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

punishment. And what of it? “Punishment”? I was due for punishment long ago. The city should have crumbled to bits around me long ago.
    His girlfriend had asked him to marry her when they graduated from college. “I want to be married to you, Super-Frog. I want to live with you and have your child—a boy, with a big thing just like yours.”
    “I can’t marry you,” Yoshiya said. “I know I should have told you this, but I’m the son of God. I can’t marry anybody.”
    “Is that true?”
    “It is. I’m sorry.”
    He knelt down and scooped up a handful of sand which he sifted through his fingers back to earth. He did this again and again. The chilly, uneven touch of the soil reminded him of the last time he had held Mr. Tabata’s emaciated hand.
    “I won’t be alive much longer, Yoshiya,” Mr. Tabata said in a voice that had grown hoarse. Yoshiya began to protest, but Mr. Tabata stopped him with a gentle shake of the head.
    “Never mind,” he said. “This life is nothing but a short, painful dream. Thanks to His guidance, I have made it through this far. Before I die, though, there is one thing I have to tell you. It shames me to say it, but I have no choice: I have had lustful thoughts toward your mother any number of times. As you well know, I have a family that I love with all my heart, and your mother is a pure-hearted person, but still, I have had violent cravings for her flesh—cravings that I have never been able to suppress. I want to beg your forgiveness.”
    There is no need for you to beg anyone’s forgiveness, Mr. Tabata. You are not the only one who has had lustful thoughts. Even I, her son, have been pursued by terrible obsessions . . . Yoshiya wanted to open himself up in this way, but he knew that all it would accomplish would be to upset Mr. Tabata even more. He took Mr. Tabata’s hand and held it for a very long time, hoping that the thoughts in his breast would communicate themselves from his hand to Mr. Tabata’s. Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another. All God’s children can dance. The next day, Mr. Tabata drew his last breath.
    Kneeling on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya gave himself up to the flow of time. Somewhere in the distance he heard the faint wail of a siren. A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grass’s song before it died.
    “Oh God,” Yoshiya said aloud.

thailand
    There was an announcement:
Lettuce angel men. We aren’t countering
some tah bulence. Please retahn to yah seat at thees time and fasten yah seat
belt.
Satsuki had been letting her mind wander, and so it took her a while to decipher the Thai steward’s shaky Japanese.
    She was hot and sweating. It was like a steam bath, her whole body aflame, her nylons and bra so uncomfortable she wanted to fling everything off and set herself free. She craned her neck to see the other business-class passengers. No, she was obviously the only one suffering from the heat. They were all curled up, asleep, blankets around their shoulders to counter the air-conditioning. It must be another hot flash. Satsuki bit her lip and decided to concentrate on something else to forget about the heat. She opened her book and tried to read from where she had left off, but forgetting was out of the question. This was no ordinary heat. And they wouldn’t be touching down in Bangkok for hours yet. She asked a passing stewardess for some water and, finding the pill case in her pocketbook, she washed down a dose of the hormones she had forgotten to take.
    Menopause: it had to be the gods’ ironic warning to (or just plain nasty trick on) humanity for having artificially extended the life span, she told herself for the
n
th time. A mere hundred years ago, the average life span was less than fifty, and any woman who went on living