“Didn’t you see a doctor?”
“Of course I did. I went to a hospital in my neighborhood, a pretty good-sized one. They took X-rays and tested my urine. Cancer was a real possibility, so they looked me over pretty well. But they couldn’t find a thing wrong with me. I was the picture of health. They ended up prescribing me medicine for ‘chronic stomach fatigue’ or maybe stress. They gave me the old ‘early to bed, early to rise,’ said to cut back on liquor, and not to let little things bother me. But who did they think they were kidding? I know about chronic stomach fatigue: you’d have to be an idiot not to know you have it. You get this heavy feeling in your stomach, and heartburn, and no appetite, and like that. If you do get nauseated, it’s only after you get all those other symptoms. You don’t just start throwing up out of nowhere. Which is what happened to me. I might have been hungry all the time, but otherwise, I felt great, and my mind was perfectly clear.
“And as far as ‘stress’ goes—it’s just not something I have. True, I had quite a backlog of work, but not enough to let it get to me, and girls were no problem at all. Plus, I was going to the pool for a good swim two or three times a week. I was doing everything right, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sounds like it to me,” I said.
“I was just throwing up, that was all,” he said.
It went on like this for two weeks, the vomiting and the phone calls. By the fifteenth day, he decided that he had had more than enough of both and took off from work. He might not be able to stop the vomiting, but at least he wanted to get away from the calls, so he went to a hotel and spent the day watching TV and reading. At first, the change of scene appeared to be working. He managed to digest the roast beef sandwich and asparagus salad he ordered for lunch. At 3:30 he met a friend’s girlfriend in the hotel tearoom, where he sent his stomach a piece of cherry pie and black coffee, which also stayed down. Then he and the woman went to bed. This also worked without a hitch. After he had sent her home, he ate dinner alone at a nearby restaurant: Kyoto-style broiled mackerel with tofu, vinegared vegetables, miso soup, and a bowl of white rice. As usual, he kept away from alcohol. This was 6:30 p.m.
He went back to his room, watched the news, and started reading a new Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel. When nine o’clock rolled around and he still felt no nausea, he breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, after two long weeks, he was able to enjoy the simple pleasure of a full stomach. Things would probably go back to normal now, he felt. He closed his book, switched on the TV again, and after flicking through the channels with the remote, decided to watch an old western. The movie ended at eleven, and the late news came on. When that ended, he turned off the TV. What he wanted more than anything now was a good whiskey, and he came close to going to the bar upstairs for a nightcap, but he was able to stop himself. Why mess up one perfectly clean day? He turned out the reading lamp and snuggled under the covers.
It was the middle of the night when the phone rang. He opened his eyes to find the clock reading 2:15. At first he was too groggy to grasp why a bell might be ringing nearby, but he shook his head and, almost unconsciously, picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.
“Hello.”
The now familiar voice pronounced his name again and, a second later, the connection was cut.
“But you didn’t tell anyone you were staying in the hotel, did you?” I asked.
“Of course not—except for the woman I slept with.”
“Maybe she leaked it to someone else.”
“What possible reason could she have for doing that?”
He had a point there.
“After the call, I threw up every last bit of food in my stomach. The fish, the rice—everything. It was as if the phone call had opened a door and made a passageway for the nausea to get inside me.
“When I was done throwing up, I sat on the edge of the tub and tried to put things in order inside my head. My first thought was that the telephone call had been someone’s clever joke or malicious mischief. I didn’t know how they knew I was in the hotel, but setting that aside, I figured it might be a trick that someone was playing on me. The second possibility was that I was imagining the phone call. This seemed ridiculous to me at first, but analyzing the situation more coolly, I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Maybe I had thought I heard the phone ring, and when I picked up the receiver I had thought I heard the voice saying my name, but in fact there had been nothing at all. Theoretically, at least, such a thing was conceivable, don’t you think?”
“Well, I suppose so…”
“I rang the front desk and asked them to see if a call had just come in to my room, but they couldn’t help me. Their system kept track of all outgoing calls, but no record at all of incoming calls. That left me with nothing to go by.
“That night in the hotel was a kind of turning point for me. It’s when I started thinking about these things more seriously—the nausea and the phone calls—and the idea that they might be linked—whether wholly or partially, I didn’t know. But I was beginning to see that I couldn’t go on taking either of them as lightly as I had been doing.
“I spent two nights in the hotel, but even after I went home to my apartment, the vomiting and phone calls went on the same as before. I had friends put me up a few times to see what would happen, but the phone calls always found me—and always when I was alone in their houses. Needless to say, it started to give me the creeps, like I had some invisible thing standing behind me and watching every move I made: it knew exactly when to call me and when to jam its finger down my throat. When you start having thoughts like this, it’s the first sign of schizophrenia, you know.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but there aren’t too many schizophrenics who worry about getting schizophrenia, are there?”
“No, you’re right. And there are no known cases of a link between schizophrenia and vomiting. At least, that’s what the psychiatrists told me at the university hospital. They wouldn’t even look at me. They only want patients with unmistakable symptoms. Every carload of commuters on the Yamanote Line contains anywhere from 2.5 to 3 people with symptoms like mine, they said: they simply don’t have the facilities to treat each and every one of those. I should take my vomiting to an internist and the phone calls to the police.
“But as you may know, there are two kinds of crimes the police won’t bother with: crank calls and stolen bicycles. There are too many cases, and as crimes they’re too petty. Police operations would be paralyzed if they got involved in every one. They wouldn’t listen to me. Crank calls? What does the person say to you? Your name? That’s all? OK, fill out this form and contact us if something worse happens. That’s as far as they were willing to go. OK, I said, but how come the guy knows exactly where I am every time? They wouldn’t take me seriously. And I knew they’d think I was crazy if I insisted too much.
“Obviously, I wasn’t going to get any help from the doctors or the police or anybody else. I would have to take care of it myself. This became clear to me on the twentieth day from the beginning of the ‘nausea phone calls.’ I think of myself as pretty tough, both physically and mentally, but by this point it was beginning to get to me.”
“Everything was OK with that one friend’s girlfriend, though?”
“Pretty much. My friend happened to go to the Philippines for two weeks on business, so the two of us enjoyed each other a lot.”
“Didn’t you get any calls while you were with her?”
“Not one. I could check my diary, but I don’t think it ever happened. The calls only came when I was alone. Same with the vomiting. So then I began to wonder: how come I’m alone so much? In fact, I probably average a little over twenty-three hours a day alone. I live alone, I hardly ever see anybody in connection with my work, I take care of most of my business by phone, my girlfriends belong to other people, I eat out ninety percent of the time, the only sport I ever practice is long, lonely swims, my only hobby is listening to these more or less antique records by myself, and the o
nly way I can ever get my kind of work done is to concentrate on it alone. I do have a few friends, but when you get to this age, everybody’s busy, and it’s impossible to get together all the time. You know what this life is like, I’m sure.”
“Sure, more or less,” I said.
He poured more whiskey over the ice in his glass, stirred it with a finger, and took a sip. “So then I started thinking seriously. What was I going to do from now on? Was I going to go on suffering with crank calls and vomiting?”
“You could have gotten a girlfriend. One of your own.”
“I thought about that, of course. I was twenty-seven at the time, not a bad age to settle down. But I’m not that type of guy. I couldn’t give up so easily. I couldn’t let myself be defeated by something so stupid and meaningless as nausea and phone calls, to change my whole way of life like that. So I decided to fight back. I’d fight until every last ounce of physical and mental strength was squeezed out of me.”
“Wow.”
“Tell me, Mr. Murakami, what would you have done?”
“I wonder,” I said. “I have no idea.” Which was true: I had no idea.
“The calls and the vomiting kept up for a long time after that. I lost a tremendous amount of weight. Wait a minute—here it is: On June 4, I weighed 141 pounds. June 21, 134 pounds. July 10, whoa, 128 pounds. 128 pounds! For my height, that’s almost unthinkable! None of my clothes fit anymore. I had to hold my pants up when I walked.”
“Let me ask one question: why didn’t you just install an answering machine, or something like that?”
“Because I didn’t want to run away, of course. If I had done that, it would have been like admitting defeat to the enemy. This was a war of wills! Either he was going to run out of steam or I was going to kick the bucket. I took the same approach with the vomiting. I decided to think of it as an ideal way to diet. Fortunately, I didn’t have any extreme loss of muscle strength, and I could keep up my work and daily chores. So I started drinking again. I’d have beer for breakfast and drink plenty of whiskey after the sun went down. I threw up whether I drank or not, so what the hell, why not? It felt better to drink, and it all made more sense.
“So then I took some cash out of my savings account and had a suit and two pairs of pants made to fit my new body shape. Looking at myself so thin in the tailor’s mirror, I rather liked what I saw. Come to think of it, throwing up was no big deal. It was a lot less painful than hemorrhoids or tooth decay, and more refined than diarrhea. This was relative, of course. With the problem of nutrition solved and the problem of cancer gone, throwing up was essentially harmless. I mean, in America they go so far as to sell emetics for weight loss.”
“So then,” I said, “the vomiting and phone calls continued through July 14, was that it?”
“Strictly speaking—wait a second—strictly speaking, my last round of vomiting occurred on July 14 at nine thirty in the morning when I brought up my toast, tomato salad, and milk. The last phone call came at ten twenty-five p.m. that night when I was listening to Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea and drinking Seagram’s VO. Handy, isn’t it, keeping a diary like this?”
“It really is,” I agreed. “But you’re saying that, after July 14, both things came to a sudden stop?”
“Just like that,” he said. “It was like Hitchcock’s The Birds. You open the door the next morning and everything’s gone. The nausea, the prank calls: I never had either of them again. I went right back up to 140 pounds, and the new suit and pants are still hanging in my closet. They’re like souvenirs.”
“And the guy on the phone—he just kept saying the same thing, the same way, right up to the end?”
He gave his head a slight shake and looked at me a little vaguely. “Not quite,” he said. “His very last call was different. First, he said my name. That was nothing new. But then he added, ‘Do you know who I am?’ After that, he just waited without saying anything. I kept quiet, too. It must have lasted ten or fifteen seconds, without either of us saying a word. Then he hung up, and the only sound was the dial tone.”
“Really, that’s all he said? ‘Do you know who I am?’”
“That’s it, exactly. He pronounced the words slowly: ‘Do you know who I am?’ I had absolutely no recollection of that voice. At least among the people I had dealt with over the previous five or six years, there was nobody with a voice like that. I suppose it could have been someone from my childhood, or someone I had barely spoken with, but I couldn’t think of anything I might have done to make someone like that hate me, and I’m not in such demand that some other illustrator would have had it in for me. Of course, as I’ve told you, my conscience was not entirely clear where my love life was concerned, I grant you that. I was no innocent babe after twenty-seven years of living. But I knew all the voices of those guys. I would have recognized them in a second.”
“Still,” I said, “you have to admit it’s not exactly normal to specialize in sleeping with your friends’ partners.”
“So, what you’re telling me, Mr. Murakami, is that my own guilt feelings—feelings of which I myself was unaware—could have taken on the form of nausea or made me hear things that were not there?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” I corrected him. “You are.”
“Hmm,” he said, taking a mouthful of whiskey and looking up at the ceiling.
“And there are other possibilities,” I said. “One of the friends you deceived could have hired a private detective to tail you and make phone calls to you to teach you a lesson or warn you to back off. And the nausea could have been just a temporary condition that happened to coincide with the calls.”
“Hmm,” he said again. “Both of those make sense. I guess that’s why you’re a writer and I’m not. But still, where the detective theory is concerned, I didn’t stop sleeping with the women, but the calls suddenly stopped coming. Why would that be? It doesn’t fit.”
“Maybe the guy got fed up, or he ran out of money to keep hiring the detective. Anyhow, it’s just a theory. I can give you hundreds of those. The problem is which theory you’re willing to accept. And what you learn from it.”
“Learn from it?” he shot back. He pressed the base of his whiskey glass to his forehead for a few seconds. “What do you mean, ‘learn from it’?”
“What to do if it happens again, of course. Next time it might not end in forty days. Things that start for no reason end for no reason. And the opposite can be true.”
“What a nasty thing to say,” he said with a chuckle. Turning serious again, he went on, “But it’s strange. Until you just said that, it never occurred to me. That it might happen again. Do you think it will?”
“How should I know?”
Giving his glass an occasional swirl, he took a few sips of his whiskey. When the glass was empty, he set it on the table and blew his nose into a tissue.
“Maybe next time,” he said, “it might happen to somebody else. To you, for example, Mr. Murakami. You’re probably not all that innocent either, I suspect.”
He and I have gotten together a few times since then to trade our far-from-avant-garde records and enjoy a drink, maybe two or three times a year. I’m not the diary-keeping type, so I can’t say for sure. Fortunately, neither he nor I have been visited by nausea or phone calls so far.
—TRANSLATED BY JAY RUBIN
THE SEVENTH MAN
A huge wave nearly swept me away,” said the seventh man, almost whispering. “It happened one September afternoon when I was ten years old.”
The man was the last one to tell his story that night. The hands of the clock had moved past ten. The small group that huddled in a circle could hear the wind tearing through the darkness outside, heading west. It shook the trees, set the windows to rattling, and moved past the house with one final whistle.
“It was the biggest wave I had ever seen in my life,” he said. “A strange wave. An absolute giant.”
He paused.
“It just barely missed m
e, but in my place it swallowed everything that mattered most to me and swept it off to another world. I took years to find it again and to recover from the experience—precious years that can never be replaced.”
The seventh man appeared to be in his midfifties. He was a thin man, tall, with a mustache, and next to his right eye he had a short but deep-looking scar that could have been made by the stab of a small blade. Stiff, bristly patches of white marked his short hair. His face had the look you see on people when they can’t quite find the words they need. In his case, though, the expression seemed to have been there from long before, as though it were part of him. The man wore a simple blue shirt under a gray tweed coat, and every now and then he would bring his hand to his collar. None of those assembled there knew his name or what he did for a living.
He cleared his throat, and for a moment or two his words were lost in silence. The others waited for him to go on.
“In my case, it was a wave,” he said. “There’s no way for me to tell, of course, what it will be for each of you. But in my case it just happened to take the form of a gigantic wave. It presented itself to me all of a sudden one day, without warning, in the shape of a giant wave. And it was devastating.”
I grew up in a seaside town in S——Prefecture. It was such a small town, I doubt that any of you would recognize the name if I were to mention it. My father was the local doctor, and so I had a rather comfortable childhood. Ever since I could remember, my best friend was a boy I’ll call K. His house was close to ours, and he was a grade behind me in school. We were like brothers, walking to and from school together, and always playing together when we got home. We never once fought during our long friendship. I did have a brother, six years older, but what with the age difference and differences in our personalities, we were never very close. My real brotherly affection went to my friend K.