"Man-Eatings Cats" - Haruki Murakami

When Izumi and I sat at our outdoor café, drinking coffee or beer, aimlessly gazing at the boat in the harbor and at the far-off Turkish hills, we were sitting at the edge of Europe. The wind was the wind at the edge of the world. An inescapable retro color filled the place. It made me feel as if I were being quietly swallowed up by an alien reality, something foreign and just out of reach, vague yet strangely gentle. And the shadow of that substance colored the faces, the eyes, the skin of the people gathered in the harbor.

At times, I couldn’t grasp the fact that I was part of this scene. No matter how much I took in the scenery around me, no matter how much I breathed in the air, there was no organic connection between me and all this.

[…]

A week later, she phoned my office about some minor matter and we chatted for a bit. I told a joke, and she laughed. “Want to go out for a drink?” I asked. We went to a small bar and had a new few drinks. I can’t recall exactly what we talked about, but we found a million topics and could have talked forever. With a laserlike clarity, I could grasp everything she wanted to say. And things I couldn’t explain well to anyone else came across to her with an exactness that took me by surprise. We were both married, with no major complaints about our married lives. We loved our spouses and respected them. Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle running across someone to wham you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been a mistake to label this “love”. It was more like total empathy.

Neither one of us lured the other to bed, but we did start sleeping together. We’d both been faithful to our spouses up to that point, but somehow we didn’t feel guilty, for the simple reason that we had to do it. Undressing her, caressing her skin, holding her close, slipping inside her, coming – it was all just a natural extension of our conversations. So natural that our lovemaking was not a source of heartrending physical pleasure, it was just a calm, pleasant act, stripped of all pretense. Best of all were our quiet talks in bed after sex. I’d hold her naked body close, and she’d curl up in my arms, and we’d whisper secrets in our own private language.

We met whenever we could. Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, we were absolutely convinced that our relationship could go on forever, or married lives on one side of the equation, our own relationship on the other, with no problems arising. We were convinced that our affair would never come to light. Sure we had sex, but how was that hurting anyone? On night when I slept with Izumi, I’d get home late and have to make up some lie to tell my wife, and I did feel a pang of conscience, but it never seemed be an actual betrayal. Izumi and I had a strictly compartmentalized yet totally intimate relationship.

[…]

--- Posted on July 28th by santa ---