Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami

The phone calls made me think. Someone was trying to get through to someone else. Yet almost no one ever called me. Not a single person was trying to reach me, and even if they had been, they wouldn’t have said what I wanted to hear.

Each of us had, to a greater or lesser degree, resolved to live according to his or her own system. If another person’s way of thinking was too different from mine, it made me mad; too...

Would I ever find a place that was truly mine? Where might it be?

After a few days, the Rat could feel the tangible reality of their relationship swelling within him, as if a soft wedge were being driven into his everyday life. Little by little, something was getting through. His long-forgotten gentler, sweeter side seemed to expand each time he thought of her slender arms wrapped around his body.

you couldn’t tell where the air ended and the clouds began.

I felt empty. Maybe I had nothing left to give.

Many dreams, many sorrows, many promises. Yet in the end nothing remained.

There were so many things I wanted to think about, but none took shape.

Now I had a rare moment alone, and I still couldn’t get a handle on how to deal with myself.

It was weird. I had been on my own for years and had assumed I was getting by pretty well. Yet now I couldn’t remember any of it.

I felt like someone who realizes in the midst of looking for something that they have forgotten what it was. What was the object of my search?

“Well, it doesn’t make sense to me.” “That’s the best way to handle it. Admit that you don’t understand and leave it at that.”

“You know, J,” the Rat said, still looking at his glass, “I’ve lived twenty-five years, and I don’t feel like I’ve learned a damn thing.”

The problem, as I saw it, was that the places I fit in were all out of date. Not much I could do about that, though.

“Were you happy?” “Looking back, I guess I was,”

“Just about anything looks better from a distance.”

“I was born under a strange star. Like I’ve always been able to get whatever I want. But each time something new comes into my hands, I trample something else. Follow me?”

“No one believes me, but it’s the truth. It hit me about three years ago. So I decided. Not to want anything anymore.”

There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.

The Rat, however, was a true fanatic; he got me to snap a commemorative photo of him and the pinball machine on the day he reached his all-time high score of 92,500. It shows him leaning against the machine, grinning from ear to ear, while beside him the machine is grinning too, proud of the score on its display. The one and only heartwarming snapshot I took with my Kodak pocket camera. The Rat looks like a Second World War flying ace, the pinball machine like an old fighter plane.

For a week, the Rat had felt forsaken, abandoned by everything, including luck itself.

Convinced that would get him through the rest of the week, he rolled over and went to sleep. When he woke up, though, everything was the same. Except that now his head hurt a little.

what is the point of struggling like this? Where is it getting me? Nowhere.

By the end of those three days the Rat’s apartment was filled with empty cans and cigarette butts. He missed the woman like crazy. His whole being longed for her warmth. He wanted to enter her and stay there. Yet he could never go back. Face the music, he told himself. You’re the one who burned the bridges. You’re the one who plastered the walls and sealed yourself inside, right?

“But I’ve come to believe it doesn’t really make a damn bit of difference. One way or the other, we’re all going to rot. Don’t you think?”

“I’m lost.” J nodded. “It’s hard to know what to do.”

“There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.”

“Hey, a lot of things have gone down.” J nodded several times as he dusted the rows of glasses on the sideboard with a dry cloth. “But when it’s over, it all seems like a dream.” “I guess you’re right. But you know it’ll probably take me a hell of a long time to really feel that way.”

At least I don’t have to explain myself to anyone anymore, thought the Rat. How much more warm and peaceful and quiet the bottom of the sea might be than any of those towns. But enough thinking. Enough.