Read Online After the Quake by Haruki Murakami - Free Book Online

the entire outfield. A breeze swept across the grass, carrying an empty potato chip bag with it to nowhere.
    Yoshiya plunged his hands into his coat pockets and held his breath, waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened. He surveyed right field, then left field, then the pitcher’s mound and the ground beneath his feet before looking up at the sky. Several chunks of cloud hung there, the moon tinging their hard edges a strange color. A whiff of dog shit mixed with the smell of the grass. The man had disappeared without a trace. If Mr. Tabata had been here, he would have said, “So you see, Yoshiya, our Lord reveals Himself to us in the most unexpected forms.” But Mr. Tabata was dead.
    He had died of urethral cancer three years ago. His final months of suffering were excruciating to see. Had he never once in all that time tested God? Had he never once prayed to God for some small relief from his terrible pain? Mr. Tabata had observed his own strict commandments with such rigor and lived in such intimate contact with God that he of all people was qualified to make such prayers (concrete and limited in time though they might be). And besides, thought Yoshiya, if it was all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?
    Yoshiya felt a faint throbbing in his temples, but he could not tell if this was the remains of his hangover or something else. With a grimace, he pulled his hands from his pockets and began taking long, slow strides toward home base. Only seconds earlier, the one thing on his mind had been the breathless pursuit of a man who might well be his father, and that had carried him to this ball field in a neighborhood he’d never seen before. Now that the stranger had disappeared, however, the importance of the succeeding acts that had brought him this far turned unclear inside him. Meaning itself broke down and would never be the same again, just as the question of whether he could catch an outfield fly had ceased to be a matter of life and death to him anymore.
    What was I hoping to gain from this? he asked himself as he strode ahead. Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now? Was I hoping to be woven into some new plot, to be given some new and better-defined role to play? No, he thought, that’s not it. What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I’m sure I’ll never see it again.
    Yoshiya’s spirit now lingered in the stillness and clarity of one particular point in time and space. So what if the man was his father, or God, or some stranger who just happened to have lost his right earlobe? It no longer made any difference to him, and this in itself had been a manifestation, a sacrament: should he be singing words of praise?
    He climbed the pitcher’s mound and, standing on its worn footrest, stretched himself to his full height. He intertwined his fingers, thrust his arms aloft and, sucking in a lungful of cold night air, looked up once more at the moon. It was huge. Why was the moon so big one day and so small another? Simple plank bleachers ran the length of the first- and third-base lines. Empty, of course: it was the middle of a February night. Three levels of straight plank seats ascended in long, chilly rows. Window-less, gloomy buildings—some kind of warehouses, probably— huddled together beyond the backstop. No light. No sound.
    Standing on the mound, Yoshiya swung his arms up, over, and down in large circles. He moved his feet in time with this, forward and to the side. As he went on with these dancelike motions, his body began to warm and to recover the full senses of a living organism. Before long he realized that his headache was all but gone.
    Yoshiya’s girlfriend throughout his college years called him “Super-Frog” because he looked like some kind of