Vintage Murakami

  We reached the bus stop and waited.

  “Certain things will always remain as riddles, of course,” said Lieutenant Mamiya. “There are many things I still don’t understand. I still wonder who that lone Mongolian officer was who met us in the desert. And I wonder what would have happened if we had managed to bring that document back to headquarters. Why did Yamamoto not simply leave us on the right bank of the Khalkha and cross over by himself? He would have been able to move around far more freely that way. Perhaps he had been planning to use us as a decoy for the Mongolian troops so that he could escape alone. It certainly is conceivable. Perhaps Corporal Honda realized this from the start and that was why he merely stood by while the Mongolians killed him.

  “In any case, it was a very long time after that before Corporal Honda and I had an opportunity to meet again. We were separated from the moment we arrived in Hailar and were forbidden to speak or even to see each other. I had wanted to thank him one last time, but they made that impossible. He was wounded in the battle for Nomonhan and sent home, while I remained in Manchuria until the end of the war, after which I was sent to Siberia. I was only able to find him several years later, after I was repatriated from my Siberian internment. We did manage to meet a few times after that, and we corresponded. But he seemed to avoid talking about what had happened to us at the Khalkha River, and I myself was not too eager to discuss it. For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?

  “This has turned into a very long story, but what I wanted to convey to you was my feeling that real life may have ended for me deep in that well in the desert of Outer Mongolia. I feel as if, in the intense light that shone for a mere ten or fifteen seconds a day in the bottom of the well, I burned up the very core of my life, until there was nothing left. That is how mysterious that light was to me. I can’t explain it very well, but as honestly and simply as I can state it, no matter what I have encountered, no matter what I have experienced since then, I ceased to feel anything in the bottom of my heart. Even in the face of those monstrous Soviet tank units, even when I lost this left hand of mine, even in the hellish Soviet internment camps, a kind of numbness was all I felt. It may sound strange to say this, but none of that mattered. Something inside me was already dead. Perhaps, as I felt at the time, I should have died in that light, simply faded away. That was the time for me to die. But, as Mr. Honda had predicted, I did not die there. Or perhaps I should say that I could not die there.

  “I came back to Japan, having lost my hand and twelve precious years. By the time I arrived in Hiroshima, my parents and my sister were long since dead. They had put my little sister to work in a factory, which was where she was when the bomb fell. My father was on his way to see her at the time, and he, too, lost his life. The shock sent my mother to her deathbed; she finally passed away in 1947. As I told you earlier, the girl to whom I had been secretly engaged was now married to another man, and she had given birth to two children. In the cemetery, I found my own grave. There was nothing left for me. I felt truly empty, and knew that I should not have come back there. I hardly remember what my life has been like since then. I became a social studies teacher and taught geography and history in high school, but I was not, in the true sense of the word, alive. I simply performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me, one after another. I never had one real friend, no human ties with the students in my charge. I never loved anyone. I no longer knew what it meant to love another person. I would close my eyes and see Yamamoto being skinned alive. I dreamed about it over and over. Again and again I watched them peel the skin off and turn him into a lump of flesh. I could hear his heartrending screams. I also had dreams of myself slowly rotting away, alive, in the bottom of the well. Sometimes it seemed to me that that was what had really happened and that my life here was the dream.

  “When Mr. Honda told me on the bank of the Khalkha River that I would not die on the continent, I was overjoyed. It was not a matter of believing or not believing: I wanted to cling to something then—anything at all. Mr. Honda probably knew that and told me what he did in order to comfort me. But of joy there was to be none for me. After returning to Japan, I lived like an empty shell. Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell. This is what I hope I have made clear to you, Mr. Okada.”

  “Does this mean,” I ventured, “that you never married after returning to Japan?”

  “Of course not,” answered Lieutenant Mamiya. “I have no wife, no parents or siblings. I am entirely alone.”

  After hesitating a moment, I asked, “Are you sorry that you ever heard Mr. Honda’s prediction?”

  Now it was Lieutenant Mamiya’s turn to hesitate. After a moment of silence, he looked me straight in the face. “Maybe I am,” he said. “Maybe he should never have spoken those words. Maybe I should never have heard them. As Mr. Honda said at the time, a person’s destiny is something you look back at afterward, not something to be known in advance. I do believe this, however: now it makes no difference either way. All I am doing now is fulfilling my obligation to go on living.”

  The bus came, and Lieutenant Mamiya favored me with a deep bow. Then he apologized to me for having taken up my valuable time. “Well, then, I shall be on my way,” he said. “Thank you for everything. I am glad in any case that I was able to hand you the package from Mr. Honda. This means that my job is done at last. I can go home with an easy mind.” Using both his right hand and the artificial one, he deftly produced the necessary coins and dropped them into the fare box.

  I stood there and watched as the bus disappeared around the next corner. After it was gone, I felt a strange emptiness inside, a hopeless kind of feeling like that of a small child who has been left alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

  Then I went home, and sitting on the living room couch, I opened the package that Mr. Honda had left me as a keepsake. I worked up a sweat removing layer after layer of carefully sealed wrapping paper, until a sturdy cardboard box emerged. It was a fancy Cutty Sark gift box, but it was too light to contain a bottle of whiskey. I opened it, to find nothing inside. It was absolutely empty. All that Mr. Honda had left me was an empty box.

  —Translated by Jay Rubin

  ICE MAN

  I married an ice man.

  I first met him in a hotel at a ski resort, which is probably the perfect place to meet an ice man. The hotel lobby was crowded with animated young people, but the ice man was sitting by himself on a chair in the corner farthest from the fireplace, quietly reading a book. Although it was nearly noon, the clear, chilly light of an early-winter morning seemed to linger around him.

  “Look, that’s an ice man,” my friend whispered.

  At the time, though, I had absolutely no idea what an ice man was. My friend didn’t, either. “He must be made of ice. That’s why they call him an ice man.” She said this to me with a serious expression, as if she were talking about a ghost or someone with a contagious disease.

  The ice man was tall, and he seemed to be young, but his stubby, wirelike hair had patches of white in it, like pockets of unmelted snow. His cheekbones stood out sharply, like frozen stone, and his fingers were rimed with a white frost that looked as if it would never melt. Otherwise, though, the ice man seemed like an ordinary man. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but you could see that he might be very attractive, depending on how you looked at him. In any case, something about him pierced me to the heart, and I felt this, more than anywhere, in his eyes. His gaze was as silent and transparent as the splinters of light that pass through icicles on a winter morning. It was like the single glint of life in an artificial body.

  I stood there for a while and watched the ice man from a distance. He didn’t look up. He just sat without moving, reading his book as though there were no one else around him.

  THE next morn
ing, the ice man was in the same place again, reading a book in exactly the same way. When I went to the dining room for lunch, and when I came back from skiing with my friends that evening, he was still there, directing the same gaze onto the pages of the same book. The same thing happened the day after that. Even when the sun sank low, and the hour grew late, he sat in his chair, as quiet as the winter scene outside the window.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, I made up some excuse not to go out on the slopes. I stayed in the hotel by myself and loitered for a while in the lobby, which was as empty as a ghost town. The air there was warm and moist, and the room had a strangely dejected smell—the smell of snow that had been tracked in on the soles of people’s shoes and was now melting in front of the fireplace. I looked out the windows, rustled through the pages of a newspaper or two, and then went over to the ice man, gathered my nerve, and spoke.

  I tend to be shy with strangers and, unless I have a very good reason, I don’t usually talk to people I don’t know. But I felt compelled to talk to the ice man no matter what. It was my last night at the hotel, and if I let this chance go by I feared I would never get to talk with an ice man again.

  “Don’t you ski?” I asked him, as casually as I could.

  He turned his face toward me slowly, as if he’d heard a noise in the distance, and he stared at me with those eyes. Then he calmly shook his head. “I don’t ski,” he said. “I just like to sit here and read and look at the snow.” His words formed white clouds above him, like comic-strip captions. I could actually see the words in the air, until he rubbed them away with a frost-rimed finger.

  I had no idea what to say next. I just blushed and stood there. The ice man looked into my eyes and seemed to smile slightly.

  “Would you like to sit down?” he asked. “You’re interested in me, aren’t you? You want to know what an ice man is.” Then he laughed. “Relax, there’s nothing to worry about. You won’t catch a cold just by talking to me.”

  We sat side by side on a sofa in the corner of the lobby and watched the snowflakes dance outside the window. I ordered a hot cocoa and drank it, but the ice man didn’t drink anything. He didn’t seem to be any better at conversation than I was. Not only that, but we didn’t seem to have anything in common to talk about. At first, we talked about the weather. Then we talked about the hotel. “Are you here by yourself?” I asked the ice man. “Yes,” he answered. He asked me if I liked skiing. “Not very much,” I said. “I only came because my friends insisted. I actually rarely ski at all.”

  There were so many things I wanted to know. Was his body really made of ice? What did he eat? Where did he live in the summer? Did he have a family? Things like that. But the ice man didn’t talk about himself, and I held back from asking personal questions.

  Instead, the ice man talked about me. I know it’s hard to believe, but he somehow knew all about me. He knew about the members of my family; he knew my age, my likes and dislikes, the state of my health, the school I was attending, and the friends I was seeing. He even knew things that had happened to me so far in the past that I had long since forgotten them.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, flustered. I felt as if I were naked in front of a stranger. “How do you know so much about me? Can you read people’s minds?”

  “No, I can’t read minds or anything like that. I just know,” the ice man said. “I just know. It’s as if I were looking deep into ice, and, when I look at you like this, things about you become clearly visible to me.”

  I asked him, “Can you see my future?”

  “I can’t see the future,” he said slowly. “I can’t take any interest in the future at all. More precisely, I have no conception of a future. That’s because ice has no future. All it has is the past enclosed within it. Ice is able to preserve things that way—very cleanly and distinctly and as vividly as though they were still alive. That’s the essence of ice.”

  “That’s nice,” I said and smiled. “I’m relieved to hear that. After all, I don’t really want to know what my future is.”

  WE met again a number of times once we were back in the city. Eventually, we started dating. We didn’t go to movies, though, or to coffee shops. We didn’t even go to restaurants. The ice man rarely ate anything to speak of. Instead, we always sat on a bench in the park and talked about things—anything except the ice man himself.

  “Why is that?” I asked him once. “Why don’t you talk about yourself? I want to know more about you. Where were you born? What are your parents like? How did you happen to become an ice man?”

  The ice man looked at me for a while, and then he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said quietly and clearly, exhaling a puff of white words into the air. “I know the past of everything else. But I myself have no past. I don’t know where I was born, or what my parents looked like. I don’t even know if I had parents. I have no idea how old I am. I don’t know if I have an age at all.”

  The ice man was as lonely as an iceberg in the dark night.

  I FELL seriously in love with this ice man. The ice man loved me just as I was—in the present, without any future. In turn, I loved the ice man just as he was—in the present, without any past. We even started to talk about getting married.

  I had just turned twenty, and the ice man was the first person I had really loved. At the time, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it meant to love an ice man. But even if I’d fallen in love with a normal man I doubt I’d have had a clearer idea of what love meant.

  My mother and my older sister were strongly opposed to my marrying the ice man. “You’re too young to get married,” they said. “Besides, you don’t know a thing about his background. You don’t even know where he was born or when. How could we possibly tell our relatives that you’re marrying someone like that? Plus, this is an ice man we’re talking about, and what are you going to do if he suddenly melts away? You don’t seem to understand that marriage requires a real commitment.”

  Their worries were unfounded, though. After all, an ice man isn’t really made of ice. He isn’t going to melt, no matter how warm it gets. He’s called an ice man because his body is as cold as ice, but what he’s made of is different from ice, and it’s not the kind of cold that takes away other people’s heat.

  So we got married. Nobody blessed the wedding, and no friends or relatives were happy for us. We didn’t hold a ceremony, and, when it came to having my name entered in his family register, well, the ice man didn’t even have one. We just decided, the two of us, that we were married. We bought a little cake and ate it together, and that was our modest wedding.

  We rented a tiny apartment, and the ice man made a living by working at a cold-storage meat facility. He could take any amount of cold, and he never felt tired, no matter how hard he worked. So the ice man’s employer liked him very much, and paid him a better salary than the other employees. The two of us lived a happy life together, without bothering or being bothered by anyone.

  When the ice man made love to me, I saw in my mind a piece of ice that I was sure existed somewhere in quiet solitude. I thought that the ice man probably knew where that piece of ice was. It was frozen hard, so hard that I thought nothing could be harder. It was the biggest piece of ice in the world. It was somewhere very far away, and the ice man was passing on the memories of that ice to me and to the world. At first, I felt confused when the ice man made love to me. But, after a while, I got used to it. I even started to love having sex with the ice man. In the night, we silently shared that enormous piece of ice, in which hundreds of millions of years—all the pasts of the world—were stored.

  THERE were no problems to speak of in our married life. We loved each other deeply, and nothing came between us. We wanted to have a child, but that didn’t seem to be possible. It may have been that human genes and ice-man genes didn’t combine easily. In any case, it was partly because we didn’t have children that I found myself with time on my hands. I would finish up all the housework in the morning, an
d then have nothing to do. I didn’t have any friends to talk to or go out with, and I didn’t have much to do with the people in our neighborhood, either. My mother and sister were still angry with me for marrying the ice man and showed no sign of ever wanting to see me again. And although, as the months passed, the people around us started talking to him from time to time, deep in their hearts they still hadn’t accepted the ice man or me, who had married him. We were different from them, and no amount of time could bridge the gap between us.

  So, while the ice man was working, I stayed at home by myself, reading books and listening to music. I tend to prefer staying at home, anyway, and I don’t especially mind being alone. But I was still young, and doing the same thing day after day eventually began to bother me. It wasn’t the boredom that hurt. It was the repetition.

  That was why I said to my husband one day, “How would it be if the two of us went away on a trip somewhere, just for a change?”

  “A trip?” the ice man said. He narrowed his eyes and stared at me. “What on earth would we take a trip for? Aren’t you happy being here with me?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I am happy. But I’m bored. I feel like travelling somewhere far away and seeing things that I’ve never seen before. I want to see what it’s like to breathe new air. Do you understand? Besides, we haven’t even had our honeymoon yet. We have some savings, and you have plenty of vacation days coming to you. Isn’t it about time that we got away somewhere and took it easy for a while?”