After dark - By Haruki Murakami Page 0,49
something she can’t solve on her own. So all she wants to do is go to bed and sleep, to get away from the flesh-and-blood world for a while. I think I know how she feels. Or should I say, I know exactly how she feels.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters, Korogi?”
“Two brothers. Both younger.”
“Are you close to them?”
“Used to be,” Korogi says. “Don’t know now. Haven’t seen ’em for a long time.”
“To be completely honest,” Mari says, “I never knew my sister very well—like, how she was spending her days, or what she was thinking about, or who she was seeing. I don’t even know if something was troubling her. I know this sounds cold, but even though we were living in the same house, she was busy with her stuff and I was busy with my stuff, and the two of us never really talked heart-to-heart. It’s not that we didn’t get along: we never had a fight after we grew up. It’s just that we’ve been living very different lives for a long time.”
Mari stares at the blank TV screen.
Korogi says, “Tell me about your sister. If you don’t know what she’s like inside, tell me just the surface things, what you know about her in general.”
“She’s a college student. Goes to one of the old missionary colleges for rich girls. She’s twenty-one. Officially majoring in sociology, but I don’t think she has any interest in the subject. She went to college because that’s what she was expected to do, and she knows enough to pass her exams, that’s all. Sometimes she’ll throw a little money in my direction to write reports for her. Otherwise, she models for magazines and appears on TV now and then.”
“TV? What program?”
“Nothing special. Like, she used to be the one showing the prizes to the camera on a quiz show, holding them up with a big smile. That show ended, so she’s not on anymore. She was in a few commercials, too—one for a moving company. Stuff like that.”
“She must be really pretty.”
“That’s what everybody says. She doesn’t look the least bit like me.”
“Sometimes I wish I had been born beautiful like that. I’d like to try it, just once, see what it’s like,” Korogi says with a short sigh.
Mari hesitates a moment, then says as if sharing a confession, “This may sound strange, but my sister really is beautiful when she sleeps. Maybe more beautiful than when she’s awake. She’s like transparent. I may be her sister, but my heart races just seeing her that way.”
“Like Sleeping Beauty.”
“Exactly.”
“Somebody’ll kiss her and wake her up,” Korogi says.
“If all goes well,” Mari says.
The two fall silent for a time. Korogi is still playing with the buttons on the remote control. An ambulance siren sounds in the distance.
“Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?”
Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says.
“So you don’t think there’s a life to come?”
“I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.”
“So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?”
“Basically.”
“Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.”
“Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.”
“Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.”
“Well, yeah…,” says Mari.
“I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time.”
“Uh-huh…but it still seems more natural to me to think that once you’re dead, there’s nothing.”
“I wonder if that’s ’cause you’ve got such a strong personality.”
“Me?!”
Korogi nods. “You seem to have a good, strong grip on yourself.”
Mari shakes her head. “Not me,” she says. “When I was little, I had no self-confidence at all. Everything scared me. Which is why I used to get bullied