All God's Children Can Dance

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Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE.
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Harper's Magazine
Oct, 2001
ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE.
Author/s: Haruki Murakami
Yoshiya woke with the worst possible hangover. He could barely
manage to open one eye; the left lid wouldn't budge. His head felt
as if it had been stuffed with decaying teeth during the night. A foul
sludge was oozing from his rotting gums and eating away at his
brain from the inside. If he ignored it, he wouldn't have a brain left.
Which would be all right. Just a little more sleep: that's all he
wanted. But he knew it was out of the question. He felt too awful to
sleep.
He glanced up at the clock by his pillow, but it had vanished. Why
wasn't the clock where it belonged? No glasses either. He must have
tossed them somewhere. It had happened before.
He managed to raise the upper half of his body, but this jumbled his
mind, and his face plunged back into the pillow. A truck came
through the neighborhood selling clothes-drying poles. They'd take
your old ones and exchange them for new ones, said the
loudspeaker, and the price was the same as twenty years ago. The
monotonous, stretched-out voice belonged to a middle-aged man. It
made him feel seasick, but he couldn't barf.
The best cure for a bad hangover was to watch a morning talk show,
according to one friend. The shrill witch-hunter voices of the showbiz
correspondents would bring up every last bit left in your stomach
from the night before.
But Yoshiya didn't have the strength to drag himself to the TV. Just
breathing was hard enough. Random but persistent streams of clear
light and white smoke swirled together inside his eyes, which gave
him a strangely flat view of the world. Was this what it felt like to
die? If so, fine. But once was enough. Please, God, he thought,
never do this to me again.
"God" brought to mind his mother. He started to call out to her for a
glass of water, but realized he was home alone. She and the other
believers had left for Kansai three days earlier. It takes all kinds to
make a world, and his mother was a volunteer servant of God. He
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Harper's Magazine: ALL GOD'S CHILDREN CAN DANCE.
still couldn't open his left eye. Who the hell could he have been
drinking so much with? No way to remember. Just trying turned the
core of his brain to stone. Never mind now; he'd think about it later.
It couldn't be noon yet. But still, Yoshiya figured, judging from the
glare of what seeped past the curtains, it had to be after eleven.
Some degree of lateness on the part of a young staff member was
never a big deal to his employer, a publishing company. He had
always evened things out by working late. But showing up after noon
had earned him some sharp remarks from the boss. Those he could
overlook, but he wanted to avoid causing any problems for the
believer who had recommended him for the job.
By the time he left the house, it was almost one o'clock. Any other
day he would have made up an excuse and taken off from work, but
he had one document on disk that he had to format and print out
today, and it was not a job that anyone else could do.
He left the condo in Asagaya that he rented with his mother, took
the elevated Chuo Line to Yotsuya, transferred to the Marunouchi
Line subway, took that as far as Kasumigaseki, transferred again,
this time to the Hibiya Line subway, and got off at Kamiya-cho, the
station closest to the small foreign-travel-guide publishing company
where he worked. He climbed up and down the long flights of stairs
at each station on wobbly legs.
He saw the man with the missing earlobe as he was transferring
back the other way underground at Kasumigaseki around ten o'clock
that night. Hair half-gray, the man was somewhere in his
mid-fifties: tall, no glasses, tweed overcoat somewhat
old-fashioned, briefcase in right hand. He walked with the slow pace
of someone deep in thought, heading from the Hibiya Line platform
toward the the Chiyoda Line. Without hesitation, Yoshiya fell in after
him. That's when he noticed that his throat was as dry as a piece of
old leather.
Yoshiya s mother was forty-three, but she didn't look more than
thirty-five. She had clean, classic good looks, a great figure that she
preserved with a simple diet and vigorous workouts morning and
evening, and dewy skin. Only eighteen years older than Yoshiya, she
was often taken for his elder sister.
She had never had much in the way of maternal instincts, or
perhaps she was just eccentric. Even after Yoshiya had entered
middle school and begun to take an interest in things sexual, she
would think nothing of walking around the house wearing skimpy
underwear--or nothing at all. They slept in separate bedrooms, to be
sure, but whenever she felt lonely at night, she would crawl under
his covers with almost nothing on. As if hugging a dog or cat, she
would sleep with an arm thrown over Yoshiya, who knew she meant
nothing by it, but still it made him nervous. He would have to twist
himself into incredible positions to keep his mother unaware of his
erection.
Terrified of stumbling into a fatal relationship with his own mother,
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Yoshiya embarked on a frantic search for an easy lay. As long as
one failed to materialize, he would take care to masturbate at
regular intervals. He even went so far as to patronize a porno shop
while he was still in high school, using the money he made from
part-time jobs.
He should have left his mother's house and begun living on his own,
Yoshiya knew, and he had wrestled with the question at critical
points: when he entered college and again when he took a job. But
here he was, twenty-five years old and still unable to tear himself
away. One reason for this, he felt, was that there was no telling
what his mother might do if he were to leave her alone. He had
devoted vast amounts of energy over the years to preventing her
from carrying out the wild, self-destructive (but good-hearted)
schemes she was always coming up with.
Plus, there was bound to be a terrible outburst if he were to
announce all of a sudden that he was leaving home. He was sure it
had never once crossed his mother's mind that they might someday
live apart. He recalled all too vividly the profound heartbreak and
distress that she had experienced when he announced at the age of
thirteen that he was abandoning the faith. For two solid weeks or
more, she ate nothing, she said nothing, she never once took a bath
or combed her hair or changed her underwear. She hardly even
managed to attend to her period when it came. Yoshiya had never
seen his mother in such a filthy, smelly state. Just imagining the
possibility of its happening again gave him chest pains.
Yoshiya had no father. From the time of his birth, there had been
only his mother, and she had told him again and again, from the
time he was a little boy, "Your father is Our Lord" (which is how
they referred to their god). "Our Lord must stay high up in Heaven;
He can't live down here with us. But He is always watching over
you, Yoshiya; He always has your best interests at heart."
Mr. Tabata, who served as little Yoshiya's special "Guide," would say
the same kinds of things to him:
"It's true, you do not have a father in this world, and you're going to
meet all sorts of people who say stupid things to you about that.
Unfortunately, the eyes of most people are clouded and unable to
see the truth, Yoshiya, but Our Lord, your father, is the world itself.
You are fortunate to live in the embrace of His love. You must be
proud of that and live a life that is good and true."
"I know," responded Yoshiya just after he had entered elementary
school. "But God belongs to everybody, doesn't He? Fathers are
different, though. Everybody has a different one. Isn't that right?"
"Listen to me, Yoshiya. Someday Our Lord, your father, will reveal
Himself to you as yours and yours alone. You will meet Him when
and where you least expect it. But if you begin to doubt or to
abandon your faith, He may be so disappointed that He never shows
Himself to you. Do you understand?"
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"I understand."
"And you will keep in mind what I've said to you?"
"I will keep it in mind, Mr. Tabata."
But in fact what Mr. Tabata was telling him did not make much
sense to Yoshiya because he could not believe that he was a special
"child of God." He knew that he was average, just like the other
boys and girls he saw everywhere--or rather, that he was just a little
bit less than average. He had nothing that made him stand out, and
he was always making a mess of things. It stayed that way for him
through elementary school. His grades were decent enough, but
when it came to sports he was hopeless. He had slow and spindly
legs, myopic eyes, and clumsy hands. In baseball he missed most
fly balls that came his way. His teammates would grumble, and the
girls in the stands would titter.
Yoshiya would pray to God, his father, each night before bedtime: "I
promise to maintain unwavering faith in You if only You will let me
catch outfield flies. That's all I ask (for now)." If God really was his
father, He should be able to do that much for him. But his prayer
was never answered. The flies continued to drop from his glove.
"This means you are testing Our Lord, Yoshiya," said Mr. Tabata
sternly. "There is nothing wrong with praying for something, but you
must pray for something grander than that. It is wrong to pray for
something concrete, with time limits."
When Yoshiya turned seventeen, his mother revealed the secret of
his birth (more or less). He was old enough to know the truth, she
said.
"I was living in a profound darkness in my teen years. My soul was
in chaos as deep as a newly formed ocean of mud. The true light
was hidden behind dark clouds. And so I had knowledge of several
different men without love. You know what it means to have
knowledge, don't you?"
Yoshiya said that he did indeed know what it meant. His mother
used incredibly old-fashioned language when it came to sexual
matters. By that point in his life, he himself had had knowledge of
several different girls without love.
His mother continued her story. "I first became pregnant in the
second year of high school. At the time, I had no idea how very
much it meant to become pregnant. A friend of mine introduced me
to a doctor who gave me an abortion. He was a very kind man, and
very young, and after the operation he lectured me on
contraception. Abortion was good neither for the body nor the spirit,
he said, and I should also be concerned about venereal disease, so I
should always be sure to use a condom, and he gave me a new box
of them.
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"I told him that I had used condoms, so he said, `Well, then,
someone didn't put them on right. It's amazing how few people
know the right way to use them.' But I'm not stupid. I was being
very careful about contraception. The minute we took our clothes
off, I would be sure to put it on the man myself. You can't trust
men with something like that. You know about condoms, I hope?"
Yoshiya said that he did know about condoms.
"So, two months later I got pregnant again. I could hardly believe
it: I was being more careful than ever. There was nothing I could do
but go back to the same doctor. He took one look at me and said,
`I told you to be careful. What have you got in that head of yours?'
I couldn't stop crying. I explained to him how much care I had taken
with contraception whenever I had knowledge, but he wouldn't
believe me. `This would never have happened if you put them on
right,' he said. He was mad.
"Well, to make a long story short, about six months later, because
of a weird series of circumstances, I ended up having knowledge of
the doctor himself. He was thirty at the time, and still a bachelor.
He was kind of boring to talk to, but he was a nice man. His right
earlobe was missing. A dog chewed it off when he was a boy. He
was just walking along the street one day when a big black dog he
had never seen before jumped up on him and bit his earlobe off. He
used to say he was glad it was just an earlobe. You could live
without an earlobe. But a nose would be different. I had to agree
with him.
"Being with him helped me get my old self back. When I was having
knowledge of him, I managed not to think disturbing thoughts. I
even got to like his half-size ear. He was such a serious man, he
would lecture me on the use of the condom while we were in
bed--like when and how to put it on and when and how to take it
off. You'd think this would make for fool-proof contraception, but I
ended up pregnant again."
Yoshiya's mother went to see her doctor-lover and told him she
seemed to be pregnant. He examined her and confirmed that it was
so. But he would not admit to being the father. He was a
professional, he said; his contraceptive techniques were beyond
reproach. Which meant that she must have had relations with
another man.
"This really hurt me. He made me so angry when he said that, I
couldn't stop shaking. Can you see how deeply this would have hurt
me?"
Yoshiya said that he did see.
"While I was with him, I never had knowledge of another man. Not
once. But he just thought of me as some kind of young slut. That
was the last I saw of him. I didn't have an abortion either. I decided
to kill myself. And I would have. I would have gotten on a boat to
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