After dark - By Haruki Murakami Page 0,48

kind of person who tells lies, Korogi,” Mari says.

“I’m glad you said that,” Korogi says. “I’ve got something to show you.”

Korogi pulls her shirt up, exposing her back. Impressed in the skin on either side of her backbone is a mark of some kind. Each consists of three diagonal lines like a bird’s footprint and appears to have been made there by a branding iron. The scar tissue pulls at the surrounding skin. These are the remnants of intense pain. Mari grimaces at the sight.

“This is just one thing they did to me,” Korogi says. “They left their mark on me. I’ve got other ones, but in places I can’t show you. These are no lie.”

“How awful!”

“I’ve never shown them to anyone before. Just to you, Mari: I want you to believe me.”

“I do believe you.”

“I just had that feeling, like I could tell you, it would be okay. I don’t know why.”

Korogi lowers her shirt. Then, as if inserting an emotional punctuation mark, she heaves a great sigh.

“Korogi?” Mari says.

“Uh-huh?”

“Can I tell you something I’ve never told anybody before?”

“Sure. Go ahead,” Korogi says.

“I’ve got a sister. My only sibling. She’s two years older than me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just about two months ago, she said, ‘I’m going to go to sleep for a while.’ She made this announcement to the family at dinnertime. Nobody thought much about it. It was only seven p.m., but my sister always had irregular sleep habits, so it was nothing to be too shocked about. We said good-night to her. She had hardly touched her food, but she went to her room and got in bed. She’s been sleeping ever since.”

“Ever since?!”

“Yup,” Mari says.

Korogi knits her brows. “She never wakes up?”

“She does sometimes, we think,” Mari says. “The meals we leave on her desk disappear, and she seems to be going to the toilet. Every once in a while, she takes a shower and changes her pajamas. So she’s getting up and doing the bare minimum needed to keep herself alive—but really, just the bare minimum. None of us has actually seen her awake, though. Whenever we look in, she’s in the bed, sleeping—really sleeping, not just faking it. She seems practically dead: you can’t hear her breathing, and she doesn’t move a muscle. We shout at her and shake her, but she won’t wake up.”

“So…have you had a doctor look at her?”

“The family doctor comes to see her once in a while. He’s just a general practitioner, so he can’t run any major tests on her, but medically speaking, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. Her temperature’s normal. Her pulse and blood pressure are on the low side, but not enough to worry about. She’s getting enough nourishment, so she doesn’t need intravenous feeding. She’s just sound asleep. Of course if this were a coma or something, that would be a huge problem, but as long as she can wake up once in a while and do what she has to do, there’s no need for special care. We consulted a psychiatrist, too, but there’s no precedent for symptoms like this. She announces ‘I’m going to go to sleep for a while’ and does exactly that: if she has such an inward need for sleep, he says, the best thing we can do is let her keep sleeping. Even if he was going to treat her, it would have to be after she woke up and he could interview her. So we’re just letting her sleep.”

“Don’t you think you should have her tested at a hospital?”

“My parents are trying to take the most optimistic view—that my sister will sleep as much as she wants to, and one day she’ll wake up like nothing ever happened, and everything’ll go back to normal. They’re clinging to that possibility. But I can’t stand it. Or should I say, every once in a while I can’t take it anymore—living under the same roof with my sister and not having any idea why she’s out cold for two months.”

“So you leave the house and wander around the streets at night?”

“I just can’t sleep,” Mari says. “When I try, all I can think of is my sister in the next room sleeping like that. When it gets bad, I can’t stay in the house.”

“Two months, huh? That’s a long time.”

Mari nods in agreement.

Korogi says, “I don’t really know what’s going on, of course, but it seems to me your sister must have some big problem she’s trying to deal with,