Wind/Pinball Read online

  The editor told me that there were five finalists, including me. I was surprised, but I was also very sleepy, so the reality of what had happened didn’t really sink in. I got out of bed, washed up, got dressed, and went for a walk with my wife. Just when we were passing the local elementary school, I noticed a passenger pigeon hiding in the shrubbery. When I picked it up I saw that it seemed to have a broken wing. A metal tag was affixed to its leg. I gathered it gently in my hands and carried it to the closest police station, at Aoyama-Omotesando. As I walked there along the side streets of Harajuku, the warmth of the wounded pigeon sank into my hands. I felt it quivering. That Sunday was bright and clear, and the trees, the buildings, and the shopwindows sparkled beautifully in the spring sunlight.

  That’s when it hit me. I was going to win the prize. And I was going to go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success. It was an audacious presumption, but I was sure at that moment that it would happen. Completely sure. Not in a theoretical way, but directly and intuitively.

  —

  I wrote Pinball, 1973 the following year as a sequel to Hear the Wind Sing. I was still running the jazz bar, which meant that Pinball was also written late at night at my kitchen table. It is with love mingled with a bit of embarrassment that I call these two works my kitchen-table novels. It was shortly after completing Pinball, 1973 that I made up my mind to become a full-time writer and we sold the business. I immediately set to work on my first full-length novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, which I consider to be the true beginning of my career as a novelist.

  Nevertheless, these two short works played an important role in what I have accomplished. They are totally irreplaceable, much like friends from long ago. It seems unlikely that we will ever get together again, but I will never forget their friendship. They were a crucial, precious presence in my life back then. They warmed my heart, and encouraged me on my way.

  I can still remember, with complete clarity, the way I felt when whatever it was came fluttering down into my hands that day thirty years ago on the grass behind the outfield fence at Jingu Stadium; and I recall just as clearly the warmth of the wounded pigeon I picked up in those same hands that spring afternoon a year later, near Sendagaya Elementary School. I always call up those sensations when I think about what it means to write a novel. Such tactile memories teach me to believe in that something I carry within me, and to dream of the possibilities it offers. How wonderful it is that those sensations still reside within me today.

  JUNE 2014

  HEAR THE WIND SING

  1

  “There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” So said a writer I bumped into back when I was a university student. It wasn’t until much later that I could grasp his full meaning, but I still found consolation in his words—that there’s no such thing as perfect writing.

  All the same, I despaired whenever I sat down to write. The scope of what I could handle was just too limited. I could write something about an elephant, let’s say, but when it came to the elephant’s trainer, I might draw a blank. That kind of thing.

  I was caught in this bind for eight years—eight years. A long time.

  If one operates on the principle that everything can be a learning experience, then of course aging needn’t be so painful. That’s what they tell us, anyway.

  From the age of twenty on, I did my best to live according to that philosophy. As a result, I was cheated and misunderstood, used and abused, time and again. Yet it also brought me many strange experiences. All sorts of people told me their stories. Then they left, never to return, as if I were no more than a bridge they were clattering across. I, however, kept my lips zipped tight. And so the stories stayed with me until I entered this, the final year of my twenties.

  —

  Now I think it’s time to tell my story.

  Which doesn’t mean, of course, that I have resolved even one of my problems, or that I will be somehow different when I finish. I may not have changed at all. In the end, writing is not a full step toward self-healing, just a tiny, very tentative move in that direction.

  All the same, writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.

  Don’t take this as an excuse. I promise you—I’ve told my story as best I can right now. There’s nothing to add. Yet I can’t help thinking: if all goes well, a time may come, years or even decades from now, when I will discover that my self has been salvaged and redeemed. Then the elephant will return to the veldt, and I will tell the story of the world in words far more beautiful than these.

  *

  I learned a lot of what I know about writing from Derek Hartfield. Almost everything, in fact. Unfortunately, as a writer, Hartfield was sterile in the full sense of the word. One has only to read some of his stuff to see that. His prose is mangled, his stories slapdash, his themes juvenile. Yet he was a fighter as few are, a man who used words as weapons. In my opinion, when it comes to sheer combativeness he should be ranked right up there with the giants of his day, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Sadly, however, he could never fully grasp exactly what it was he was fighting against. In the final reckoning, I suppose, that’s what being sterile is all about.

  Hartfield waged his fruitless battle for eight years and two months, and then he died. In June 1938, on a sunny Sunday morning, he jumped off the Empire State Building clutching a portrait of Adolf Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left. Few people noticed, though—he was as ignored in death as he had been in life.

  I came across a copy of Hartfield’s long-out-of-print first book during my last summer vacation of junior high, a time marked in my memory by a terrible case of crotch rot. The uncle who gave me the book died in agony three years later of intestinal cancer. The last time I saw him, the doctors had hacked him up so badly that he bristled with plastic tubes ferrying fluids in and out of both ends of his body. He was shrunken and his skin had turned reddish brown, so that he resembled a crafty old monkey.

  *

  I had three uncles in total. One died just outside Shanghai two days after the end of the Pacific War when he stepped on a land mine he himself had laid. My sole surviving uncle works as a magician on the Japanese hot springs circuit.

  *

  Hartfield says this about good writing: “Writing is, in effect, the act of verifying the distance between us and the things surrounding us. What we need is not sensitivity but a measuring stick” (from What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, 1936).

  I began fearfully scanning the world around me with a measuring stick in hand the year Kennedy was shot, which was fifteen years ago now—fifteen years spent jettisoning one thing after another. Like an airplane with engine trouble, I started by pitching out the cargo, then the seats, then, finally, the poor flight attendants, getting rid of everything while taking on nothing new at all.

  Was this the right way? How the hell should I know! Sure, life is easier like this, but I get scared when I imagine what it will be like to be old and facing death. I mean, what will be left after they incinerate my corpse? Not even a shard of bone.

  My late grandmother used to say, “People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can’t dream at all.”

  The night she died, the first thing I did was reach out and gently close her eyes. And in that moment, all the dreams she’d seen in her seventy-nine years vanished without a sound (poof!), like a summer shower on hot pavement. Nothing left.

  *

  One last thing about writing.

  I find the act of writing very painful. I can go a whole month without managing a single line, or write three days and nights straight, only to find the whole thing has missed the mark.

  At the same time, though, I love writing. Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it.

  I was in my teens, I think, when I discovered this, and it so completely blew my mind th
at I couldn’t talk for a week. If I could just keep my wits about me, I felt, I could force the world to conform to my will, overturning whole systems of values, and altering the flow of time.

  Sadly for me, it took ages to see that this was a trap. When at last I caught on, I took a blank notebook and drew a line down the middle; then I listed all that I had gained from this principle on the left-hand side and all that I had lost on the right. It turned out that I had lost so much—things long abandoned, trampled underfoot, sacrificed, betrayed—I couldn’t even write them all down.

  A gulf separates what we attempt to perceive from what we are actually able to perceive. It is so deep that it can never be calculated, however long our measuring stick. What I can set down here is no more than a list. It’s not a novel or even literature, nor is it art. It’s just a notebook with a line drawn down the middle. It may contain something of a moral, though.

  If it’s art or literature you’re interested in, I suggest you read the Greeks. Pure art exists only in slave-owning societies. The Greeks had slaves to till their fields, prepare their meals, and row their galleys while they lay about on sun-splashed Mediterranean beaches, composing poems and grappling with mathematical equations. That’s what art is.

  If you’re the sort of guy who raids the refrigerators of silent kitchens at three o’clock in the morning, you can only write accordingly.

  That’s who I am.

  2

  This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later—in other words, on August 26 of the same year.

  3

  “Eat shit, you rich bastards!” the Rat shouted, glowering at me, with his hands resting on the bar.

  Maybe it wasn’t me he was bellowing at but the coffee grinder behind me. Since we were sitting side by side, he really didn’t have to raise his voice like that. Whatever the cause, he seemed to have become his old self again. He took a satisfied swig of beer.

  No one in the bar gave a damn about the Rat’s shouting. Fact was, the place was so packed everyone and his cousin was yelling. It looked like the Titanic just before it sank.

  “Leeches!” the Rat spat out, shaking his head. “The bastards can’t do a damn thing for themselves. Looking at their faces makes me want to puke.”

  I nodded back without taking my lips from the rim of my glass. Rant ended, the Rat began contemplating his slender fingers, turning them back and forth on the bar, as if warming them over a fire. I studied the ceiling and waited. He would have to examine each finger before our conversation could resume. So what else was new?

  The Rat and I had spent the whole summer as if possessed, drinking enough beer to fill a twenty-five-meter pool and scattering enough peanut shells to cover the entire floor of J’s Bar to a depth of two inches. We were bored out of our skulls that summer, and surviving the only way we knew how.

  When the boredom grew too much to bear, I contemplated the nicotine-stained print hanging behind the bar. It was the kind of picture you’d find on a Rorschach test: from where I sat, it resembled two green monkeys tossing deflated tennis balls back and forth. I spent hours looking at it.

  When I told J the bartender what it reminded me of, he just shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I can see that,” he said, after studying it for a moment.

  “But what do you think it symbolizes?” I persisted.

  “The monkey on the left is you,” he replied. “And the one on the right is me. I’m throwing you a beer and you’re tossing me back the money.”

  Far out, I thought, taking another swig of beer.

  —

  “Makes me want to puke,” said the Rat, his finger inspection complete.

  The Rat was always running down the rich—he out-and-out despised them. Yet his family was loaded. Whenever I pointed that out, his reply was always, “Ain’t my fault.” There were times (usually when we were smashed) when I said, “Sure it is,” but to say that only bummed me out. I knew there was some truth in what he said.

  —

  “Know why I hate the rich so much?” the Rat continued. This was the first time he’d gotten past the puking part.

  I shook my head no.

  “To be blunt, ’cause they don’t have a goddamn clue. They can’t scratch their own asses without a flashlight and a measuring tape.”

  “To be blunt” was one of the Rat’s signature phrases.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. They’re totally in the dark, the whole lot of them. They only pretend to think about important stuff…Know why?”

  “No, why?”

  “’Cause they don’t need to, that’s why. Sure, they have to use their brains a little to get rich in the first place, but once they make it, it’s a piece of cake—they don’t need to think anymore. Like an orbiting satellite doesn’t need gas. They just keep going round and round, always over the same damn place. But I’m not like that, and neither are you. We have to use our brains to survive. We think about everything, from tomorrow’s weather to the size of the bathtub plug. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “That’s where things stand.”

  The Rat looked bored. He pulled out a tissue and blew his nose. He’d said everything he wanted to say, but how seriously was I supposed to take him? I had no idea.

  “In the end we all die anyway,” I said, trying to feel him out.

  “Yeah. We all die. But it’ll take another fifty years. And, to be blunt, fifty years spent thinking is a helluva lot more exhausting than five thousand years of living without using your brain, right?”

  No argument there.

  4

  I had met the Rat three years earlier. It was the spring of our first year in college, and both of us were flat-out wasted. In fact, for the life of me, I can’t remember how we met or how I ended up in his shiny black Fiat 600 at 4 a.m. Maybe we had a mutual friend.

  Anyhow, there we were, smashed, flying down the road. Which explains why we went merrily crashing through the park fence, bulldozed the azaleas, and wrapped ourselves around one of the stone pillars. It was a frigging miracle neither of us got hurt.

  When I recovered from the shock, I kicked my way out through the busted car door and surveyed the damage. The front grill had assumed the exact shape of the pillar, while the hood had flown off and landed some ten yards away, in front of the monkey cage. Judging by the sounds they were making, the monkeys did not appreciate being awoken in such a rude fashion.

  With both hands still on the wheel, the Rat was bent over vomiting the pizza he’d eaten an hour before all over the dashboard. I scrambled up onto the car and looked down at him through the sunroof.

  “Are you okay?” I called to him.

  “Yeah, but I guess I overdid the booze. Puking like this.”

  “Can you get out?”

  “Yeah. Just give me a boost.”

  The Rat cut the engine, stuck the pack of cigarettes he’d left on the dashboard into his pocket, grabbed my hand, and calmly climbed up onto the car roof. There we sat side by side, smoking one cigarette after another in silence as the sky began to lighten. For some reason, I started thinking about a Richard Burton war movie, that one where he plays a tank commander. I have no idea what was on the Rat’s mind.

  “Hey,” he said after about five minutes. “We’re a lucky pair, don’t you think? I mean, just look at us—not a scratch. Can you believe it?”

  I nodded. “But the car’s a write-off,” I said.

  “Don’t sweat it. I can always buy a new one. But you can’t buy luck.”

  I gave the Rat a closer look. “Are you rich or something?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “That’s good.”

  The Rat shook his head in disgust. “Whatever. But at least we’ve got luck on our side.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  The Rat ground out his cigarette with the heel of his sneaker and flicked the butt toward the monkey cage.

  “Hey, how about we team up? We could have a blast.”


  “What should we do now?”

  “Drink more beer.”

  We bought a half-dozen cans from a nearby vending machine and carried them down to the ocean, lay on the beach, and drank. When we’d drained them all we just looked at the water. The weather was perfect.

  “You can call me Rat,” he said.

  “How’d you get a name like that?”

  “Don’t remember. Happened a long time ago. It bugged me at first, but not anymore. A guy can get used to anything.”

  We chucked the empty cans into the ocean, propped our backs against the embankment, pulled our coats over our heads, and took an hour-long nap. When I woke I was filled with an intense sense of being alive. It was weird—I had never felt that kind of energy before.

  “Man, I feel like I could run sixty miles!” I told the Rat.

  “Me too,” he said.

  —

  But what we had to do in reality was make payments over the next three years, with interest, to city hall for the cost of repairing the damage to the park.

  5

  The Rat is a virtual stranger to books. In fact, the only things I’ve seen him read are sports newspapers and junk mail. Still, he’s always curious about the books I read to kill time, peering at them with the curiosity of a fly staring at a flyswatter.

  “Why do you read books?” he asked.

  “Why do you drink beer?” I replied without glancing in his direction, taking alternate mouthfuls of pickled herring and green salad. The Rat saw this as a very serious question.