Read Online Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami - Free Book Online Page B

to this. Then one day I discovered that I was no longer the kind of person who could just say half of what he was really feeling.
    I don’t know what that had to do with being cool. However, if you could call an old refrigerator in desperate need of defrosting cool, that was me. In that vein, I was caught in the ebb and flow of time, and when my consciousness begged for sleep, I kickstarted it with beer and cigarettes to keep on writing like this. I took lots of hot showers, shaved twice a day, and listened to old records ad infinitum. Right now, behind me, those old-fashioned Peter, Paul, and Mary are singing:
    “Don’t think twice, it’s alright.”
    31
    The following day, I invited the Rat to the pool at the hotel on the mountainside. Summer was almost over, traffic was rough, and there were only ten other guests at the pool. Of them, half were swimming and the other half were contentedly-sunbathing Americans staying there.
    The hotel was a remodeled nobleman’s estate spanned by a splendid lawn, the pool and the main wing partitioned by a hedge rising up a slightly inclining hill, with a clear view of the ocean, the town, and the harbor below.
    After racing the Rat back and forth down the length of the twenty-five meter pool, we sat in the deck chairs and drank cola. I caught my breath and then in the time it took to take one hit of my cigarette, the Rat was all alone, his gaze fixed absently on an American girl swimming beautifully.
    In the brilliant sky, a few jet trails could be seen, stuck to the sky as if frozen there.
    “I feel like lots more planes used to fly by when I was a kid,” said the Rat as he looked up.
    “They were mostly US Air Force planes, though. Twin-fuselage propeller planes. You’ve seen ‘em?”
    “Like the P-38?”
    “Nah, transport planes. Much bigger than P-38s. They’d be flying really low, and you could see the emblems painted on the side…also I saw a DC-6, a DC-7, and a Sabrejet.”
    “Those are really old.”
    “Yep, back from the Eisenhower days. The cruisers would enter the bay, and the town would be full of sailors. You ever seen an MP?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Times change,” he sighed. “Not that I particularly like sailors or anything…”
    I nodded.
    “The Sabres were really great planes. They were only used to drop napalm. You ever see an airplane drop napalm?”
    “Just in war movies.”
    “People really think up a lot of things. And napalm is one of them. After ten years, you’d even start to miss the napalm, I bet.”
    I laughed and lit my second cigarette. “You really like airplanes, don’t you?”
    “I thought I wanted to be a pilot, back in those days. But my eyes were bad, so I gave it up.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I like the sky. You can look at it forever and never get tired of it, and when you don’t want to look at it anymore, you stop.”
    The Rat was silent for five minutes, then suddenly spoke.
    “Sometimes, there’s nothing I can do, I just can’t stand it any longer. ‘Cause I’m rich.”
    “I can’t pretend to know how you feel,” I said resignedly, “but it’s okay to run away. If you really feel that way.”
    “Probably…I think that would be the best thing to do. Go to some town I don’t know, start all over again. Wouldn’t be too bad.”
    “You won’t go back to college?”
    “I’m done. There’s no way I can go back.”
    From behind his sunglasses, the Rat’s eyes followed the girl who was still swimming.
    “Why’d you quit?”
    “I don’t know, ‘cause I was bored? Still, in my own way, I tried my best. More than even I could believe. I thought about other people just as much as myself, and thanks to that I got punched by a policeman. But, when the time comes, everybody goes back to their own routine. I just had nowhere to go back to. Like a game of musical chairs.”
    “So what are you going to do?”
    He wiped his legs with a towel as he thought this over.
    “I’m thinking of writing novels. What do you