Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami Page B

asked.
    “A hundred percent sure,” Sumire said. “When I’m with her that bone in my ear starts ringing. Like delicate seashell wind chimes. And I want her to hold me, let everything take its course. If that isn’t sexual desire, what’s flowing in my veins must be tomato juice.”
    “Hmm,” I said. What could I possibly say to that?
    “It explains
everything.
Why I don’t want to have sex with any guys. Why I don’t feel anything. Why I’ve always thought I’m different from other people.”
    “Mind if I give you my two cents’ worth here?” I asked.
    “OK.”
    “Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I’m speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it’s something a single book can explain, it’s not worth having explained. What I mean is don’t leap to any conclusions.”
    “I’ll remember that,” Sumire said. And the call ended, somewhat abruptly.
    I pictured her hanging up the receiver, walking out of the telephone booth. By my clock it was three-thirty. I went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water, snuggled back in bed, and closed my eyes. But sleep wouldn’t come. I drew the curtain aside, and there was the moon, floating in the sky like some pale clever orphan. I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep. I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, pulled a chair over next to the window, and sat there, munching on cheese and crackers. I sat, reading, waiting for the dawn.

CHAPTER 5
    I t’s time to say a few words about myself.
    Of course this story is about Sumire, not me. Still, I’m the one whose eyes the story is told through—the tale of who Sumire is and what she did—and I should explain a little about the narrator. Me, in other words.
    I find it hard to talk about myself. I’m always tripped up by the eternal
who am I?
paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as
me.
But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors—values, standards, my own limitations as an observer—make me, the
narrator,
select and eliminate things about me, the
narratee.
I’ve always been disturbed by the thought that I’m not painting a very objective picture of myself.
    This kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother most people. Given the chance, people are surprisingly frank when they talk about themselves. “I’m honest and open to a ridiculous degree,” they’ll say, or “I’m thin-skinned and not the type who gets along easily in the world.” Or “I am very good at sensing others’ true feelings.” But any number of times I’ve seen people who say they’re easily hurt hurt other people for no apparent reason. Self-styled honest and open people, without realizing what they’re doing, blithely use some self-serving excuse to get what they want. And those “good at sensing others’ true feelings” are duped by the most transparent flattery. It’s enough to make me ask the question: How well do we really know ourselves?
    The more I think about it, the more I’d like to take a rain check on the topic of
me.
What I’d like to know more about is the objective reality of things
outside
myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it.
That’s
how I’d grasp a clearer sense of who I am.
    These are the kinds of ideas I had running through my head when I was a teenager. Like a master builder stretches taut his string and lays one brick after another, I constructed this viewpoint—or philosophy of life, to put a bigger spin on it. Logic and speculation played a part in formulating this viewpoint, but for the most part it was based on my own experiences. And speaking of experience, a number of painful episodes taught me that getting this viewpoint of mine across to other people wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.
    The upshot of all this was that when I was young I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with, I