After dark - By Haruki Murakami Page 0,31

and rock the boat. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend every day making chitchat and putting on a smiley face at the dinner table. Being alone has never been hard for me. Besides, I haven’t got such a great relationship with my father.”

“You don’t like each other?”

“Well, let’s just say our personalities are different. And our values.”

“What does he do?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” Takahashi says. “But I’m almost one hundred percent sure that it’s nothing to be proud of. And besides—this is not something I go around telling people—he spent a few years in prison when I was a kid. He was an antisocial type—a criminal. That’s another reason I don’t want to live with my family. I start having doubts about my genes.”

“And that’s your really short version?” Mari asks in mock horror, smiling.

Takahashi looks at her and says, “That’s the first time you’ve smiled all night.”

10

Eri Asai is still sleeping.

The Man with No Face, however, who was sitting beside her and watching her so intently, is gone. So is his chair. Without them, the room is starker, more deserted than before. The bed stands in the center of the room, and on it lies Eri. She looks like a person in a lifeboat floating in a calm sea, alone. We are observing the scene from our side—from Eri’s actual room—through the TV screen. There seems to be a TV camera in the room on the other side capturing Eri’s sleeping form and sending it here. The position and angle of the camera change at regular intervals, drawing slightly nearer or drawing slightly farther back each time.

Time goes by, but nothing happens. She doesn’t move. She makes no sound. She floats face-up on an ocean of pure thought devoid of waves or current. And yet, we can’t tear ourselves away from the image being sent. Why should that be? We don’t know the reason. We sense, however, through a certain kind of intuition, that something is there. Something alive. It lurks beneath the surface of the water, expunging any sense of its presence. We keep our eyes trained on the motionless image, hoping to ascertain the position of this thing we cannot see.

Just now, it seemed there might have been a tiny movement at the corner of Eri Asai’s mouth. No, we might not even be able to call it a movement. A tremor so microscopic we can’t be sure we even saw it. It might have been just a flicker of the screen. A trick of the eyes. A visual hallucination aroused by our desire to see some kind of change. To ascertain the truth, we focus more intently on the screen.

As if sensing our will, the camera lens draws nearer to its subject. Eri’s mouth appears in close-up. We hold our breath and stare at the screen, waiting patiently for whatever is to come next. A tremor of the lips again. A momentary spasm of the flesh. Yes, the same movement as before. Now there is no doubt. It was no optical illusion. Something is beginning to happen inside Eri Asai.

Gradually we begin to tire of passively observing the TV screen from this side. We want to check out the interior of that other room directly, with our own eyes. We want to see more closely the beginning of faint movement, the possible quickening of consciousness, that Eri is beginning to exhibit. We want to speculate upon its meaning based on something more concrete. And so we decide to transport ourselves to the other side of the screen.

It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind, and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass. With that accomplished, we can pass through any wall, leap over any abyss. Which is exactly what we do. We let ourselves become a pure single point and pass through the TV screen separating the two worlds, moving from this side to the other. When we pass through the wall and leap the abyss, the world undergoes a great deformation, splits and crumbles, and is momentarily gone. Everything turns into fine, pure dust that scatters in all directions. And then the world is reconstructed. A new substance surrounds us. And all of this takes but the blink of an eye.

Now we are on the other side, in the room we saw on the screen. We survey