Hear The Wind Sing Part 13

Because my birthday is December 24th. The girl with only four fingers on her left hand, I never saw her again. When I went back to the town that winter, she'd quit the record store and vacated her apartment. Then, in a flood of people and in the flow of time, she vanished without a trace. When I go back to the town in the summer, I always walk down the street we walked together, sit on the stone stairs in front of the warehouse and gaze out at the sea. When I think I want to cry, the tears won't come. That's just how it is.

That California Girls record, it's still on my record shelf. When summer comes around I pull it out and listen to it over and over. Then I think of California and drink beer.

Next to the record shelf is my desk, and above my desk hangs the dried-out, nearly mummified remains of the clump of gra.s.s. The gra.s.s I pulled out of that cow's stomach.

The picture of the dead girl from the French lit department, it got lost when I moved.

The Beach Boys put out their first new record in a long time.

I wish they all could be California I wish they all could be California girls...

40

Let's talk one last time about Derek Hartfield. Hartfield was born in 1909 in a small town in Ohio, the same town where he was raised. His father was a taciturn telegraph engineer, his mother, a plump woman, cooked up horoscopes and cookies. During his gloomy youth, he had not a single friend, and when he could find some free time, he'd leaf through comic books and pulp magazines, and eating his mother's cookies and continuing in the aforementioned manner, he graduated from high school. After graduating, he tried working in the town's post office, but it didn't suit him for very long, and from this point forward he believed that his path led only in the direction of being a novelist. He sold his fifth short story to Weird Tales in 1930, getting twenty dollars for the ma.n.u.script. For the next year, he spouted out 70,000 word ma.n.u.scripts at the rate of one per month, the following year his pace increased to 100,000 words, and before he died he was up to 150,000 words. He had to buy a new Remington typewriter every six months, or so the legend goes.

His books were mostly adventure novels and bizarre stories, and he skillfully unified both those themes in his Waldo the Young Adventurer series, which became his biggest hit, totaling 42 stories in all. Within those stories, Waldo died three times, killed five thousand of his enemies, and (including Martian women) slept with 375 women. Out of those stories, we can read a few of them in translation. Hartfield despised a great deal of things. The post office, high school, publishing companies, carrots, women, dogs...the list goes on and on. However, there were only three things he liked. Guns, cats, and his mother's cookies. To fend off Paramount studios and FBI researchers, he had the biggest, most complete gun collection in the United States. Everything short of antiaircraft and ant.i.tank guns. His favorite gun of all was his .38 special revolver with its pearl-inlaid handle, and though it could only hold one bullet at a time, 'With this, I can revolve myself anytime I want,' was one of his favorite sayings.

However, when his mother died in 1938, he took a trip to New York City, climbed the Empire State Building, and jumped off the roof, splattering on the pavement like a frog.

His tombstone, in accordance with his will, bears the following Nietzsche-esque quotation: "In the light of day, one can comprehend the depths of night's darkness."

Hartfield, once again... (instead of an afterword) To say that if I hadn't come across a writer called Derek Hartfield I wouldn't have started writing, no, I wouldn't go that far. Still, my path to getting here would have probably been completely different. When I was in high school, in a secondhand bookstore in Kobe, looking as if they'd been put there by foreign sailors, there were some Hartfield books, and I rounded them up and bought them. One book was fifty yen. Had the place not been a bookstore, I wouldn't have even recognized them as books. Riding on some freighter, or atop the bed of some junior officer's bunk in a destroyer, these books had made the trip across the Pacific Ocean, and from far across time, they made their way to the top of my desk.

A few years later, I went over to America. It was a short trip; I went only to see Hartfield's grave. I learned where it was from a letter sent to me by a Mr. Thomas McClure, the enthusiastic (and only) researcher of Derek Hartfield. 'The grave is as small as the heel of a high-heeled shoe. Be sure not to overlook it,' he wrote.

From New York I boarded a Greyhound bus resembling a giant coffin, and it arrived in that small town in Ohio at 7am. Not a single other pa.s.senger got off the bus with me. Crossing the fields outside of town, there was the graveyard. It was bigger than the town itself. Above my head, a bunch of skylarks were going round in circles while singing their flight songs. I spent a long hour searching for Hartfield's grave. After plucking some dusty wild roses from nearby and placing them on his tombstone as an offering, I put my hand to the grave, sat down, and smoked a cigarette. Beneath the soft May sunlight, I felt that life and death were just as peaceful. Facing the sky, I closed my eyes and spent a few hours listening to the singing of the skylarks.

This story began there, at that graveyard. Where it eventually ended up, I have no idea.

"Compared to the complexity of the universe,"

Hartfield says, "our world's like the brain tissue of an earthworm."

I'd like to see it, that's my request as well.

We've come to the end, but in regards to Hartfield's diary, the aforementioned Mr. Thomas McClure's laboriously-written work (The Legend of the Sterile Stars: 1968) provided me with many quotes. I am grateful.

May, 1979

Murakami Haruki