Vintage Murakami Page 13

  The ice man heaved a deep frozen sigh. It crystallized in midair with a ringing sound. He laced his long fingers together on his knees. “Well, if you really want to go on a trip so badly, I don’t have anything against it. I’ll go anywhere if it’ll make you happy. But do you know where you want to go?”

  “How about visiting the South Pole?” I said. I chose the South Pole because I was sure that the ice man would be interested in going somewhere cold. And, to be honest, I had always wanted to travel there. I wanted to wear a fur coat with a hood, and I wanted to see the aurora australis and a flock of penguins.

  When I said this, my husband looked straight into my eyes, without blinking, and I felt as if a pointed icicle were piercing all the way through to the back of my head. He was silent for a while, and finally he said, in a glinting voice, “All right, if that’s what you want, then let’s go to the South Pole. You’re really sure that this is what you want?”

  I wasn’t able to answer right away. The ice man’s stare had been on me so long that the inside of my head felt numb. Then I nodded.

  AS time passed, though, I came to regret ever having brought up the idea of going to the South Pole. I don’t know why, but it seemed that as soon as I spoke the words “South Pole” to my husband something changed inside him. His eyes became sharper, his breath came out whiter, and his fingers were frostier. He hardly talked to me anymore, and he stopped eating entirely. All of this made me feel very insecure.

  Five days before we were supposed to leave, I got up my nerve and said, “Let’s forget about going to the South Pole. When I think about it now, I realize that it’s going to be terribly cold there, and it might not be good for our health. I’m starting to think that it might be better for us to go someplace more ordinary. How about Europe? Let’s go have a real vacation in Spain. We can drink wine, eat paella, and see a bullfight or something.”

  But my husband paid no attention to what I was saying. He stared off into space for a few minutes. Then he declared, “No, I don’t particularly want to go to Spain. Spain is too hot for me. It’s too dusty, and the food is too spicy. Besides, I’ve already bought tickets for the South Pole. And we’ve got a fur coat and fur-lined boots for you. We can’t let all that go to waste. Now that we’ve come this far, we can’t not go.”

  The truth is that I was scared. I had a premonition that if we went to the South Pole something would happen to us that we might not be able to undo. I was having this bad dream over and over again. It was always the same. I’d be out taking a walk and I’d fall into a deep crevasse that had opened up in the ground. Nobody would find me, and I’d freeze down there. Shut up inside the ice, I’d stare up at the sky. I’d be conscious, but I wouldn’t be able to move, not even a finger. I’d realize that moment by moment I was becoming the past. As people looked at me, at what I’d become, they were looking at the past. I was a scene moving backward, away from them.

  Then I’d wake up and find the ice man sleeping beside me. He always slept without breathing, like a dead man.

  But I loved the ice man. I cried, and my tears dripped onto his cheek and he woke up and held me in his arms. “I had a bad dream,” I told him.

  “It was only a dream,” he said. “Dreams come from the past, not the future. You aren’t bound by them. The dreams are bound by you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced.

  I COULDN’T find a good reason to cancel the trip, so in the end my husband and I boarded a plane for the South Pole. The stewardesses were all taciturn. I wanted to look at the view out the window, but the clouds were so thick that I couldn’t see anything. After a while, the window was covered with a layer of ice. My husband sat silently reading a book. I felt none of the excitement of heading off on a vacation. I was just going through the motions and doing things that had already been decided on.

  When we went down the stairs and stepped off onto the ground of the South Pole, I felt my husband’s body lurch. It lasted less than a blink of an eye, just half a second, and his expression didn’t change at all, but I saw it happen. Something inside the ice man had been secretly, violently shaken. He stopped and looked at the sky, then at his hands. He heaved a huge breath. Then he looked at me and grinned. He said, “Is this the place you wanted to visit?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  The South Pole was lonely beyond anything I had expected. Almost no one lived there. There was just one small, featureless town, and in that town there was one hotel, which was, of course, also small and featureless. The South Pole was not a tourist destination. There wasn’t a single penguin. And you couldn’t see the aurora australis. There were no trees, flowers, rivers, or ponds. Everywhere I went, there was only ice. Everywhere, as far as I could see, the wasteland of ice stretched on and on.

  My husband, though, walked enthusiastically from place to place as if he couldn’t get enough of it. He learned the local language quickly, and spoke with the townspeople in a voice that had the hard rumble of an avalanche. He conversed with them for hours with a serious expression on his face, but I had no way of knowing what they were talking about. I felt as though my husband had betrayed me and left me to care for myself.

  There, in that wordless world surrounded by thick ice, I eventually lost all my strength. Bit by bit, bit by bit. In the end, I didn’t even have the energy to feel irritated anymore. It was as though I had lost the compass of my emotions somewhere. I had lost track of where I was heading, I had lost track of time, and I had lost all sense of my own self. I don’t know when this started or when it ended, but when I regained consciousness I was in a world of ice, an eternal winter drained of all color, closed in alone.

  Even after most of my sensation had gone, I still knew this much. My husband at the South Pole was not the same man as before. He looked out for me just as he had always done, and he spoke to me kindly. I could tell that he truly meant the things he said to me. But I also knew that he was no longer the ice man I had met in the hotel at the ski resort.

  There was no way I could bring this to anybody’s attention, though. Everyone at the South Pole liked him, and, anyway, they couldn’t understand a word I said. Puffing out their white breath, they would tell jokes and argue and sing songs in their own language while I sat by myself in our room, looking out at a gray sky that was unlikely to clear for months to come. The airplane that had brought us there had long since gone, and after a while the runway was covered with a hard layer of ice, just like my heart.

  “Winter has come,” my husband said. “It’s going to be a very long winter, and there will be no more planes, or ships, either. Everything has frozen over. It looks as though we’ll have to stay here until next spring.”

  About three months after we arrived at the South Pole, I realized that I was pregnant. The child that I gave birth to would be a little ice man—I knew this. My womb had frozen over, and my amniotic fluid was slush. I could feel its chill inside me. My child would be just like his father, with eyes like icicles and frost-rimed fingers. And our new family would never again set foot outside the South Pole. The eternal past, heavy beyond all comprehension, had us in its grasp. We would never shake it off.

  Now there’s almost no heart left in me. My warmth has gone very far away. Sometimes I forget that warmth ever existed. In this place, I am lonelier than anyone else in the world. When I cry, the ice man kisses my cheek, and my tears turn to ice. He takes those frozen teardrops in his hand and puts them on his tongue. “See how I love you,” he says. He is telling the truth. But a wind sweeping in from nowhere blows his white words back and back into the past.

  —Translated by Richard L. Peterson

  VINTAGE BOOKS BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

  after the quake

  Out of the Kobe earthquake of 1995 come these six surreal (yet somehow believable) stories. An electronics salesman, abruptly deserted by his wife, is entrusted to deliver a mysterious package but gets more than he bargained for on the receiving
end; a Thai chauffeur takes his troubled charge to a seer, who penetrates her deepest sorrow; and, in the unforgettable title story, a boy acknowledges a shattering secret about his past that will change his life forever. Fiction/Literature/0-375-71327-1

  Dance Dance Dance

  As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami’s protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenage psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Fiction/Literature/0-679-75379-6

  The Elephant Vanishes

  This collection of stories is a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air, a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night, and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster in her back yard. Fiction/Literature/0-679-75053-3

  Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  Murakami draws readers into a narrative particle accelerator in which a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, Bob Dylan, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. Fiction/Literature/0-679-74346-4

  Norwegian Wood

  Toru, a college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. But their relationship is colored by the tragic death of their mutual best friend years before. Toru has learned to live with his grief, but it becomes apparent that for Naoko, life is becoming too difficult to bear. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-70402-7

  South of the Border, West of the Sun

  Born in 1951 to an affluent family, Hajime has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime’s happiness. A boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-76739-8

  Sputnik Sweetheart

  Plunging us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles, Murakami tells a story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves. A college student, “K,” falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, “K” is solicited to join the search party and finds himself drawn back into her world, and beset by ominous, haunting visions. Fiction/Literature/0-375-72605-5

  Underground

  On March 20, 1995, five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin, a poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. In an attempt to discover why, Murakami talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe— from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt, to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators, to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum. Nonfiction/Literature/0-375-72580-6

  A Wild Sheep Chase

  A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakami’s international reputation. A young advertising exec uses a postcard picture of a sheep in a campaign, unwittingly capturing the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Fiction/Literature/0-375-71894-X

  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrated marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. Fiction/Literature/0-679-77543-9

  VINTAGE READERS

  Authors available in this series

  Martin Amis

  James Baldwin

  Sandra Cisneros

  Joan Didion

  Richard Ford

  Langston Hughes

  Barry Lopez

  Alice Munro

  Haruki Murakami

  Vladimir Nabokov

  V. S. Naipaul

  Oliver Sacks

  Representing a wide spectrum of some of our most significant

  modern authors, the Vintage Readers o fer an attractive,

  accessible selection of writing that matters.

  Haruki Murakami

  VINTAGE MURAKAMI

  Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949. He grew up in Kobe and graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), won him the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers. This novel, together with Pinball 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), for which he won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers, form The Trilogy of the Rat. He is also the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Norwegian Wood (1987), Dance Dance Dance (1988), South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992), and The Elephant Vanishes (1993). In 1991, Murakami spent four years in the United States with his wife where he taught at Princeton and wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994). After the Kobe earthquake and the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995, Murakami returned to Japan where he interviewed attack victims, and then members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. From these interviews, Murakami published two nonfiction books in Japan, the later of which, The Place That Was Promised (1998), won the Kuwabara Takeo Academic Award. These two books were selectively combined to form the English edition Underground (2000). Since then, Murakami has written Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) and after the quake (2002). The most recent of his many honors is the Yomiuri Literary Prize, whose previous recipients include Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages.

  BOOKS BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

  A Wild Sheep Chase

  Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

  Norwegian Wood

  The Elephant Vanishes

  Dance Dance Dance

  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  South of the Border, West of the Sun

  Sputnik Sweetheart

  Underground

  after the quake

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Haruki Murakami

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House,

  Inc., New York.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  The pieces in this collection were originally published in the following:

  Chapter One from Norwegian Wood, translated by Jay Rubin, copyright © 2000 by

  Haruki Murakami. “Barn Burning,” translated by Alfred Birnbaum, in The Elephant

  Vanishes, copyright © 1993 by Haruki Murakami. “Shizuko Akashi,” translated by

  Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel, in Underground, copyright © 2000 by Haruki

  Murakami. “honey pie,” translated by Jay Rubin, in after the quake (originally

  published in The New Yorker), copyright © 2002 by Haruki Murakami. “Lieutenant

  Mamiya’s Long Story: Part I” and “Lieutenant Mamiya’s Long Story: Part II,”

  translated by Jay Rubin, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, copyright © 1997 by

  Haruki Murakami. “Ice Man,” translated by Richard L. Peterson, was originally

  published in The New Yorker, copyright © 2003 by Haruki Murakami.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Murakami, Haruki, 1949–.

  Vintage Murakami / Haruki Murakami.

&nbs
p; p. cm.

  Contents: “Barn burning” from The Elephant vanishes—“Shizuko Akashi” from

  Underground—“honey pie” from after the quake—“Lieutenant Mamiya’s long

  story: Part I” from The Wind-up bird chronicle—“Lieutenant Mamiya’s long story:

  Part II” from The Wind-up bird chronicle—“Ice man.”

  I. Title.

  PL856.U673 A2 2004

  895.6’35—dc21 2003049700

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43001-4

  v3.0