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“Johnnie Walker?” “That’s right. He has boots and a tall black hat, and a vest and walking stick. He collects cats to get their souls.”
He didn’t make any friends. None of this bothered him, though. Being left alone meant he could be lost in his own little world.
Whenever he was free he liked to sit on the porch and talk with the cats.
He understood he was different from other people. Though no one else noticed this, he thought his shadow on the ground was paler, lighter, than that of other people.
The only ones who really understood him were the cats.
They just told him, “This is how much you have in your account,” and told him an amount, which to him was an abstract concept. So when it all vanished he never had the sense that he’d actually lost something real.
Until the day that Johnnie Walker showed up.
She’s got to be a ghost. First of all, she’s just too beautiful.
She’s so perfect I know she can’t be real. She’s like a person who stepped right out of a dream.
The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remains of some faint, distant memory.
Time’s rules don’t apply here. Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.
The door is shut, yet soundlessly she disappears.
When I wake up, my pillow’s cold and damp with tears. But tears for what? I have no idea.
“I want to listen to ‘Kafka on the Shore.’ Can you get hold of the record?”
Does any fifteen-year-old girl come here?”
“Not as far as I know,”
I knew from the first that the young girl who visited my room last night was Miss Saeki.
The smile in the photo’s the same one I saw last night.
What I saw here in this room the night before was definitely Miss Saeki at age fifteen.
The real Miss Saeki, of course, is still alive.
While they’re still alive, people can become ghosts.
“this is a pretty weird thing to ask, but do you think it’s possible for someone to become a ghost while they’re still alive?”
“That’s what’s called a ‘living spirit.’ I don’t know about in foreign countries, but that kind of thing appears a lot in Japanese literature.
The Tale of Genji, for instance, is filled with living spirits.
In the Heian period—or at least in its psychological realm—on occasion people could become living spirits and travel through space to...
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