On a Stone Pillow
Haruki Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
I’d like to tell a story about a woman. The thing is, I know next to nothing about her. I can’t even remember her name, or her face. And I’m willing to bet she doesn’t remember my name or face either.
When I met her I was a sophomore in college, not yet twenty, and I’m guessing she was in her mid-twenties. We both had part-time jobs at the same place, at the same time. It was totally unplanned, but we ended up spending a night together. And never saw each other again.
At nineteen I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn’t yet grasp were all the myriad phenomena that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. And that fact often led me to feel anxious, and helpless.
That said, I still want to talk about her.
What I do know is that she wrote tanka and had published a book of poetry. I say published, but the book was made up of printed pages bound with string, a simple cover attached, more a pamphlet, really, that barely rose to the level of a self-published book. But several of the poems in her collection were strangely unforgettable. Most of them were about love between men and women, or about death. Almost as if to show that love and death were concepts that adamantly refused to be separated or divided.
You and I / are we really so far apart?
Should I, maybe / have changed trains at Jupiter?
When I press my ear / against the stone pillow
The sound of blood flowing / is absent, absent
“I might yell out another man’s name when I come. Are you okay with that?” she asked me. We were naked, under the covers.
“I’m okay with that, I guess,” I said. I wasn’t totally sure, but I thought something like that probably wouldn’t bother me. I mean, it’s just a name. Nothing’s going to change because of a name.
“I might yell pretty loud.”
“Well, that could be a problem,” I hurriedly said. The ancient wooden apartment I lived in had walls as thin and flimsy as one of those wafers I used to eat as a kid. It was pretty late at night, and if she really screamed, the people next door would hear it all.
“I’ll bite down on a towel, then,” she said.
I picked out the cleanest, thickest towel in the bathroom, brought it back, and laid it next to the pillow.
“Is this one okay?”
She bit down on the towel, like a horse testing a new bit. She nodded. The towel passed muster, apparently.
It was a totally chance hookup. I wasn’t particularly hoping we’d get together, and she wasn’t either (I think). We’d worked at the same place for a couple of weeks, but since the work we did was different, we hardly ever had any chance for a decent conversation. I was working that winter washing dishes and helping out in the kitchen of a down-market Italian restaurant near Yotsuya station, and she worked there as a waitress. All the part-timers were college students, except her. Maybe that’s why she seemed a bit aloof.
She decided to quit the job in the middle of December, and one day after work some of the employees went to a nearby izakaya to have some drinks. I was invited to join them. It wasn’t exactly a full-blown farewell party, just us drinking draft beer, having some snacks, chatting about various things. I learned that before she waitressed she’d worked at a small real estate agency, and at a bookstore. In all the places she worked, she explained, she never got along with the managers or owners. At the restaurant, she didn’t have any blowups with anyone, she explained, but the pay was too low for her to get by for long, so she had to go out and look for another job. Not that she wanted to.
Someone asked what kind of job she wanted to get.
“I don’t care,” she said, rubbing the side of her nose. (Beside her nose there were two small moles, lined up like a constellation.) “I mean, whatever I wind up with isn’t going to be all that great anyway.”
I lived in Asagaya at the time, and her place was in Koganei. So we rode the high-speed train together on the Chuo line out of Yotsuya. We sat down side by side in the train. It was past eleven, a bitter night, with a cold, biting wind. Before I’d known it we were in the season where you needed gloves and a muffler. As the train approached Asagaya I stood up, ready to get off, and she looked up at me and said, in a low voice, “If it’s okay, would you let me stay at your place tonight?”
“Okay—but how come?”
“It’s too far to go all the way back to Koganei.”
“I have to warn you, it’s a tiny apartment, and a real mess,” I said.
“That doesn’t bother me in the least,” she said, and took the arm of my coat.
So she came to my cramped, crummy place, and we had some cans of beer. We took our time with the beer, and afterwards, like it was a natural next step, she shed her clothes right in front of me. Just like that, she was naked, and snuggled into my futon. Following her lead I took off my clothes and joined her in bed. I switched off the light, but the glow from the gas stove kept the room fairly bright. In bed we awkwardly warmed each other up. For a while neither of us said a word. So quickly naked with each other, it was hard to know what to talk about. But our bodies gradually warmed, and we literally felt the awkwardness loosen in our skin. It was an oddly intimate sensation.
That’s when she asked, “I might yell out another man’s name when I come. Are you okay with that?”
“Do you love him?” I asked her after I’d gotten the towel ready.
“I do. A lot,” she said. “I love him so, so much. I’m always thinking of him, every minute. But he doesn’t love me that much. What I mean is, he has a full-time girlfriend.”
“But you’re seeing him?”
“Um. He calls me whenever he wants my body,” she said. “Like ordering takeout over the phone.”
I had no clue how to respond, so kept quiet. She traced a figure on my back with her fingertips. Or maybe she was writing something in cursive.
“He told me my face is plain-looking but my body is the best.”
I didn’t think her face was particularly plain-looking, though calling her beautiful was going too far. Looking back on it now, I can’t recall what kind of face she had, exactly, or describe it in any detail.
“But if he calls you, you go?”
“I love him, so what else can I do?” she said, like nothing could be more natural. “No matter what he says to me, there are just times when I’m dying to have a man make love to me.”
I considered this. But back then it was beyond me to imagine what feelings this entailed—for a woman to want a man to make love to her (and even now, come to think of it, I don’t entirely understand it).
“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,” she said, in a flat tone, like she was reciting something written on the wall.
“I see,” I said, affected by her words.
“So it’s okay if you think of some other woman instead of me,” she said. “Don’t you have anybody you like?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“So I don’t mind if you yell out that person’s name when you come. It won’t bother me at all.”
There was a girl I liked at the time, but circumstances kept us from getting more deeply involved, and when the moment arrived I didn’t call out her name. The thought crossed my mind, but in the middle of sex it seemed kind of stupid, and I ejaculated into the woman without a word. She was about to yell out a man’s name, like she said she would, and I had to hurriedly stuff the towel between her teeth. She had really strong, healthy-looking teeth. Any dentist would be properly impressed. I don’t even remember what the name was she yelled out. All I recall is some nothing, run-of-the-mill name, and being impressed that such a bland name was, for her, precious and important. A simple name can, at the right time, really jolt a person’s heart.
Ihad an early class the next morning where I had to submit a major report in lieu of a midterm, but as you can imagine I blew both of these off. (Which led to some huge problems later, but that’s another story.) We finally woke up in the late morning, and boiled water for instant coffee, and ate some toast. There were eggs in the fridge and I boiled those up and we had them. The sky was clear and cloudless, the morning sunlight dazzling, and I was feeling pretty lazy.
As she munched on buttered toast she asked me what I was majoring in at college.
“I’m in the literature department,” I said.
“Do you want to be a novelist?” she asked.
“I’m not really planning on it,” I answered honestly. I had no plans whatsoever at the time of becoming a novelist. I’d never even considered it (though there were plenty of people in my class who’d announced they were planning to become novelists). With this, she seemed to lose interest in me. Not that she had much interest to begin with. But still.
In the light of day her clear teeth marks embedded in the towel struck me as a little bizarre. She must have bitten down pretty hard. In the light of day, she seemed out of place. It was hard to believe this girl before me, small, bony, with a not-so-great complexion, was the same girl who had screamed out passionately in my arms in the winter moonlight the night before.
“I write tanka,” she said, out of the blue.
“Tanka?”
“You know tanka, right?”
“Sure,” I said. Even someone as naïve as me knew that much. “But this is the first time I’ve met someone who actually writes them.”
She gave a happy laugh. “But there are people like that in the world, you know.”
“Are you in a poetry club or something?”
“Not, it’s not like that,” she said. She gave a slight shrug. “Tanka are something you write by yourself. Right? It’s not like playing basketball.”
“What kind of tanka?”
“Do you want to hear some?”
I nodded.
“Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“Really,” I said.
And that was the truth. I seriously was curious. I mean, what kind of poems would she write, this girl who, a few hours before had moaned in my arms and yelled out another man’s name?
She hesitated. “I don’t think I can recite any here. It’s embarrassing. And it’s still just morning. But I did publish a kind of collection, so if you really want to read them I’ll send it to you. Could you tell me your name and address?”
I jotted them on a piece of memo paper and handed it to her. She glanced at it, folding it in four, then stuffed it in the pocket of her overcoat. A light green coat that had seen better days. On the rounded collar was a silver broach shaped like a lily of the valley. I remember how it glistened in the sunlight streaming in the south-facing window. I know next to nothing about flowers, but for some reason I’ve always liked lilies of the valley.
“Thanks for letting me stay over. I truly didn’t want to ride back to Koganei on my own,” she said as she was leaving my place. “That happens with girls sometimes.”
We were both well aware of it then. That we would probably never see each other again. That night she simply didn’t want to ride the train all the way back to Koganei—that’s all there was to it.
Aweek later her poetry collection arrived in the mail. Honestly, I really didn’t expect her to follow up and send it. I figured she’d totally forgotten about me by the time she got back to her place in Koganei (perhaps trying to forget me as soon as she could), and never imagined she’d go to all the trouble of putting a copy of the book in an envelope, writing my name and address, sticking on a stamp, and depositing it in a letterbox—maybe even going all the way to the post office for all I knew. Which is why, one morning when I spied that package in my mail slot, it took me by surprise.
The title of the poetry collection was On a Stone Pillow, the author simply listed as “Chiho.” It wasn’t clear if this was her real name, or a pen name. At the restaurant I must have heard her name many times, but I just couldn’t recall it. No one called her Chiho, that much I knew. The book was in a plain brown business envelope, with no sender’s name or address, and no card or letter included. Just one copy of a thin collection of poems, bound together with white string, silently resting inside. It wasn’t some cheap mimeograph, but nicely printed on thick, high-quality paper. I’m guessing the author arranged the pages in order, attached the cardboard cover, and carefully hand-bound each copy using a needle and the string. To save on bookbinding costs. I tried imagining her doing that sort of piecework, but couldn’t picture it. The number 28 was stamped on the first page. Must have been the twenty-eighth in a limited edition. How many were there altogether? There was no price indicated anywhere. Maybe there never was a price.
I didn’t open the book right away. I left it on top of my desk, casting the occasional glance at the cover. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, it’s just I felt that reading a poetry collection someone put together—especially a person who, a week before, had been naked in my arms—required a bit of mental preparation. A sort of respect towards it, I suppose. So I finally opened the book that weekend, in the evening. I leaned back against the wall next to the window and read it in the winter twilight. There were forty-two poems contained in the collection. One tanka per page. Not a particularly large number. There was no foreword, no afterword, not even a date of publication. Just printed tanka in straightforward black type on white pages with generous margins.
I certainly wasn’t expecting some monumental literary work or anything. Like I said, I was just sort of personally curious. What kind of poems would a woman write who yelled out some guy’s name in my ear as she chomped down on a towel. But what I found as I read through the collection was that several of the poems really got to me.
Tanka were basically a mystery to me (and still are, even now). So I’m certainly not able to venture an objective opinion about what tanka are considered great, and which not so much. But apart from any judgments of literary value, several of the tanka she wrote—eight of them, specifically—struck a chord deep within me.
This one, for instance:
The present moment / if it is the present moment / can only be taken / as the inescapable present
In the mountain wind / a head cut off / without a word / June water at the roots of a hydrangea
Strangely enough, as I opened the pages of the collection, following the large, black printed words with my eyes, and as I read the poems aloud, the girl’s body I saw that night came back to my mind. Not the less-than-impressive figure I saw in the morning light, but the way she was as I held her body, enveloped by smooth skin, on that moonlit night. Her shapely round breasts, the small hard nipples, the sparse pubic hair, her dripping-wet vagina. As she reached orgasm she shut her eyes, alternately biting down hard on the towel and calling out, heartrendingly, another man’s name in my ear. The name of a man somewhere, a humdrum name I can’t recall anymore.
As I consider that / we’ll never meet again / I also consider how / there’s no reason that we cannot
Will we meet / or will it simply end like this / drawn by the light / trampled by shadows
I have no idea, of course, whether she’s still writing tanka or not. As I said, I don’t even know her name, and hardly remember her face. What I do remember is the name Chiho on the cover of the collection, her defenseless, soft, slick flesh in the pale winter moonlight shining in the window, and the mini-constellation of two small moles beside her nose.
Perhaps she’s not even alive anymore. Sometimes I think that. I can’t help but feel that maybe at some point she took her own life. I say this because most of her tanka—or at least most of the ones in that collection—were, beyond all doubt, images of death. And for some reason these involved a head being severed with a blade. For her that style might have been the best way to die.
Lost in this incessant / afternoon downpour / a nameless ax /decapitates the twilight
But in a corner of my heart I’m still wishing she’s alive somewhere in this world. Sometimes I’ll catch myself, all of sudden, hoping that she’s survived, and is still composing poetry. Why? Why do I take the trouble to think about something like that? There’s not one thing in this world linking my life and hers. Even if, say, we passed each other on a street, or were seated at adjoining tables in a restaurant, I seriously doubt that we would even recognize each other. Like two straight lines overlapping, we momentarily crossed at a certain point, then went our separate ways.
Many years have passed since then. Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely) people age in the blink of an eye. Each and every moment our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, then open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds these things—some with names, some without—are blown away, without a trace. All that’s left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?
But even so, if we’re blessed, a few words might remain by our side. They climb to the top of the hill during the night, crawl into small holes dug to fit the shape of their bodies, stay quite still, and let the stormy winds of time blow past. The dawn finally breaks, the wild wind subsides, and the surviving words quietly peek out from their hideouts. For the most part they have small voices, are shy, and only have ambiguous ways of expressing themselves. Even so, they are ready to serve as witnesses. As honest, fair witnesses. But in order to produce those enduring, long-suffering words, or else to find them and leave them behind, we must sacrifice, unconditionally, our own bodies, our very own hearts. We have to lay our own necks down on a cold stone pillow illuminated by the winter moon. Maybe, other than me, there’s not another soul in this world who remembers that girl’s poems, let alone can recite some of them. That slim little self-published book, bound together with string, is now forgotten, with the exception of number 28, all the other copies dispersed, sucked up somewhere into the benighted darkness between Jupiter and Saturn, vanished forever. Perhaps she herself (assuming she’s still alive) can’t recall a thing about those poems she wrote back when she was young. Maybe the only reason I recall some of her poetry even now is because it’s linked to memories of her teeth marks on that towel. Maybe that’s all it is. I don’t know how much meaning or value there is in still remembering all that, in sometimes pulling out that faded copy of the book from my drawer and reading it again. To tell the truth, I really don’t know.
At any rate, her words remained. While other words and memories turned to dust and vanished.
Whether you cut it off / or someone else cuts it off / if you put your neck on the stone pillow / Believe it—you will turn to dust