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HEAR THE WIND SING
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HEAR THE WIND SING
by Haruki Murakami
translated by Alfred Birnbaum
(typed by “a fan” on Haruki Murakami Forum)
KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL
Words and music of the song "California Girls," p. 51, by Brian Wilson, Copyright
1965 by Irving Music, Inc. Rights for Japan assigned to Taiyo Music, Inc. Words
and music of the song "Return to Sender," p. 76, by Otis Blackwell/Winfield Scott.
Copyright 1962 by Elvis Presley Music, Inc. Rights for Japan assigned to
Chappel/Intersong K. K.
Published by Kodansha Publishers Ltd., 12-21 Otowa 2-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
122, and Kodansha International Ltd., 2-2 Otowa 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
112.
First published by Kodansha Ltd. In Japanese under the title Kaze no Uta o Kike.
Copyright 1979 by Haruki Murakami.
English translation copyright in Japan 1987 by Kodansha International Ltd. All
rights reserved. Printed in Japan.
ISBN 4-06-186026-7
First edition, 1987
Second printing, 1989
1.
"There's no such thing as perfect writing. Just like there's no such thing as perfect
despair."
A writer I chanced to meet when I was in university told me this once. It was
only much later that I caught on to the real meaning of those words, but at least
I was able to find some consolation in them. That there is no such thing as perfect
writing.
All the same, when it came to getting something into writing, I was always
overcome with despair. The range of my ability was just too limited. Even if I
could write, say, about elephants, I probably couldn't have written a thing about
elephant trainers. So it went.
For eight years I was caught in that dilemma--and eight years is a long time.
Of course, you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from
everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.
Ever since I turned twenty, I've tried to stick to that philosophy of life. Thanks
to which I've been dealt smarting blows, been cheated and misunderstood
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countless times, or just as often got myself into the strangest situations. All sorts
of people have come my way telling their tales, trudged over me as if I were a
bridge, then never come back. All the while I kept my mouth shut right and said
nothing. That's how I saw out my late twenties.
Now I think I'm ready to talk.
Granted I haven't come up with one single solution to anything. For that
matter, by the time I get through talking, things might be no different than when
I started. You get right down to it, writing is no means to self-help. It's scarcely a
passing attempt at self-help.
Still, it's awfully hard to tell things honestly. The more honest I try to be, the
more the right words recede into the distance.
I don't mean to rationalize, but at least this writing is my present best. There's
nothing more to say. And yet I find myself thinking that if everything goes well,
sometime way ahead, years, maybe decades, from now, I might discover at last
that these efforts have been my salvation. Then lo, at that point, the elephants
will return to the plains and I will set forth a vision in words more beautiful.
***
I've learned a lot about writing from Derek Heartfield. Perhaps almost
everything. Unfortunately, Heartfield was in every sense of the word a wasted
talent. Read him and you'll see. His style is difficult, the stories impossible, the
themes infantile. Nonetheless, he was one of those few writers distinguished by
an ability to put up a good fight with words. A contemporary of Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and that crowd, Heartfield was in my estimation no less a "fighter"
than they. It was just that right through to the end Heartfield never got a clear
picture who he should have been fighting. Ultimately, that was the waste of his
talent.
For eight years and two months he struggled on in vain, then died. One fine
Sunday morning in June, 1938, a portrait of Hitler clutched in his right hand and
an open umbrella in his left, he leaped from the top of the Empire State Building.
He was as unnoticed in death as he had been in life.
It was during summer vacation in my third year of middle school--and I'd
come down with a terrible rash in my crotch--when an out-of-print word by
Heartfield first found its way into my possession. The uncle who'd given me the
book developed intestinal cancer three years later and died in excruciating pain,
his guts all hacked to pieces and plastic pipes shoved in and out of his body. The
last time I saw him, he'd shriveled up dark and red like some crafty old monkey.
***
Altogether I had three uncles, one of whom died on the outskirts of Shanghai.
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Two days after the cease-fire, he stepped on a mine he himself had laid. My only
surviving uncle has since become a sleight-of-hand artist who tours hot spring
resorts throughout Japan.
***
Heartfield has this to say about good writing: "The task of writing consists
primarily in recognizing the distance between oneself and the things around one.
It is not sensitivity one needs, but a yardstick." (What's So Bad About Feeling
Good?, 1936).
With me, it had to have been the year President Kennedy died that I took my
yardstick in hand and began checking things out ever so cautiously. That's already
been fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years I've tossed out quite an
assortment of things. Just like when an airplane has engine trouble and they start
tossing out the baggage to reduce the weight, then the seats, and finally they'll
even toss out the flight attendants. Over these fifteen years I've tossed out all
kinds of things, but taken on almost nothing in the process.
I'm not entirely sure it was the right thing to do. Certainly it's made my load
easier to bear, but the prospects are awfully scary: in old age, when it comes time
to die, what on earth's going to be left of me? After my cremation there won't be
a bone remaining.
"To those of gloomy spirit come only gloomy dreams." That's what my
grandmother always said.
The night my grandmother died, the very first thing I did was reach out to
close her eyes. And as I drew her eyelids down, the dreams of her seventy-nine
years quietly dispersed like a passing summer shower on a shopping street,
leaving not a thing behind.
***
One more point about writing. And this will be the last.
For me, writing is extremely hard work. There are times when it takes me a
whole month just to write one line. Other times I'll write three days and nights
straight through, only to have it come out all wrong.
Nonetheless, writing can also be fun. Compared to the sheer difficulty of living,
the process of attaching meanings to life is altogether clear sailing.
Back in my teens, was it? I was so startled upon awakening to this truth, that
for one week I didn't say a word. If I so much as paid the slightest attention to
things, the world would start to conform to my will--that's what it seemed like. All
values would shift, the very passage of time would change.
The catch became apparent, unfortunately, only much later. I'd rule a line
down the middle of a notebook page, put down all the things I'd recently gained
on the left, and on the right everything gone by the wayside--things I'd lost,
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things I'd crushed, things I was glad to have lost track of, things I'd sacrificed,
things I'd betrayed--the list was endless.
A gaping chasm separates what we try to be aware of and what we actually
are aware of. And I don't care how long your yardstick is, there's no measuring
that drop. What I can set down here in writing only amounts to a catalog. Not a
novel, not literature, not even art. Just a notebook with a line ruled down the
center. And maybe a lesson or two in it somewhere.
If it's art or literature you're looking for, you'd do well to read what the Greeks
wrote. In order for there to be true art, there necessarily has to be slavery. That's
how it was with the ancient Greeks: while thew slaves worked the fields, prepared
the meals, and rowed the ships, the citizens would bask beneath the
Mediterranean sun, rapt in poetical composition or engaged in their mathematics.
That's how it is with art.
More humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the
morning are incapable of such writing.
And that includes me.
2.
This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later, on August 26
of the same year.
3.
"The rich can all eat shit!"
The Rat turned to me and bellowed gloomily, both hands pressed on the counter.
Or maybe he was shouting at the coffee mill behind me. The Rat was seated next
to me at the counter, so there really wasn't any need for him to turn in my
direction. But whatever, once he'd let off steam, he went back to savoring his
beer with his usual satisfied expression.
To be sure, not a soul paid his outburst any attention. The tiny bar was packed,
and who wasn't shouting just as loudly at someone else? The whole place seemed
like a passenger ship about to go under.
"Lice, that's what they are!" The Rat shook his head vehemently, "Nothing but
deadbeats the lot of them! Gives me the creeps just looking at their money-bag
faces!"
I put my mouth to the lip of my beer glass and quietly nodded. The Rat had said
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his piece and he fell silent and stared intently at his hand on the counter, turning
his long fingers over and back, again and again, as if roasting them over a fire. I
resigned myself to looking at the ceiling. There'd be no starting a new line of
conversation until he'd finished examining his ten fingers in order. It was always
like that.
We used to drink as if we were possessed. Over the course of one summer we
managed to down a twenty-five-meter pool's worth of beer and eat enough
peanuts to cover the floor of J's Bar two inches deep with shells. If we hadn't kept
it up, we'd never have survived that boring summer.
A nicotine-yellowed print hung behind the counter of J's Bar, and when things got
unbearably slow we'd stare at that picture for hours on end. The image was a
pattern, something like a Rorschach test, in which I saw what seemed to be a
face-off between two green monkeys tossing two tennis balls through the air at
each other.
When I told J, the bartender, this, he paused a while to take a look, then came
back with a noncommittal, "Well, now that you mention it . . ."
"What do you suppose it symbolizes?" I asked him.
"The left monkey is you and the right one's me. I'm tossing you a bottle of beer
and you're tossing me the money for it."
I drank my beer, most impressed.
"They give me the creeps!"
The Rat was done with his finger check and had started in again. These tirades
against the rich weren't anything new in the Rat, and in fact he really did hate
them. The Rat's own family was fairly well off, yet whenever I pointed this out to
him, his stock reply would be, "It's not my fault." On occasion (typically when I'd
had too much beer), I'd tell him, "Nah, it's your fault all right." Once I'd gone and
said that, I'd always feel awful. Because, in a way, the Rat had a point.
"Why do you think I can't stand rich people?"
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