I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.
And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a film. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. Wake up, it says. I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here. The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. At Hamburg airport, though, the kicks were longer and harder than usual. Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?
Be that as it may, it's all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones.
This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko.
Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about her. But I couldn't produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen.
Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start - the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.
Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her.
Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.
The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.
Or maybe it didn't matter all that much and nobody really cared - aside from me. Not that I really cared, either. It was just something that happened to cross my mind.
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."
"And you have no use for "ideals', I suppose?"
"None. Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."
"But there are lots of other ways to live, aren't there?" I asked.
"You like the way I live, don't you?"
"Tell me, Nagasawa," I asked, "what is the "standard of action' in your life?"
"You'll laugh if I tell you," he said.
"No I won't."
"All right," he said. "To be a gentleman."
I didn't laugh, but I nearly fell off my chair. "To be a gentleman? A gentleman?"
"You heard me."
"What does it mean to be a gentleman? How do you define it?"
"A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do."
Still, it is wonderful for two people to love each other, don't you think? I mean, for a man to love his wife so much he can tell his daughters they should have died in her place
I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.
She was gone when I woke at 12.30. I found no note of any kind. One side of my head felt strangely heavy from having drunk at an odd hour. I took a shower to wake myself, shaved and sat in a chair, naked, drinking a bottle of juice from the fridge and reviewing in order the events of the night before. Each scene felt unreal and strangely distant, as though I were viewing it through two or three layers of glass, but the events had undoubtedly happened to me.
"But there's nothing I can do but wait for him," said Hatsumi with her chin in her hand.
"You love him that much?"
"I do," she answered without a moment's hesitation.
"Oh boy," I said with a sigh, drinking down the last of my beer. "It must be a wonderful thing to be so sure that you love somebody."
"I'm a stupid, old-fashioned girl," she said. "Have another beer?"
"It's strictly psychological, I'm sure," I said. "Give it time. There's no hurry."
"All of my problems are strictly psychological," said Naoko
"Don't feel sorry for yourself," he said. "Only arseholes do that."
This was the beginning of one weird spring. I spent the whole holiday waiting for letters. I couldn't take a trip, I couldn't go home to see my parents, I couldn't even take a part-time job because there was no telling when a letter might arrive from Naoko saying she wanted me to come and see her on such-and-such a date.
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.
But don't get me wrong. I'm not totally mad at you. I'm just sad. You were so nice to me when I was having my problems, but now that you're having yours, it seems there's not a thing I can do for you. You're all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside. So now I see you coming back with our drinks - walking and thinking. I was hoping you'd trip, but you didn't. Now you're sitting next to me drinking your Coke. I was holding out one last hope that you'd notice and say "Hey, your hair's changed!" but no. If you had, I would have torn up this letter and said: "Let's go to your place. I'll make you a nice dinner. And afterwards we can go to bed and cuddle." But you're about as sensitive as a steel plate. Goodbye.
The birds and the rabbits are doing just fine.
April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn't talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this. I know it's too late to be saying this, but your new hairstyle looks great on you. Really cute.
That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.
"I have to talk to you," I said. "I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."