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

chatting about various things. I learned that before she waitressed she’d worked at a small real estate agency and at a bookstore. In all the places she worked, she explained, she never got along with the managers or owners. At the restaurant, she didn’t have any arguments with anyone, she explained, but the pay was too low for her to get by for long, so she had to look for another job. Not that she wanted to.

What kind of job do you want to get? someone asked.

“I don’t care,” she said, rubbing the side of her nose. (Beside her nose there were two small moles, lined up like a constellation.) “I mean, whatever I wind up with isn’t going to be all that great anyway.”

I lived in Asagaya at the time, and her place was in Koganei. So we rode the high-speed train together on the Chuo line out of Yotsuya. We sat down side by side in the train. It was past eleven p.m., a bitterly cold night, with a biting wind. Before I’d known it we were in the season where you needed gloves and a muffler. As the train approached Asagaya I stood up, ready to get off, and she looked up at me and said, in a low voice, “If it’s okay, would you let me stay at your place tonight?”

“Okay—but how come?”

“It’s too far to go all the way back to Koganei.”

“I have to warn you, it’s a tiny apartment, and a real mess,” I said.

“That doesn’t bother me in the least,” she said, and took the arm of my coat.

So she came to my cramped, crummy place, and we drank some cans of beer. We took our time with the beer, and afterward, like it was a natural next step, she shed her clothes right in front of me. Just like that, she was naked, and snuggled into my futon. Following her lead, I took off my clothes and joined her in bed. I switched off the light, but the glow from the gas stove kept the room fairly bright. In bed we awkwardly warmed each other up. For a while, neither of us said a word. So quickly naked with each other, it was hard to know what to talk about. But as our bodies gradually warmed up, we literally felt the awkwardness loosen up through our skin. It was an oddly intimate sensation.

That’s when she asked, “I might yell another man’s name when I come. Are you okay with that?”

“Do you love him?” I asked her, after I’d gotten the towel ready.

“I do. A lot,” she said. “I love him so, so much. I’m always thinking of him, every minute. But he doesn’t love me that much. What I mean is, he has a girlfriend.”

“But you’re seeing him?”

“Um. He calls me whenever he wants my body,” she said. “Like ordering takeout over the phone.”

I had no clue how to respond, so I kept quiet. She traced a figure on my back with her fingertips. Or maybe she was writing something, in cursive.

“He told me that my face is plain but my body is the best.”

I didn’t think her face was particularly plain, though calling her beautiful was going too far. Looking back on it now, I can’t recall what kind of face she had, exactly, or describe it in any detail.

“But if he calls, you go?”

“I love him, so what else can I do?” she said, like nothing could be more natural. “No matter what he says to me, there are just times when I’m dying to have a man make love to me.”

I considered this. But back then it was beyond me to imagine what feelings this entailed—for a woman to want a man to make love to her. (And even now, come to think of it, I don’t entirely understand it.)

“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,” she said, in a flat tone, like she was reciting something written on the wall.

“I see,” I said, moved by her words.

“So it’s okay if you think of some other woman instead of me,” she said. “Don’t you have anybody you like?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So I don’t mind if you yell that person’s name when you come. It won’t bother me at all.”

There was a girl I liked at the time, but circumstances kept us from getting more deeply involved, and when the moment arrived, I didn’t call out her name. The thought crossed my mind, but in the middle of sex it seemed kind of stupid, and I ejaculated inside the woman without a word. She was about to yell a man’s name, like she said she would, and I had to hurriedly stuff the towel between her teeth. She had really strong, healthy-looking teeth. Any dentist would be properly impressed. I don’t even remember what name she yelled. All I recall is that it was some nothing, run-of-the-mill name, and that I was impressed that such a bland name was, for her, precious and important. A simple name can sometimes really jolt a person’s heart.

—

The next morning, I had an early class where I had to submit a major report in lieu of a midterm, but as you can imagine, I blew it off. (Which led to some huge problems later, but that’s another story.) We finally woke up in the late morning, and boiled water for instant coffee, and ate some toast. There were some eggs in the fridge, so I boiled them for us to eat. The sky was clear and cloudless, the morning sunlight dazzling, and I was feeling pretty lazy.

As she munched on buttered toast, she asked me what I was majoring in at college. I’m in the literature department, I said.

Do you want to be a novelist? she asked.

I’m not really planning to, I answered honestly. I had no plans whatsoever at the time of becoming a novelist. I’d never even considered it (though there were plenty of people