Free Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami Page A

on a broken airplane. Of course there are lucky people, there are also unlucky people. There’re tough people, and weak people, rich people, and poor people. However, not a single person’s broken the mold with his toughness. We’re all the same. Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they’ll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll want to get stronger. Even if you’re just pretending. Don’t you think?
    There aren’t any real strong people anywhere. Only people who can put on a good show of being strong.”
    “Can I ask you a question?”
    I nodded.
    “You really believe all that?”
    “Yeah.”
    The Rat was silent for a moment, fixing his gaze on his beer glass.
    “You sure you’re not bullshitting me?” the Rat said earnestly.
    After I drove the Rat back to his house, I dropped by J’s Bar.
    “You talk to him?”
    “I did.”
    “That’s good.”
    Saying that, J set a plate of French fries in front of me.
    32
    In spite of Derek Hartfield’s large volume of work, when it came to the subjects of life, dreams, love, and the like, he was an extremely rare writer. Comparatively serious (‘serious’ meaning stories without appearances by spacemen and monsters) was his 1937 semi-autobiographical book Halfway ‘Round the Rainbow, in which, through all the irony, jokes, insults, and paradoxes, he revealed just a little bit of his true feelings.
    “My most sacred books are in this room, and by that I mean the stack of alphabetized phonebooks on which I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but. The truth is this: life is empty. However, help is available. If you know that from the outset, it’s almost as if life’s not really meaningless at all. We’ve really worked tirelessly to build it all up, and then tried with all our might to wear it down, and now it’s empty. No matter how hard you work, or how hard your try to bring it down, none of that’ll be written here. ‘Cause it’s a real pain in the ass. For those of you who really want to know, you can read about it in Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe. It’s all there, written out for you.”
    The reason Hartfield was so terribly enamored with Jean-Christophe is, quite simply, because it diligently outlined the life of one person from birth until death and, moreover, it was a terribly long novel. In his opinion, a novel could present information even better than graphs, chronologies, and the like, and he thought the accuracy was comparable as well.
    He was always critical of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
    ‘Of course, I have no problem with the length of it,’
    he noted. ‘It’s that it lacks a clear conceptualization of outer space, and the author has given the reader a mishmash of impressions.’ The phrase
    ‘conceptualization of space,’ the way he uses it, usually meant ‘sterility.’
    The novel he liked the most was A Dog of Flanders.
    ‘Hey, you. Can you believe a dog died just for a picture?’
    During an interview, a newspaper reporter once asked Hartfield this:
    “Your book’s protagonist, Waldo, has died twice on Mars, and once on Venus. Isn’t this some kind of contradiction?”
    Hartfield’s reply was this:
    “Do you know how time flows in the void of space?”
    “No,” he responded, “but nobody knows that.”
    “If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?”
    * * *
    Out of all of Hartfield’s works, one story, The Wells of Mars stands out, almost suggesting a hint of Ray Bradbury’s future appearance on the writing scene. It was a long time ago when I read it, and I forget most of the details, so I’m only going to give you the most important points.
    This story is about the countless bottomless wells dug into the surface of Mars and the young man who climbed down into one. These wells were dug by the Martians tens of thousands of years ago, and that’s