After the Quake by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online

TV. Just breathing was hard enough. Random but persistent streams of clear light and white smoke swirled together inside his eyes, which gave him a strangely flat view of the world. Was this what it felt like to die? OK. But once was enough. Please, God, never do this to me again.
    “God” made him think of his mother. He started to call out to her for a glass of water, but realized he was home alone. She and the other believers had left for Kansai three days ago. It takes all kinds to make a world: a volunteer servant of God was the mother of this hangover heavyweight. He couldn’t get up. He still couldn’t open his left eye. Who the hell could he have been drinking so much with? No way to remember. Just trying turned the core of his brain to stone. Never mind now: he’d think about it later.
    It couldn’t be noon yet. But still, Yoshiya figured, judging from the glare of what seeped past the curtains, it had to be after eleven. Some degree of lateness on the part of a young staff member was never a big deal to his employer, a publishing company. He had always evened things out by working late. But showing up after noon had earned him some sharp remarks from the boss. These he could ignore, but he didn’t want to cause any problems for the believer who had recommended him for the job.
    It was almost one o’clock by the time he left the house. Any other day, he would have made up an excuse and stayed home, but he had one document on disk that he had to format and print out today, and it was not a job that anyone else could do.
    He left the condo in Asagaya that he rented with his mother, took the elevated Chuo Line to Yotsuya, transferred to the Marunouchi Line subway, took that as far as Kasumigaseki, transferred again, this time to the Hibiya Line subway, and got off at Kamiya-cho, the station closest to the small foreign travel guide publishing company where he worked. He climbed up and down the long flights of stairs at each station on wobbly legs.
    He saw the man with the missing earlobe as he was transferring back the other way underground at Kasumigaseki around ten o’clock that night. Hair half gray, the man was somewhere in his mid-fifties: tall, no glasses, old-fashioned tweed overcoat, briefcase in right hand. He walked with the slow pace of someone deep in thought, heading from the Hibiya Line platform toward the Chiyoda Line. Without hesitation, Yoshiya fell in after him. That’s when he noticed that his throat was as dry as a piece of old leather.
    Yoshiya’s mother was forty-three, but she didn’t look more than thirty-five. She had clean, classic good looks, a great figure that she preserved with a simple diet and vigorous workouts morning and evening, and dewy skin. Only eighteen years older than Yoshiya, she was often taken for his elder sister.
    She had never had much in the way of maternal instincts, or perhaps she was just eccentric. Even after Yoshiya had entered middle school and begun to take an interest in things sexual, she would continue to walk around the house wearing skimpy underwear—or nothing at all. They slept in separate bedrooms, of course, but whenever she felt lonely at night she would crawl under his covers with almost nothing on. As if hugging a dog or cat, she would sleep with an arm thrown over Yoshiya, who knew she meant nothing by it, but still it made him nervous. He would have to twist himself into incredible positions to keep his mother unaware of his erection.
    Terrified of stumbling into a fatal relationship with his own mother, Yoshiya embarked on a frantic search for an easy lay. As long as one failed to materialize, he would take care to masturbate at regular intervals. He even went so far as to patronize a porn shop while he was still in high school, using the money he made from part-time jobs.
    He should have left his mother’s house and begun living on his own, Yoshiya knew, and he had wrestled with the question at critical moments—when he entered college