Time really does go by before you know it. Of course, gazing at a little bit of the scenery from the window of my air-conditioned hospital room, the change of the seasons holds little meaning for me, but still, when one season ends, another comes calling, and that really does make my heart dance.
I’m seventeen now, for these last three years I’ve been unable to read a book, unable to watch television, unable to walk…no, I’m unable to rise from bed, and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t even shift the positions in my sleep. My sister, visiting me, is the one kind enough to write this letter for me. She stopped going to college so she could look after me. Of course, I’m incredibly grateful to her. What I’ve learned during my three years of lying in this hospital bed is that even from whatever miserable experience you might have, there is something to be learned, and it’s because of this that I can find the will to keep on living.
My illness appears to be related to nerve damage in my spinal cord. It’s a terribly debilitating disease, but there is, of course, a chance of recovery. It might only be three percent…but my doctor (a wonderful person) gave me an example illustrating the rate of recovery from my illness. The way he explained it, the odds are longer than a pitcher throwing a no-hit, no-run game against the Giants, but not quite as unlikely as a complete shutout.
Sometimes, when I think I’m never going to recover, I get really scared. So scared I want to scream out.
I feel like I’m going to spend my whole life like this, like a stone, lying on my back staring at the ceiling, unable to read a book, unable to walk in the wind, unable to be loved by anyone, growing old here for decades and decades, and then die here quietly, I think of this and I just can’t stand it and I get so sad. When I wake up at 3am in the middle of the night, I feel like I can hear the bones in my spine dissolving. In reality, that’s probably what’s happening. I won’t say any more about that unpleasant business. So, like my sister coming here every day, hundreds of times over, to encourage me, I’m going to try to only think positive thoughts. And I’ll be able to fall sound asleep at night. Because the worst thoughts usually strike in the dead of night. From my hospital window, I can see the harbor. Every morning, I get out of bed and walk to the harbor and take deep breaths of the ocean air…at least, I imagine that I do. If I could do this just once, just one time, I think I could understand what the world is all about. I believe that. And if I could comprehend just that little bit, I think I’d even be able to endure spending the rest of my life in this bed. Goodbye. Take care.
The letter is unsigned.
It was yesterday, a little after 3pm, when I received this letter. I was sitting in the break room, reading it as I drank coffee, and when my work finished in the evening, I walked down to the harbor, looking up towards the mountains. If you can see the harbor from your hospital room, I expect I can see your hospital room from the harbor. I could see quite a few lights when I looked at the mountains. Of course, I have no idea which of the lights was your hospital room. One thing I saw was the lights of a rundownlooking house, and I could also see the lights of a big mansion. There were hotels, schools, also company buildings. Really just many different kinds of people living their various lives, I thought. It was the first time I’d really thought about it like that. Thinking that, I burst out in tears. It was the first time I’d cried in a really long time. But hey, it’s okay, I wasn’t crying because I felt sorry for you. What I want to say is this. I’m only going to say it once, so listen up: I love all of you.
Ten years from now, this show and the records I played, and me, if you still remember all this, remember what I told you just now.
I’ll play the song she requested. Elvis Presley’s Good Luck Charm.
After this song, we’ve got one hour and fifty minutes left, and we’ll go back to the same old lowbrow comedy routine we always do. Thank you for listening.
38
The evening of my return to Tokyo, with my suitcase in hand, I peeked my head into J’s Bar. It wasn’t open yet, but J let me in and gave me a beer.
“I’m taking the bus back tonight.”
Facing the potatoes for the French fries, he nodded a few times.
“I’ll be sad to see you go. Our monkey business is finished,” he said as he pointed to the picture on the counter. “The Rat is sad, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Tokyo seems like a lot of fun.”
“Anyplace is the same as any other.”
“Perhaps. Since the Tokyo Olympics, I haven’t left this town even once.”
“You like this town that much?”
“You put it best: any place is as good as any other.”
“Yeah.”
“Still, after a few years go by, I’d like to go back to China one time. I’ve never been there even once…I think about it when I go down to the harbor and look at the ships.”
“My uncle died in China.”
“Yeah…lots of people died there. Still, we’re all brothers.”
J treated me to a few beers, and as a bonus he threw some French fries into a plastic bag and gave them to me to take.
“Thank you.”
“No big deal. Just something I felt like doing…hey, you kids grow up so fast. First time I met you, you were still in high school.”
I laughed and nodded and said goodbye.
“Take care,” J said.
On the bar’s calendar, the aphorism written under August 26th was:
“What you give freely to others, you will always receive in turn.”
I bought a ticket for the night bus, went to the pickup spot and sat on a bench, gazing at the lights of the town. As the night grew later, the lights started to go out, leaving only the streetlights and neon signs. The sea breeze blew over the faint sound of a steam whistle.
There were two station workers, one on each side of the bus door, taking tickets and checking seat numbers. When I handed over my ticket, he said,
“Number twenty-one China.”
“China?”
“Yeah, seat 21-C, it’s a kind of phonetic alphabet. A is America, B for Brazil, C for China, D for Denmark. You’ll be upset if you hear me wrong and end up in the wrong seat.”
Saying that, he pointed to his partner, who was in charge of consulting the seating chart. I nodded and boarded the bus, sat in seat 21-C, and ate my stillwarm French fries. Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That’s the way we live our lives.
39
This is where my story ends, but of course there’s an epilogue.
I’m twenty-nine, the Rat is thirty. Kind of an uninteresting age. At the time of the highway expansion, J’s Bar was remodeled and became a nice little place. Going in there, you can see J every day, same as ever, facing his bucket of potatoes, and you can hear the regulars complaining about how much better things used to be as they keep on drinking their beers.
I got married, and I’m now living in Tokyo. Whenever a new Sam Peckinpah movie comes out, my wife and I go to the movie theatre, stop at Hibiya Park on the way back and drink two beers each, scattering our popcorn for the pigeons. Out of Peckinpah’s movies, my favorite is Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and she says she likes Convoy the best. Of non-Peckinpah movies, I like Ashes and Diamonds, and she likes Mother Joan of the Angels. Live together long enough, and I guess your interests start to coincide.
Am I happy? If you asked me this, I’d have to say,
‘Yeah, I guess.’ Because dreams are, after all, just that: dreams.
The Rat is still writing his novels. He sends me copies of them every year for Christmas. Last year’s was about a cook in a psychiatric hospital’s cafeteria, the one from the year before that was about a comedy band based on The Brothers Karamazov. Same as ever, his novels have no sex scenes, and none of the characters die.
The first page is always a piece of Japanese writing paper bearing this message:
“Happy birthday,
and a
White Christmas.”
Because my birthday is December 24th. The girl with only four fingers on her left hand, I never saw her again. When I went back to the town that winter, she’d quit the record store and vacated her apartment. Then, in a flood of people and in the flow of time, she vanished without a trace. When I go back to the town in the summer, I always walk down the street we walked together, sit on the stone stairs in front of the warehouse and gaze out at the sea. When I think I want to cry, the tears won’t come. That’s just how it is.
That California Girls record, it’s still on my record shelf. When summer comes around I pull it out and listen to it over and over. Then I think of California and drink beer.
Next to the record shelf is my desk, and above my desk hangs the dried-out, nearly mummified remains of the clump of grass. The grass I pulled out of that cow’s stomach.
The picture of the dead girl from the French lit department, it got lost when I moved.
The Beach Boys put out their first new record in a long time.
I wish they all could be California I wish they all could be California girls…
40
Let’s talk one last time about Derek Hartfield. Hartfield was born in 1909 in a small town in Ohio, the same town where he was raised. His father was a taciturn telegraph engineer, his mother, a plump woman, cooked up horoscopes and cookies. During his gloomy youth, he had not a single friend, and when he could find some free time, he’d leaf through comic books and pulp magazines, and eating his mother’s cookies and continuing in the aforementioned manner, he graduated from high school. After graduating, he tried working in the town’s post office, but it didn’t suit him for very long, and from this point forward he believed that his path led only in the direction of being a novelist. He sold his fifth short story to Weird Tales in 1930, getting twenty dollars for the manuscript. For the next year, he spouted out 70,000 word manuscripts at the rate of one per month, the following year his pace increased to 100,000 words, and before he died he was up to 150,000 words. He had to buy a new Remington typewriter every six months, or so the legend goes.
His books were mostly adventure novels and bizarre stories, and he skillfully unified both those themes in his Waldo the Young Adventurer series, which became his biggest hit, totaling 42 stories in all. Within those stories, Waldo died three times, killed five thousand of his enemies, and (including Martian women) slept with 375 women. Out of those stories, we can read a few of them in translation. Hartfield despised a great deal of things. The post office, high school, publishing companies, carrots, women, dogs…the list goes on and on. However, there were only three things he liked. Guns, cats, and his mother’s cookies. To fend off Paramount studios and FBI researchers, he had the biggest, most complete gun collection in the United States. Everything short of antiaircraft and antitank guns. His favorite gun of all was his .38 special revolver with its pearl-inlaid handle, and though it could only hold one bullet at a time, ‘With this, I can revolve myself anytime I want,’ was one of his favorite sayings.
However, when his mother died in 1938, he took a trip to New York City, climbed the Empire State Building, and jumped off the roof, splattering on the pavement like a frog.
His tombstone, in accordance with his will, bears the following Nietzsche-esque quotation:
“In the light of day, one can comprehend the depths of night’s darkness.”
Hartfield, once again… (instead of an afterword) To say that if I hadn’t come across a writer called Derek Hartfield I wouldn’t have started writing, no, I wouldn’t go that far. Still, my path to getting here would have probably been completely different. When I was in high school, in a secondhand bookstore in Kobe, looking as if they’d been put there by foreign sailors, there were some Hartfield books, and I rounded them up and bought them. One book was fifty yen. Had the place not been a bookstore, I wouldn’t have even recognized them as books. Riding on some freighter, or atop the bed of some junior officer’s bunk in a destroyer, these books had made the trip across the Pacific Ocean, and from far across time, they made their way to the top of my desk.
* * *
A few years later, I went over to America. It was a short trip; I went only to see Hartfield’s grave. I learned where it was from a letter sent to me by a Mr. Thomas McClure, the enthusiastic (and only) researcher of Derek Hartfield. ‘The grave is as small as the heel of a high-heeled shoe. Be sure not to overlook it,’ he wrote.
From New York I boarded a Greyhound bus resembling a giant coffin, and it arrived in that small town in Ohio at 7am. Not a single other passenger got off the bus with me. Crossing the fields outside of town, there was the graveyard. It was bigger than the town itself. Above my head, a bunch of skylarks were going round in circles while singing their flight songs. I spent a long hour searching for Hartfield’s grave. After plucking some dusty wild roses from nearby and placing them on his tombstone as an offering, I put my hand to the grave, sat down, and smoked a cigarette. Beneath the soft May sunlight, I felt that life and death were just as peaceful. Facing the sky, I closed my eyes and spent a few hours listening to the singing of the skylarks.
This story began there, at that graveyard. Where it eventually ended up, I have no idea.
“Compared to the complexity of the universe,”
Hartfield says, “our world’s like the brain tissue of an earthworm.”
I’d like to see it, that’s my request as well.
* * *
We’ve come to the end, but in regards to Hartfield’s diary, the aforementioned Mr. Thomas McClure’s laboriously-written work (The Legend of the Sterile Stars: 1968) provided me with many quotes. I am grateful.
May, 1979
Murakami Haruki