Her Town, Her Sheep
by MURAKAMI Haruki
Translated by Kiki
The first snow of the year has started to fall on the streets of Sapporo in northern Japan. It began as rain and then it changed to snow. It didn’t take long before it had changed back to rain. However on the streets of Sapporo snow really isn’t that romantic. It’s about as welcome as an unpopular relative. It is Friday October 23.
When I left Tokyo on a 747 from Narita airport, I was wearing only a T-shirt. It started to snow before I had finished listening to my 90-minute tape on my walkman.
“That sounds about par for the course,” my friend said to me. “We generally get the first snowfall of the year about now, and then it turns cold.”
“It gets really cold, doesn’t it?”
“No kidding. It gets really, really, cold.”
We grew up in a small quiet neighborhood in Kobe in western Japan. Our houses were separated by about 50 meters. We attended both junior and senior high school together. We also went on school trips and double dates with each other. Once we got so drunk that we rolled out of the cab when its doors popped open. After graduating from high school we attended different colleges: I went to Tokyo while he moved north to Hokkaido. I married one of my classmates from Tokyo, and my friend married a classmate of his from the city of Otaru in Hokkaido. That’s just the way life works out. We were scattered like seeds in the wind.
If he had attended college in Tokyo and if I had gone to college in Hokkaido, our lives might have turned out completely different. Perhaps I might have worked for a travel agency, gallivanting all over the globe. He may have become a writer in Tokyo. But fate led me to write novels while his path took him to a travel agency. And yet everyday the sun continues to shine.
My friend has a six year old son, Hokuto, and he always carries three pictures of his son in his wallet: Hokuto playing with sheep at the zoo; Hokuto wearing dress clothes for the autumn children’s Shichigosan Festival; Hokuto riding a rocket at the playground. I looked at each picture three times, one after another, before returning them to him. I picked up my beer and grabbed some icy “ruibe”, a Hokkaido delicacy.
“By the way, how is P doing?” He asked me.
“Pretty good,” I answered. “Just the other day I bumped into him on the street. He got divorced and is now living with a young woman.”
“What about Q?”
“He’s working for an ad agency, writing some just terrible copy.”
“That doesn’t surprise me..”
Etc. Etc.
We paid for the check and left the restaurant. It had started to rain again.
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