ハードボイルド・ワンダーランド

     “You must not let fatigue set in,” she warns. “That is what my mother said. Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”
     “Good advice.”
     “To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called ‘mind’, what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.”
     “The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”
     (...)
     “Did you come from some other land?” she asks, as if the thought had only then occurred to her.
     “I think so.”
     “And what was that land like?”
     “I cannot remember,” I say. “I cannot recall a single thing. They seem to have taken all memory of my old world when they took my shadow. I only know it was far, far away.”
     “But you understand these things of mind?”
     “A little.”
     “My mother also had mind,” she says. But my mother disappeared when I was seven. Perhaps it was because she had this mind, the same as you.”
     “Disappeared?”
     “Yes, she vanished. I do not want to talk about it. It is wrong to talk about people who have disappeared. Tell me about the town where you lived. You must remember something.”
     “I can only remember two things,” I say. “That the town I lived in had no wall around it, and that our shadows followed us wherever we walked.”


     Yes, we all had shadows. They were with us constantly. But when I came to this Town, my shadow was taken away.
     “You cannot come into Town with that,” said the Gatekeeper. “Either you lose the shadow or forget about coming inside.”
     I surrendered my shadow.
     The Gatekeeper had me stand in an open space beside the Gate. The three-o’clock afternoon sun fixed my shadow to the ground.
     “Keep still now,” the Gatekeeper told me. Then he produced a knife and deftly worked it in between the shadow and the ground. The shadow writhed in resistance. But to no avail. Its dark form peeled neatly away.
     Severed from the body, it was an altogether poorer thing. It lost strength.
     (…) 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. (…)
     “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.

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Vintage Books, London, 2003 (p. 61-64)

Katakana syllabograms:

ハ = ha
ー = long vowel
ド = do
ボ = bo
イ = i
ル = ru
ワ = wa
ン = n
ダ = da
ラ = ra