Free Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami Page A

"Shadows are useless anyway. Deadweight."
    I drew near the shadow. "Sorry, I must leave you for now," I said. "It was not my idea. I had no choice. Can you accept being alone for a while?"
    "A while? Until when?" asked the shadow. I did not know.
    "Sure you won't regret this later?" said the shadow in a hushed voice. "It's wrong, I tell you. There's something wrong with this place. People can't live without their shadows, and shadows can't live without people. Yet they're splitting us apart. I don't like it. There's something wrong here."
    But it was too late. My shadow and I were already torn apart.
    "Once I am settled in, I will be back for you," I said. "This is only temporary, not forever. We will be back together again."
    The shadow sighed weakly, and looked up at me. The sun was bearing down on us both.
    Me without my shadow, my shadow without me.
    "That's just wishful thinking," said the shadow. "I don't like this place. We have to escape and go back to where we came from, the two of us."
    "How can we return? We do not know the way back." "Not yet, but I'll find out if it's the last thing I do. We need to meet and talk regularly. You'll come, won't you?"
    I nodded and put my hand on my shadow's shoulder, then returned to the Gatekeeper.
    While the shadow and I were talking, the Gatekeeper had been gathering up stray rocks and flinging them away.
    As I approached, the Gatekeeper brushed the dust from his hands on his shirttails and threw a big arm around me. Whether this was intended as a sign of welcome or to draw my attention to his strength, I could not be certain.
    "Trust me. Your shadow is in good hands," said the Gatekeeper. "We give it three meals a day, let it out once a day for exercise. Nothing to worry about."
    "Can I see him from time to time?"
    "Maybe," said the Gatekeeper. "If I feel like letting you, that is."
    "And what would I have to do if I wanted my shadow back?"
    "I swear, you are blind. Look around," said the Gatekeeper, his arm plastered to my back.
    "Nobody has a shadow in this Town, and anybody we let in never leaves. Your question is meaningless."
    So it was I lost my shadow.
    Leaving the Library, I offer to walk her home. "No need to see me to my door," she says.
    "I am not frightened of the night, and your house is far in the opposite direction."
    "I want to walk with you," I say. "Even if I went straight home, I would not sleep."
    We walk side-by-side over the Old Bridge to the south. On the sandbar midstream, the willows sway in the chill spring breeze. A hard-edged moon shines down on the cobblestones at our feet. The air is damp, the ground slick. Her long hair is tied with twine and pulled around to tuck inside her coat.
    "Your hair is very beautiful," I say.
    "Is it?" she says.
    "Has anyone ever complimented you on your hair before?"
    "No," she says, looking at me, her hands in her pockets. "When you speak of my hair, are you also speaking about something in you?"
    "Am I? It was just a simple statement."
    She smiles briefly. "I am sorry. I suppose I am unused to your way of speaking."
     
    Her home is in the Workers' Quarter, an area in disrepair at the southwest corner of the Industrial Sector. The whole of this district is singularly desolate. No doubt the Canals once conducted a brisk traffic of barges and launches, where now-stopped sluices expose dry channel beds, mud shriveling like the skin of a prehistoric organism. Weeds have rooted in cracks of the loading docks, broad stone steps descending to where the waterline once was. Old bottles and rusted machine parts poke up through the mire; a flat-bottom boat slowly rots nearby.
    Along the Canals stand rows of empty factories. Their gates are shut, windowpanes are missing, handrails have rusted off fire escapes, walls a tangle of ivy.
    Past these factory row is the Workers' Quarter. Betraying a former opulence, the estate is a confusion of subdivided rooms parceled out to admass occupation of impoverished laborers. Even now, she