Read Online Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami - Free Book Online

maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life.
    M y family isn’t anything special. So blandly normal, in fact, I don’t know where to begin. My father graduated from a local university with a degree in science and worked in the research lab of a large food manufacturer. He loved golf, and every Sunday he was out on the course. My mother was crazy about tanka poetry and often attended poetry recitals. Whenever her name was in the poetry section of the newspaper, she’d be happy as a lark for days. She liked cleaning but hated cooking. My sister, five years older than me, detested both cleaning and cooking. Those are things other people did, she figured, not her. Which meant that ever since I was old enough to be in the kitchen, I made all my own meals. I bought some cookbooks and learned how to make most everything. I was the only child I knew who lived like that.
    I was born in Suginami, but we moved to Tsudanuma in Chiba Prefecture when I was small, and I grew up there. The neighborhood was full of white-collar families just like ours. My sister was always at the top of her class; she couldn’t stand not being the best and didn’t step one inch outside her sphere of interest. She never—not even once—took our dog for a walk. She graduated from Tokyo University law school and passed the bar exam the following year, no mean feat. Her husband is a go-getter management consultant. They live in a four-room condo they purchased in an elegant building near Yoyogi Park. Inside, though, the place is a pigsty.
    I was the opposite of my sister, not caring much about studying or my class rank. I didn’t want any grief from my parents, so I went through the motions of going to class, doing the minimum amount of study and review to get by. The rest of the time I played soccer, and sprawled on my bed when I got home, reading one novel after another. None of your typical after-hours cram school, no tutor. Even so, my grades weren’t half bad. At this rate, I figured, I could get into a decent college without killing myself studying for the entrance exams. And that’s exactly what happened.
    I started college and lived by myself in a small apartment. Even when I was living at home in Tsudanuma I hardly ever had a heart-to-heart conversation with my family. We lived together under one roof, but my parents and sister were like strangers to me, and I had no idea what they wanted from life. And the same held true for them—they didn’t have any idea what kind of person I was or what I aspired to. Not that I knew what I was seeking in life—I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I figured, not part of your work or study. That’s why I majored in history, not literature. I didn’t have any special interest in history, but once I began studying it I found it an engrossing subject. I didn’t plan to go to grad school and devote my life to history or anything, though my adviser did suggest that. I enjoyed reading and thinking, but I was hardly the academic type. As Pushkin put it:
    He had no itch to dig for glories
    Deep in the dirt that time has laid.
    All of which didn’t mean I was about to find a job in a normal company, claw my way through the cutthroat competition, and advance step-by-step up the slippery slope of the capitalist pyramid.
    So, process of elimination, I ended up a teacher. The school is only a few stations away by train. My uncle happened to be on the board of education in that town and asked me whether I might want to be a teacher. I hadn’t taken all the required pedagogy classes, so I was hired as an assistant; but after a short period