I’d had enough. I scooped up my book, only a few pages still unread, and stuck it in my jacket pocket. I’d long since lost any thought of finishing it.
—
I quickly paid my bill, in cash, and exited the bar. She didn’t say anything more, just followed me fixedly with her eyes as I left. I never once turned around, yet I felt her intense gaze on my back until I made it outside. That sensation, like being jabbed with a long sharp needle, penetrated the fine cloth of my Paul Smith suit to make a deep, lasting mark on my back.
As I climbed the narrow staircase to ground level, I tried to gather my thoughts.
How should I have responded? Should I have asked her, “What in the world are you talking about?” and demanded that she explain herself? What she’d said struck me as totally unfair, something I had no memory of whatsoever.
But somehow, I couldn’t. Why not? I think I was afraid. Afraid of learning that another me who wasn’t really me had, at a shore somewhere three years before, committed a horrendous offense toward a woman, someone I probably didn’t know. Afraid of having her drag out, into the light, something inside me, something completely unknown to me. Rather than face this, I chose to silently get up off my stool and make my getaway, all the while submitting to a torrent of what I could only see as groundless accusations.
Did I do the right thing? If the same thing happened to me again, would I act the same?
But this shore she mentioned—where could it be? The word had a strange ring to it. Was it by the ocean? A lake? A river? Or some other, peculiar assemblage of water? Three years ago was I next to some sizable body of water? I couldn’t recall. I couldn’t even grasp when three years ago had occurred. Everything she said sounded so specific, but at the same time symbolic. The parts were clear, yet the whole wasn’t in focus. And that very discrepancy unsettled my nerves.
At any rate, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I tried to swallow it down but couldn’t, tried to spit out but was unable to. I wanted to get angry, plain and simple. There was no reason I had to endure that kind of preposterous experience. The way she treated me was completely unfair. Up to that moment, it had been such a pleasant, tranquil spring evening. But strangely enough, I couldn’t work up any anger. For the moment, a wave of bewilderment and confusion swept over me, swept any sense of logic away.
—
When I got to the top of the stairs and out of the building, it was no longer spring, and the moon had disappeared from the sky. This was no longer the street I knew. I’d never before seen the trees lining the street. Thick, slimy snakes wound themselves tightly around the trunks, like wriggling living ornaments. Their scales rustled drily as they rubbed against the bark. The sidewalk was ankle deep in whitish ash, and there were faceless men and women walking along, exhaling a yellowish, sulfurous breath from deep within their throats. The air was bitterly cold, almost freezing. I turned up the collar of my suit.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman said.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, whose previous recipients include Karl Ove Knausgård, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie.
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