Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami Page B

what you just told me."
    She seemed disappointed. Pouting slightly, she stared down at her hands.
    "Sorry I can't be of more help," I said, "especially after all the trouble you took to tell me this."
    "Well, don't worry, it's not your fault. I'm still glad I could tell you about it. These sort of things, you keep them all to yourself and they really start to get to you."
    "Yup, you gotta let the pressure out. If you don't, it builds up inside your head." I made an over-inflated balloon with my arms.
    She nodded silently as she fiddled with her ring again, removing it from her finger, then putting it back.
    "Tell me, do you even believe my story? About the six-teenth floor and all?" she whispered, not raising her eyes from her fingers.
    "Of course I believe you," I said.
    "Really? But it's kind of peculiar, don't you think?"
    "That may be, but peculiar things do happen. I know that much. That's why I believe you. It all links up somewhere, I think."
    She puzzled over that a minute. "Then you've had a simi-lar experience?"
    "Yeah, at least I think I have."
    "Was it scary?" she asked.
    "No, it wasn't like your experience," I answered. "No, what I mean is, things connect in all kinds of ways. With me ..." But for no reason I could understand, the words died in my throat. As if someone had yanked out the telephone line. I took a sip of whiskey and tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't know how to put it. But I definitely have seen my share of unbelievable things. So I'm quite prepared to believe what you've told me. I don't think you made up the story."
    She looked up and smiled. An individual smile, I thought, not the professional variety. And she relaxed. "I don't know why," she said, "but I feel better talking to you. I'm usually pretty shy. It's really hard for me to talk to people I don't know, but with you it's different."
    "Maybe we have something in common," I laughed.
    She didn't know what to make of that remark, and in the end didn't say anything. Instead, she sighed. Then she asked, "Feel like eating? All of a sudden, I'm starving."
    I offered to take her somewhere for a real meal, but she said a snack where we were would do.
    We ordered a pizza. And continued talking as we ate. About work at the hotel, about life in Sapporo. About herself. After high school, she'd gone to hotelier school for two years, then she worked at a hotel in Tokyo for two years, when she answered an ad for the new Dolphin Hotel. She was twenty-three. The move to Sapporo was good for her; her parents ran an inn near Asahikawa, about 120 kilometers away.
    "It's a fairly well-known inn. They've been at it a long time," she said.
    "So after doing your job here, you'll take over the family business?" I asked.
    "Not necessarily," she said, pushing up the bridge of her glasses. "I haven't thought that far ahead. I just like hotel work. People coming, staying, leaving, all that. I feel com-fortable there in the middle of it. It puts me at ease. After all, it's the environment I was raised in."
    "So that's why," I said.
    "Why what?"
    "Why standing there at the front desk, you looked like you could be the spirit of the hotel."
    "Spirit of the hotel?" she laughed. "What a nice thing to say! If only I really could become like that."
    "I'm sure you can, if that's what you want," I smiled back.
    She thought that over a while, then asked to hear my story.
    "Not very interesting," I begged off, but still she wanted to hear. So I gave her a short rundown: thirty-four, divorced, writer of odd jobs, driver of used Subaru. Nothing novel.
    But still she was curious about my work. So I told her about my interviews with would-be starlets, about my piece on restaurants in Hakodate.
    "Sounds like fun," she said, brightening up.
    "'Fun' is not the word. The writing itself is no big thing. I mean I like writing. It's even relaxing for me. But the content is a real zero. Pointless in fact."
    "What do you mean?"
    "I mean, for instance, you do the rounds of fifteen restau-rants