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

lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”

—

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