After dark - By Haruki Murakami Page 0,32

our surroundings. It smells like a room that has not been cleaned for a long time. The window is shut tight, and the air doesn’t move. It’s chilly and smells faintly of mold. The silence is so deep it hurts our ears. No one is here, nor do we sense the presence of something lurking in here. If there was such a thing here before, it has long since departed. We are the only ones here now—we and Eri Asai.

Eri goes on sleeping in the single bed in the center of the room. We recognize the bed and bedclothes. We approach her and study her face as she sleeps, taking time to observe the details with great care. As mentioned before, all that we, as pure point of view, can accomplish is to observe—observe, gather data, and, if possible, judge. We are not allowed to touch her. Neither can we speak to her. Nor can we indicate our presence to her indirectly.

Before long there is movement in Eri’s face again—a reflexive twitching of the flesh of one cheek, as if to chase away a tiny fly that has just alighted there. Then her right eyelid flutters minutely. Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to each other, their spreading ripples intermingling. The process takes place before our eyes. A unit of thought begins to form this way. Then it links with another unit that has been made in another region, and the fundamental system of self-awareness takes shape. In other words, she is moving, step by step, toward wakefulness.

The pace of her awakening may be maddeningly slow, but it never moves backward. The system exhibits occasional disorientation, but it moves steadily forward, step by step. The intervals of time needed between one movement and the next gradually contract. Muscle movements at first are limited to the area of the face, but in time they spread to the rest of the body. At one point a shoulder rises gently, and a small white hand appears from beneath the quilt. The left hand. It awakens one step ahead of the right. In their new temporality, the fingers thaw and relax and begin to move awkwardly in search of something. Eventually they move atop the bedcover as small, independent creatures, coming to rest against the slender throat, as if Eri is groping uncertainly for the meaning of her own flesh.

Soon her eyelids open. But, stabbed by the light of the fluorescent lamps ranged on the ceiling, the eyes snap shut again. Her consciousness seems to resist awakening. What it wants to do is exclude the encroaching world of reality and go on sleeping without end in a soft, enigmatic darkness. By contrast, her bodily functions seek positive awakening. They long for fresh natural light. These two opposing forces clash within her, but the final victory belongs to the power source that indicates awakening. Again the eyelids open, slowly, hesitantly. But again the fluorescent glare is too much. She raises both hands and covers her eyes. She turns aside and rests a cheek against the pillow.

Time passes. For three minutes, four, Eri Asai lies in bed in that same position, eyes closed. Could she have gone to sleep again? No, she is giving her consciousness time to accustom itself to the waking world. Time plays an important role, as when a person has been moved into a room with vastly different atmospheric pressure and must allow the bodily functions to adjust. Her consciousness recognizes that unavoidable changes have begun, and it struggles to accept them. She feels slightly nauseated. Her stomach contracts, giving her the sensation that something is about to rise from it. She overcomes the feeling with several long breaths. And when, at last, the nausea has departed, several other unpleasant sensations come to take its place: numbness of the arms and legs, faint ringing of the ears, muscle pain. She has been sleeping in one position too long.

Again time passes.

Finally she raises herself in bed and, with unsteady gaze, examines her surroundings. The room is huge. No one else is there. What is this place? What am I doing here? Again and again she tries to trace her memory back, but it gives out each time like a short thread. All she can tell is that she has been sleeping in this place: she is in bed, wearing pajamas. This is my bed, these are my