First Person Singular

by Haruki Murakami

  “Sayoko’s not here right now,” he said.

  “Not here,” I said, repeating his words.

  “She’s out somewhere. She’s not at home.”

  “But I was supposed to come and pick her up today at eleven.”

  “Is that right?” her brother said. He glanced up at the wall beside him, as if checking a clock. But there was no clock there, just a white plaster wall. He reluctantly turned his gaze back to me. “That may be, but the fact is she’s not at home.”

  I had no clue what I should do. And neither did her brother, apparently. He gave a leisurely yawn and scratched the back of his head. All his actions were slow and measured.

  “Doesn’t seem like anybody’s at home now,” he said. “When I got up a while ago nobody was here. They must have all gone out, but I don’t know where.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “My father’s probably out golfing. My sisters must have gone out to have some fun. But my mom being out, too, is a little odd. That doesn’t happen often.”

  I refrained from speculating. This wasn’t my family.

  “But if Sayoko promised she’d be here, I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” her brother said. “Why don’t you come inside and wait?”

  “I don’t want to bother you. I’ll just hang out somewhere for a while and then come back,” I said.

  “Nah, it’s no bother,” he said firmly. “Much more of a bother to have you ring the bell again and me have to come and open the front door. So come on in.”

  I had no other choice, so I went inside, and he led me to the living room. The living room with the sofa on which she and I had made out in the summer. I sat down on it, and my girlfriend’s brother eased himself into an armchair facing me. And once again let out a long yawn.

  “You’re Sayoko’s friend, right?” he asked again, as if making doubly sure.

  “That’s right,” I said, giving the same reply.

  “Not Yuko’s friend?”

  I shook my head. Yuko was her taller kid sister.

  “Is it interesting going out with Sayoko?” her brother asked, a look of curiosity in his eyes.

  I had no clue how to respond, so I stayed silent. He sat there, waiting for my reply.

  “It’s fun, yes,” I said, finally finding what I hoped were the right words.

  “It’s fun, but it’s not interesting?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean…” My words petered out.

  “No matter,” her brother said. “Interesting or fun—no difference between the two, I suppose. Hey, have you had breakfast?”

  “I have, yes.”

  “I’m going to make some toast. Sure you don’t want any?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I replied.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How about coffee?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I could have done with some coffee, but I hesitated to get more involved with my girlfriend’s family, especially when she wasn’t at home.

  He stood up without a word and left the room. Probably went to the kitchen to make breakfast. After a while, I heard the clatter of dishes and cups. I stayed there alone on the sofa, politely sitting up straight, my hands in my lap, waiting for her to come back from wherever she was. The clock now read 11:15.

  I scanned my memory to see if we really had decided that I would come at eleven. But, no matter how much I thought it over, I was sure that I’d gotten the date and time correct. We’d talked on the phone the night before and had confirmed it then. She wasn’t the type to forget or blow off a promise. And it was odd, indeed, for her and her family to all go off on a Sunday morning and leave her older brother by himself.

  Puzzled by it all, I sat there patiently. Time passed excruciatingly slowly. I’d hear the occasional sound from the kitchen—the faucet turning on, the clatter of a spoon mixing something, the sound of a cupboard opening and closing. This brother seemed the type who had to make a racket, whatever he did. But that was it, as far as sounds went. No wind blowing outside, no dogs barking. Like invisible mud, the silence steadily crept into my ears and plugged them up. I had to gulp a few times to unblock them.

  Some music would have been nice. “Theme from A Summer Place,” “Edelweiss,” “Moon River”—anything. I wasn’t picky. Just some music. But I couldn’t very well turn on the stereo in somebody else’s house without permission. I looked around for something to read but didn’t spot any newspapers or magazines. I checked out what was inside my shoulder bag. I almost always had a paperback I was reading in my bag, but not that day. As luck would have it, that was the day I’d forgotten to bring a book.

  The only book I had in my bag that day was a supplementary reader for our school textbook, Japanese Language and Literature. I reluctantly pulled it out and started flipping through the pages. I wasn’t what you’d call a reader, who goes through books systematically and attentively, but more the type who finds it hard to pass the time without something to read. I could never just sit, still and silent. I always had to be turning the pages of a book or listening to music, one or the other. When there was no book lying around, I’d grab anything printed. I’d read a phone book, an instruction manual for a steam iron. Compared with those kinds of reading material, a supplementary reader for a Japanese-language textbook was far better.

  I randomly flipped through the fiction and essays in the book. A few pieces were by foreign authors, but most were by well-known modern Japanese writers—Ryuˉnosuke Akutagawa, Junichiroˉ Tanizaki, Kobo Abe, and the like. And appended to each work—all excerpts, except for a handful of very short stories—were some questions. Most of these questions were totally meaningless. With meaningless questions, it’s hard (or impossible) to determine logically if an answer is correct or not. I doubted whether even the authors of the selections themselves would have been able to decide. Things like “What can you glean from this passage about the writer’s stance toward war?” or “When the author describes the waxing and waning of the moon, what sort of symbolic effect is created?” You could give almost any answer. If you said that the description of the waxing and waning of the moon was simply a description of the waxing and waning of the moon, and created no symbolic effect, no one could say with certainty that your answer was wrong. Of course there was a relatively reasonable answer, but I didn’t really think that arriving at a relatively reasonable answer was one of the goals of studying literature.

  Be that as it may, I killed time by trying to conjure up answers to each of these questions. And, in most cases, what sprang to mind—in my brain, which was still growing and developing, struggling every day to attain a kind of psychological independence—were the sorts of answers that were relatively unreasonable but not necessarily wrong. Maybe that tendency was one of the reasons that my grades at school were no great shakes.

  While this was going on, my girlfriend’s brother came back to the living room. His hair was still sticking out in all directions, but, maybe because he’d had breakfast, his eyes weren’t as sleepy as before. He held a large white mug, which had a picture of a First World War German biplane, with two machine guns in front of the cockpit, printed on the side. This had to be his own special mug. I couldn’t picture my girlfriend drinking from a mug like that.

  “You really don’t want any coffee?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No. I’m fine. Really.”

  His sweater was festooned with bread crumbs. The knees of his sweats, too. He had probably been starving and had gobbled down the toast without caring about crumbs going everywhere. I could imagine that bugging my girlfriend, since she always looked so neat and tidy. I liked to be neat and tidy myself, a shared quality that was part of why we got along, I think.

  Her brother glanced up at the wall. There was a clock on this wall. The hands of the clock showed ne
arly 11:30.

  * * *

  —

  “She isn’t back yet, is she? Where the heck could she have gone off to?”

  I said nothing in response.

  “What’re you reading?”

  “A supplementary reader for our Japanese textbook.”

  “Hmm,” he said, frowning slightly. “Is it interesting?”

  “Not particularly. I just don’t have anything else to read.”

  “Could you show it to me?”

  I passed him the book over the low table. Coffee cup in his left hand, he took the book with his right. I was worried that he’d spill coffee on it. That seemed about to happen. But he didn’t spill. He put his cup down on the glass tabletop with a clink, and he held the book in both hands and starting flipping through.

  “So what part were you reading?”

  “Just now I was reading Akutagawa’s story ‘Spinning Gears.’ There’s only part of the story there, not the whole thing.”

  He gave this some thought. “ ‘Spinning Gears’ is one I’ve never read. Though I did read his story ‘Kappa’ a long time ago. Isn’t ‘Spinning Gears’ a pretty dark story?”

  “It is. Since he wrote it right before he died.”

  “Akutagawa committed suicide, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” I said. Akutagawa overdosed when he was thirty-five. My supplementary reader’s notes said that “Spinning Gears” was published posthumously, in 1927. The story was almost a last will and testament.

  “Hmm,” my girlfriend’s brother said. “D’ya think you could read it for me?”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Read it aloud, you mean?”

  “Yeah. I’ve always liked to have people read to me. I’m not such a great reader myself.”

  “I’m not good at reading aloud.”

  “I don’t mind. You don’t have to be good. Just read it in the right order, and that’ll be fine. I mean, it doesn’t look like we have anything else to do.”

  “It’s a pretty neurotic, depressing story, though,” I said.

  “Sometimes I like to hear that kind of story. Like, to fight evil with evil.”

  He handed the book back, picked up the coffee cup with the picture of the biplane and its Iron Crosses, and took a sip. Then he sank back in his armchair and waited for the reading to begin.

  That was how I ended up that Sunday reading part of Akutagawa’s “Spinning Gears” to my girlfriend’s eccentric older brother. I was a bit reluctant at first, but I warmed to the job. The supplementary reader had the two final sections of the story—“Red Lights” and “Airplane”—but I just read “Airplane.” It was about eight pages long, and it ended with the line “Won’t someone be good enough to strangle me as I sleep?” Akutagawa killed himself right after writing this line.

  I finished reading, but still no one in the family had come home. The phone didn’t ring, and no crows cawed outside. It was perfectly still all around. The autumn sunlight lit up the living room through the lace curtains. Time alone made its slow, steady way forward. My girlfriend’s brother sat there, arms folded, eyes shut, as if savoring the final lines I’d read: “I don’t have the strength to go on writing. It is painful beyond words to keep living when I feel like this. Won’t someone be good enough to strangle me as I sleep?”

  Whether you liked the writing or not, one thing was clear: this wasn’t the right story to read on a bright, clear Sunday. I closed the book and glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was just past twelve.

  “There must have been some kind of misunderstanding,” I said. “I think I’ll be going.” I started to get up from the sofa. My mother had drummed it into me from childhood that you shouldn’t bother people at home when it was time to have a meal. For better or for worse, this had seeped into my being and become a reflexive habit.

  “You’ve come all this way, so how about waiting another thirty minutes?” my girlfriend’s brother asked. “How about you wait another thirty minutes, and if she’s not back by then you can leave?”

  His words were oddly distinct, and I sat back down and rested my hands in my lap again.

  “You’re very good at reading aloud,” he said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Has anybody ever told you that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Unless you really grasp the content, you can’t read like you did. The last part was especially good.”

  “Oh,” I answered vaguely. I felt my cheeks redden a bit. The praise seemed misdirected, and it made me uncomfortable. But the sense I was getting was that I was in for another thirty minutes of conversation with him. He seemed to need someone to talk to.

  He placed his palms firmly together in front of him, as if praying, then suddenly came out with this: “This might sound like a weird question, but have you ever had your memory stop?”

  “Stop?”

  “What I’m talking about is, like, from one point in time to the next you can’t remember at all where you were, or what you were doing.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ve ever had that.”

  “So you remember the time sequence and details of what you’ve done?”

  “If it’s something that happened recently, yes, I’d say so.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and scratched the back of his head for a moment, and then spoke. “I suppose that’s normal.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “Actually, I’ve had several times where my memory has just slipped away. Like at three p.m. my memory cuts out, and the next thing I know it’s seven p.m. And I can’t remember where I was, or what I was doing, during those four hours. And it’s not like something special happened to me. Like I got hit on the head or got sloppy drunk or anything. I’m just doing my usual thing and without warning my memory cuts out. I can’t predict when it’s going to happen. And I have no clue for how many hours, how many days, even, my memory will vanish.”

  “I see,” I murmured, to let him know I was following along.

  “Imagine you’ve recorded a Mozart symphony on a tape recorder. And when you play it back the sound jumps from the middle of the second movement to the middle of the third, and what should be in between has just vanished. That’s what it’s like. When I say ‘vanished,’ I don’t mean that there’s a silent section of tape. It’s just gone. Like the day after today is two days from now. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “I guess so,” I said in an uncertain tone.

  “If it’s music, it’s kind of inconvenient, but no real harm, right? But, if it happens in your real life, then it’s a pain, believe me…You get what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “You go to the dark side of the moon and come back empty-handed.”

  I nodded again. I wasn’t sure I completely grasped the analogy.

  “It’s caused by a genetic disorder, and clear-cut cases like mine are pretty rare. One person out of tens of thousands will have the disorder. And even then there’ll be differences among them, of course. In my last year of junior high, I was examined by a neurologist at the university hospital. My mom took me. The condition has a name, some annoyingly long term. I forgot it a long time ago. Makes me wonder who came up with a name like that.”

  He paused, then went on: “In other words, it’s a condition where the sequence of your memory gets messed up. One part of your memory—like the example I gave of part of a Mozart symphony—gets stashed away in the wrong drawer. And it’s next to impossible, or actually impossible, to ever find it again. That’s how they explained it to me. It’s not the kind of terrible disorder that can be fatal, or where you gradually lose your mind. But it does cause problems in daily life. They told me the name of the disorder and gave me some medication to take, but the pills don’t do a thing. They’re just a placebo.”

  For a moment, my girlfriend’s
brother was silent, studying me closely to see whether I understood. It was as if he were outside a house staring in through a window.

  “I have these episodes once or twice a year now,” he finally said. “Not so often, but the frequency isn’t the issue. When it happens it causes real problems. Even if it’s only seldom, it’s pretty awful having that kind of memory loss and not knowing when it’ll happen. You get that, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said vaguely. It was all I could do to follow his odd, rapid-fire story.

  “Like, say it happens to me, my memory suddenly cuts out, and during that lapse I take a huge hammer and bash somebody’s head in, somebody I don’t like. No way you can just write that off by saying, ‘Well, now, that’s awkward.’ Am I right?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “The cops’ll get involved and if I tell them, ‘The thing is, my memory flew away,’ they’re not going to buy that, now, are they?”

  I shook my head.

  “There are actually a couple of people I don’t like at all. Guys who really piss me off. My dad’s one of them. But when I’m lucid I’m not about to bash my dad on the head with a hammer, am I? I’m able to control myself. But when my memory cuts out, I have no clue what I’m doing.”

  I inclined my head a fraction, withholding any opinion.

  “The doctor said there’s no danger of that happening. It’s not like, while my memory’s gone, somebody hijacks my personality. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’m always myself. Even when my memory cuts out, I act like I usually do. It’s just that the recorded part skips from the middle of the second movement to the middle of the third. So it’s impossible that during that interval I take out a hammer and smash somebody’s head. I’m always able to control who I am, and act normally for the most part. Mozart doesn’t suddenly transform into Stravinsky. Mozart remains Mozart—it’s just that one part disappears into a drawer somewhere.”

  He clammed up at this point and took a sip from his biplane coffee cup. I was wishing I could have some coffee myself.

  “At least, that’s what the doctor told me. But you gotta take what doctors tell you with a grain of salt. When I was in high school it scared the crap out of me, thinking I might, when I didn’t know what I was doing, bash one of my classmates on the head with a hammer. I mean, when you’re in high school you still don’t know who you are, right? It’s like you’re living in some pipe underground. Add the pain of memory loss to that and you can’t stand it.”