Once May Kasashara was gone, I felt like my body was once again veiled by the shadow of that flat, seamless grey cloud. When I looked high overhead, the cloud was still there. The indistinct grey blended with the blue of evening, so that if I looked closely, I couldn’t tell whether the cloud was still there. But, like some giant blind beast hidden from view, it covered the sky and blocked out the moon and the stars.
Like walking on the bottom of the ocean, I thought. Front and back, left and right, everything looks exactly the same. My body just hadn’t adjusted to the pressure and the breathing yet.
Now that I was alone, my appetite had disappeared completely. I didn’t want to eat anything. I didn’t want to go back to my apartment, but there wasn’t anywhere else I needed to go either. So, not knowing what else to do with myself, I decided to walk around town until I came up with something.
From time to time, I’d come to a stop and stare at an advertisement for a kung-fu movie, or peep in the show window of a music store, but other than that I spent most of the time looking into the faces of the people passing by. Thousands of people appeared before my eyes and then vanished. I felt like they were moving from one distant realm of consciousness to another distant realm of consciousness.
The town was the same as ever, unchanged. The clamour of all those jumbled up people, who one by one had lost their original meaning; the brief fragments of music that would cut through the commotion to reach my ear, and then be gone; the traffic lights continually blinking off and on, off and on, and the sounds of the cars stopped in front of them; it all overflowed from the sky and, like an inexhaustible supply of ink, the night washed over the city. When I walk the streets of the city at night, all of the bustle and the light and the smell and the excitement doesn’t really seem real to me at all. They are all just distant echoes from yesterday or the day before or last week or last month.
But I couldn’t identify anything in that echo that I recognized. It was all too far away, too indistinct.
No matter how long I walked or what distance I covered, I still wouldn’t understand. The only thing I knew was that I had passed by thousands of people. And I could guess that, after seventy or eighty years had elapsed, all of those thousands of people would, to a man, have vanished from the face of the earth. Seventy or eighty years isn’t that long a time.
Labels: books, haruki murakami, quote, the twins and the sunken continent
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