Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

recommendations was able to study at a music academy in France. Her repertoire ran mainly from the late Romantics, Schumann and Mendelssohn, to Poulenc, Ravel, Bartók, and Prokofiev. Her playing combined a keenly sensuous tone with a vibrant, impeccable technique. In her student days she held a number of concerts, all well received. A bright future as a concert pianist looked assured. During her time abroad, though, her father fell ill, and Miu shut the lid of her piano and returned to Japan. Never to touch a keyboard again.
    “How could you give up the piano so easily?” Sumire asked hesitantly. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s OK. I just find it—I don’t know—a little unusual. I mean, you had to sacrifice a lot of things to become a pianist, didn’t you?”
    “I didn’t sacrifice
a lot of things
for the piano,” Miu said softly. “I sacrificed
everything.
The piano demanded every ounce of flesh, every drop of blood, and I couldn’t refuse. Not even once.”
    “Weren’t you sorry to give it up? You’d almost made it.”
    Miu gazed into Sumire’s eyes searchingly. A deep, steady gaze. Deep within Miu’s eyes, as if in a quiet pool in a swift stream, wordless currents vied with one another. Only gradually did these clashing currents settle.
    “I’m sorry. I’ll mind my own business,” Sumire apologized.
    “It’s all right. I just can’t explain it well.”
    They didn’t talk about it again.
    M iu didn’t allow smoking in her office and hated people to smoke in front of her, so after she began the job Sumire decided it was a good chance to quit. Being a two-packs-of-Marlboros-a-day smoker, though, things didn’t go so smoothly. After a month, like some animal that’s had its furry tail sliced off, she lost her emotional grip on things—not that this was so firm to begin with. And as you might guess, she started calling me all the time in the middle of the night.
    A ll I can think about is having a smoke. I can barely sleep, and when I do sleep I have nightmares. I’m constipated. I can’t read, can’t write a line.”
    “Everybody goes through that when they try to quit. In the beginning at least,” I said.
    “You find it easy to give opinions as long as it’s about other people, don’t you?” Sumire snapped. “You who’ve never had a smoke in your life.”
    “Hey, if you couldn’t give your opinion about other people, the world would turn into a pretty scary place, wouldn’t it? If you don’t think so, just look up what Joseph Stalin did.”
    On the other end of the line Sumire was silent for a long time. A heavy silence like dead souls on the Eastern Front.
    “Hello?” I asked.
    Sumire finally spoke. “Truthfully, though, I don’t think it’s because I quit smoking that I can’t write. It might be one reason, but that’s not all. What I mean is, quitting smoking is just an excuse. You know: ‘I’m quitting smoking; that’s why I can’t write. Nothing I can do about it.’ ”
    “Which explains why you’re so upset?”
    “I guess,” she said, suddenly meek. “It’s not just that I can’t write. What really upsets me is I don’t have confidence anymore in the act of writing itself. I read the stuff I wrote not long ago, and it’s boring. What could I have been thinking? It’s like looking across the room at some filthy socks tossed on the floor. I feel awful, realizing all the time and energy I wasted.”
    “When that happens you should call somebody at three in the morning and wake him up
—symbolically,
of course—from his peaceful semiotic sleep.”
    “Tell me,” Sumire said, “have you ever felt confused about what you’re doing, like it’s not right?”
    “I spend more time being confused than not,” I answered.
    “Are you serious?”
    “Yep.”
    Sumire tapped her nails against her front teeth, one of her many habits when she was thinking. “I’ve hardly ever felt confused like this before. Not that I’m always confident,