Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami

Author:Haruki Murakami
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Azizex666
Publisher: Kodansha
Published: 1995-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

“In the Lorraine region, there was a prominent Judge Remy who burned eight hundred witches, and was jubilant in his ‘Purge of Witches’. He’d say, ‘My justice is widespread, the other day we caught sixteen persons, and without hesitation we drowned them posthaste.’”

Shinoda Ichiro, Translator

If I say my justice is widespread, it might be better to say nothing at all.

The phone rang.

My face was sunburned from my trip to the pool, and I was in the midst of cooling it off with calamine lotion. After letting it ring ten times, I brushed the checkerboard of neatly cut cotton strips off my face and rose from the chair to take the receiver.

“Afternoon. It’s me.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You in the middle of something?”

“Nope, nothing at all.”

I took the towel draped around my shoulders and wiped my stinging face.

“I had fun yesterday. Most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

“That’s great.”

“Hm, yeah…you like beef stew?”

“Yep.”

“I made some, but it’d take me a week to eat all this all by myself. Wanna come over and eat some?”

“If it’s all right.”

“Okay, be here in one hour. If you’re late, I’m pitching it all into the garbage. Understand?”

“Yes…”

“I just hate waiting, that’s all.”

Saying that, she hung up before I’d had a chance to open my mouth.

I lied back down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for about ten minutes, listening to the Top 40 on the radio, then I took a shower and shaved my face cleanly with hot water, then put on a shirt and Bermuda shorts just back from the dry cleaner’s. It was a pleasant-feeling evening.

Watching the sun set parallel to the beach as I drove, I stopped at a place by the highway on-ramp to buy chilled wine and two cartons of cigarettes.

She’d cleaned the table, and in the space between the shining white dishes, I was using the edge of a fruit knife to wrest the cork out of the bottle. The moist steam from the beef stew made the room humid.

“I didn’t think it’d get this hot. It’s like Hell.”

“Hell is much hotter.”

“Sounds like you’ve been there to see it.”

“I heard it from someone. As soon as you’re about to go crazy from the heat, they move you somewhere cooler. As soon as you recover a little, they toss you back into the heat.”

“Just like a sauna.”

“It’s like that. But sometimes, when people go crazy, they don’t put them back in.”

“What do they do with them?”

“Drop ‘em off in Heaven. Then they make ‘em paint the walls. After all, the walls always have to be perfectly white. They get real upset if there’s even a single spot. Hurts their image.

“Thanks to the constant painting from morning ‘til night, these guides usually ruin their windpipes.”

She didn’t ask any more after that. After carefully picking the debris from the cork from the inside of the bottle, I poured us two glasses.

“Cold wine, warm heart,” she said when we toasted.

“What’s that from?”

“A television commercial. Cold wine, warm heart. You ever seen it?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t watch television?”

“I watch it a little.

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