. There was nothing to link us together in a more essential or organic way. [Question: What elements in the lives of these two were symbolically suggested by their meeting again and their conversation?] I never saw that lovely young girl again, either, the one who was holding the LP With the Beatles. Sometimes I wonder—is she still hurrying down that dimly lit high school hallway in 1964, the hem of her skirt fluttering as she goes? Sixteen even now, holding that wonderful album cover with the half-lit photo of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, clutching it tightly as though her life depended on it.

.  .  .

CONFESSIONS OF A SHINAGAWA MONKEY

I met the elderly monkey in a small Japanese-style inn in a hot springs in Gunma Prefecture, some five years ago. The inn was rustic, or, more precisely, decrepit. It was barely hanging on and I just happened to spend a night there.

I was traveling around, wherever the spirit led me, and when I arrived at the hot springs town and got off the