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

giant frog when he danced. She loved to dance and would always drag him out to clubs. “Look at you!” she used to say. “I love the way you flap those long arms and legs of yours! You’re like a frog in the rain!”
    This hurt the first time she said it, but after he had gone with her long enough, Yoshiya began to enjoy dancing. As he let himself go and moved his body in time to the music, he would come to feel that the natural rhythm inside him was pulsing in perfect unison with the basic rhythm of the world. The ebb and flow of the tide, the dancing of the wind across the plains, the course of the stars through the heavens: he felt certain that these things were by no means occurring in places unrelated to him.
    She had never seen a penis as huge as his, his girlfriend used to say, taking hold of it. Didn’t it get in the way when he danced? No, he would tell her: it never got in the way. True, he had a big one. It had always been on the big side, from the time he was a boy. He could not recall that it had ever been of any great advantage to him, though. In fact, several girls had refused to have sex with him because it was
too
big. In aesthetic terms, it just looked slow and clumsy and stupid. Which is why he always tried to keep it hidden. “Your big wee-wee is a sign,” his mother used to tell him with absolute conviction. “It shows that you’re the child of God.” And he believed it, too. But then one day the craziness of it struck him. All he had ever prayed for was the ability to catch outfield flies, in answer to which God had bestowed upon him a penis that was bigger than anybody else’s. What kind of world came up with such idiotic bargains?
    Yoshiya took off his glasses and slipped them into their case. Dancing, huh? Not a bad idea. Not bad at all. He closed his eyes and, feeling the white light of the moon on his skin, began to dance all by himself. He drew his breath deep into his lungs and exhaled just as deeply. Unable to think of a song to match his mood, he danced in time with the stirring of the grass and the flowing of the clouds. Before long, he began to feel that someone, somewhere, was watching him. His whole body—his skin, his bones—told him with absolute certainty that he was in
someone’s
field of vision. So what? he thought. Let them look if they want to, whoever they are. All God’s children can dance.
    He trod the earth and whirled his arms, each graceful movement calling forth the next in smooth, unbroken links, his body tracing diagrammatic patterns and impromptu variations, with invisible rhythms behind and between rhythms. At each crucial point in his dance, he could survey the complex intertwining of these elements. Animals lurked in the forest like trompe l’oeil figures, some of them horrific beasts he had never seen before. He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course—the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was. The beasts were ones that he himself possessed.
    How long he went on dancing, Yoshiya could not tell. But it was long enough for him to perspire under the arms. And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.
    He thought of his mother far away in that ruined city. What would happen, he wondered, if he could remain his present self and yet turn time backward so as to meet his mother in her youth when her soul was in its deepest state of darkness? No doubt they would plunge as one into the muck of bedlam and devour each other in acts for which they would be dealt the harshest