After Dark

by Haruki Murakami

“I’m not much of a talker. Never have been.” “I’d say you’ve been talking a lot to me.” “With you, I can talk, somehow.”

Even in the profoundest somnolence, people do not tread so deeply into the realm of sleep. They do not attain such a total surrender of consciousness.

“But it’s possible for people to draw closer to each other even while they keep a reasonable distance between them.” “Of course it’s possible,” Takahashi says. “But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”

I begin to get this, uh, weird feeling. At first I don’t notice just how weird it is, but the more time that goes by, the stronger it gets, like, I’m not even here: I’m not included in what’s going on here. She’s sitting right there in front of me, but at the same time she’s a million miles away.”

“I can tell you this, though: I didn’t spend much time with her, and we hardly talked at all, but I feel as if she’s living inside me now. Like she’s part of me. I don’t know how to put it.” “You can feel her pain.” “Maybe so.”

he tries to think of something that will not grate on his nerves. Something mundane, without deep meaning. Or possibly something purely abstract. But nothing comes to mind. In the vacuum, all he feels is the dull ache in his right hand. It throbs along with the beating of his heart, and echoes in his ears like the roar of the ocean. Strange, he thinks: the ocean is nowhere near here.

“Yeah. Tell me about yourself.” Takahashi thinks for a moment. “I can’t think of any sunny topics offhand.” “Okay, so tell me something dark.”

My memories are pretty vague about that, though, like it all happened to somebody else, far away.”

once you become an orphan, you’re an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I’m seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It’s evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It’s always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can’t exchange once it’s contaminated.”

Oh, do you think there’s some problem with omelets as food? Like, genetic engineering or systematic cruelty to animals or political incorrectness?”

“Let me tell you something, Mari. The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.”

“But why should you be interested in me?” “Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this second. But maybe—just maybe—if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.”

After that, it seems, we grew farther and farther apart. We separated, and before long we were living in different worlds. That sense of union I felt in the darkness of the elevator, that strong bond between our hearts, never came back again. I don’t know what went wrong, but we were never able to go back to where we started from.”