Summary
(1st person narrative, subjective point of view, narration by a minor character in past tense.)
Kitaru is a peculiar guy who has had a girlfriend since childhood. They have never had sex. Albeit an intelligent young man who was a prodigy kid, he keeps failing the exam to enter the school that his girlfriend is already attending. He asks one of his friends (the narrator) to date his girlfriend. During their date, Erika, the girlfriend of Kitaru, confesses that she is curious about someone else. Soon after the date, Kitaru and the narrator lose contact. The narrator meets Erika again after sixteen years and he finds out that both she and Kitaru are still single, but Kitaru has moved to the U.S. where he works as a sushi chef.

Quotations and notes

„[I] realised that everything that had happened to me was pretty embarrassing. (…) A handful of happy experiences. But, if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. (…) Unimaginative middle class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire (…)“

— as it emerges from all the dialogues in the story, coming-of-age is always in strong relation to denial of one’s past and one’s former status, because one finds it embarrassing. It seems that adulthood is unveiling a more meaningful take on things and life, a view that we completely lacked before. It is most probably wrong, and I think the answer lies in the improvised lyrics for the famous Beatles’ melody:

Yesterday (—our past)
Is two days before tomorrow ( — is gone, but we still have today in the middle )
the day after two days ago ( — and our past has been our future once )
Obs. note the repetition of the word „two“, the leitmotif of duality, present in the whole story.

„in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes what we are as people. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me at eighteen.“

—when we are young we have yet to find an interior language of our own, and change has to come from outside, in a structured yet complex way.

„So I kinda split myself in two, (…) part of me’s like, worried. (…) I feel left behind. (…) But I wonder, y’know, if life should really be that easy, that comfortable. It might be better to go our separate ways for a while, and, if we find out that we really can’t get along without each other, then we get back together.“

—Life seems easy and comfortable, so let’s challenge it, thinking that we can always undo what we have done. When beauty fades away under the power of habit, we challenge ourselves and call beauty back from afar. We place ourselves in the middle of a circle and let everything go, hoping that two different people can naturally belong together, and the laws of nature can bring back the other one next to us if case be, despite our pushing her away. I think it is what people undergoing uncertainty and cowardice do. Love is not compatible with egocentrism. The quotation must be related to another quotation from the end of the story, that is also the key to this piece by Murakami: „That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.“

By asking his friend to date his girlfriend, Kitaru is forcing the others towards a solution to his problems. He is taking the long way around. Of note is also the natural tendency to open up as a way of escape. In other words, beware of sudden openness, as it might be just someone smoothening their way out.

Music has that power to revive memories,
sometimes so intensely that they hurt.

„Maybe going through that kind of tough, lonely experience is necessary when you’re young. Part of the process of growing up? (…) The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grow stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter.“

— A woman in a relationship contemplates solitude. Curiosity is another leitmotif (synonym of opening up.) Again, we have the idea that we make things stronger by throwing our own tests and hardships at them, believing that they are necessary. I must ask, who are we to plan our growing up like that? If we already knew where we had to arrive, we would go there without any test.
Kitaru has yet to find out that his girlfriend liked pizza or drank wine, as they were probably concealed by their easy and comfortable life.
The narrator gets to the point where it dawns on him that he is an almost useless pawn in the story, that there is nothing that he could do to help. „You should do what you want and forget about what people think.“

„> (…) — Another key line in the story: knowing alone doesn’t really help: „I kept thinking about my ex-girlfriend. (…) I wrote her a long letter apologising for how I’d behaved. I could’ve been a whole lot kinder to her. But I never got a reply.“ The past can’t be undone, and knowing more about it can’t help.

„Aki-kun had a very strong sense of intuition.“

— Of note is the opposition between intuition and sheer knowledge. The former seems more powerful and, most of the time, sufficient for action. Something to sleep on: intuition vs. knowledge. I also have the feeling that knowing should matter more to us as people, but maybe this is only my own rational take on life.

Dreams are the kind of things that you can borrow and lend out.

I am not sure about the message when it comes to the dream about the iced moon that melts away when the morning sun rises. The interpretations can be infinite here; when a writer throws a symbol like the moon in his work, he can only complicate things for the reader. It might be about becoming intimate as lovers in times of darkness (for me, water in dreams always had to do with sensuality and physical love). What stayed in my mind is her obsession (and fear) that the (rather universal) cycle of the moon could be interrupted one day, and that it can’t be taken for granted. On one hand, I can’t help from thinking about the fundamentals of Bayesian probabilities, as discovered by Laplace. On the other hand, the Sun that melts away the moon got me thinking about Plato’s allegory of the cave, but I am not sure about that. It might be, again, about knowledge, or intuition, of a greater world, purpose, or dream.

„When I was twenty or so, I tried several times to keep a diary, but I just couldn’t do it. So many things were hapenning to me back then that could barely keep up with them, let alone stand still and write them all down in a notebook. (…) All I could do [was] to open my eyes in the strong head wind, catch my breath and forge ahead.“

— Murakami is definitely talking about me here. The problem is that, unlike the narrator, I won’t remember anything. I love the reference to running; I know that feeling so well.

„… when I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. (…) whether this period was a cold winter that left valuable growth rings inside me, I can’t really say.“

— Although solitude might have something to teach us, it might not be preferable to having a person to share our dreams and existential questions. In the turmoil of life that is young age, we can’t be sure that swimming alone is the best we can have.

( )

I'm not much of a Murakami fan, but the other stories in the same issue of the New Yorker were good , so I skimmed this. A bittersweet story of people who had trouble communicating about themselves and what they wanted. The use of the Beatles song was good. ( )