Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami

Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean. It’s weird.

As if I’ll reach a moment when something will click in my head and all my problems will disappear. But it never works that way. Nothing ever clicks.

“Was dinner good?” “It was delicious.” “Then why didn’t you say so sooner?” she said, biting her lower lip. “It’s a bad habit. I always forget the important stuff.”

Toward the end of high school, I decided to express only half of what I was really feeling. I can’t recall the initial reason, but for the next several years this was how I behaved. At which point I discovered that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.

Each of us had all the troubles we could carry. They rained down on us from the sky, and we raced around in a frenzy to pick them up and stuff them in our pockets. Why we did that stumps me, even now. Maybe we thought they were something else.

It was a lonely season for me as well. When I returned to my room and undressed at the end of the day, my bones threatened to burst through my skin and fly away. As if some mysterious internal force were propelling me in the wrong direction, leading me toward another world. 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.

A terrible loneliness assailed the Rat.

It feels strange somehow, she said. Like none of it really happened. Oh, it happened all right. But now it’s gone. Does it make you sad? No, I said, shaking my head. There was something that came out of nothing, and now it’s gone back to where it came from, that’s all. We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.

“Leaving? To go where?” “Nowhere in particular. Someplace new.

From now on, I vowed, when my horse was exhausted, my sword broken, and my armor rusty, I would lay myself down in a meadow of green foxtail and listen to the wind. I would follow the path I should follow wherever it took me, whether that be the bottom of a reservoir or a chicken plant’s refrigerated warehouse.