Her Town, Her Sheep
by MURAKAMI Haruki
Translated by Kiki
The first snow of the year has started to fall oreets of Sapporo in northern Japan. It began as rain and then it ged to snow. It didn』t take long before it had ged back to rain. However oreets of Sapporo snow really isn』t that romantic. It』s about as wele 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-miape 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 iern Japan. Our houses were separated by about 50 meters. We attended both junior and senih 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 goo college in Hokkaido, our lives might have turned out pletely different. Perhaps I might have worked for a travel agency, gallivanting all over the globe. He may have bee a writer in Tokyo. But fate led me to write novels while his path took him to a travel agency. A everyday the sun tio 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 Shichigosaival; Hokuto riding a rocket at the playground. I looked at each picture three times, oer 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 oreet. He got divorced and is now living with a young woman.」
「What about Q?」
「He』s w for an ad agency, writing some just terrible copy.」
「That doesn』t surprise me..」
Etc. Etc.
We paid for the ched left the restaurant. It had started to rain again.
「Say, have you returo Kobe retly?」 I asked.
「Nope,」 shaking his head. 「It』s just too far away. How about you?」
「Me her. I don』t really have much desire to go back.」
「Yeah.」
「I imagihe neighborhood has really ged over the years.」
We walked around the streets of Sapporo for only ten more minutes, quickly running out of things to talk about. I returo my hotel and he went back to his small apartment.
「Don』t be a straake care of your self.」
「You too.」
Suddenly the thud of a verter made me realize that tomorroill again be separated by over 500 kilometers. In a few days we will again be walking on different streets. We will return to our respective b routines. We will tihe aimless uphill struggle as members of the rat race.
Ba my hotel room I turned oV and started to watch a local public service- program. Climbing onto bed with without taking my shoes