The iron box slowly starts to float back up towards the surface of the ocean. The hands of the clock start to move once more. I lay in the darkness, opening my ears to the silence and then I hear the sound of that whistle again. But I am absolutely positive that it was the sound of a train whistle. I don’t even know where the train tracks would be, the sound is that far away… so far away that I am not even sure if I truly heard it. This whistle, it is really, really far away.
“But then, I hear the sound of a train whistle all the way off in the distance. This is what it means to wake up all alone in the middle of the night. This isn’t just some metaphor, this is the truth. No, that’s not it… it’s not that I wanted to die, it’s more like that if things had been left like that, with the air in that iron box gradually becoming thinner, I actually would have died. I felt almost as if I wanted to die, it was that painful a sensation.
“I think that this feeling is probably one of the hardest things we humans experience during our lives. Because of the pressure, my heart was aching, I felt as if I was going to be torn in two, to explode- you know this feeling?” I felt like I’d been jammed into a heavy, iron box which had been sunk to the very bottom of the ocean. If I suddenly disappeared one day, feeling like this, nobody would even notice. I realised that I had become someone who no one, in this huge, wide world, loved anymore, someone to whom no one would speak, who no one would even remember. There is not even one sound to be heard, not even the ticking of the hands of a clock counting down the time- perhaps the clock has stopped? Then I suddenly felt completely isolated, separated some unbelievable distance from everyone and everyplace I know. Can you imagine what that’s like? You can’t see anything you’re surrounded by complete darkness. Anyway, it’s the middle of the night and I was completely alone, there wasn’t anyone else there. But what time it was isn’t all that important. “I wasn’t sure of the exact time, I think it was probably around two or three o’clock.
“Once, I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night,” he begins. Without a doubt, there is a story to be had. Keeping silent, the girl waits for the tale to continue. The girl asks the boy a question: “To what extent do you love me?”Īfter thinking for a moment, the youth answers quietly, “As much as a train whistle in the night.” Murakami Haruki (© 1995 by Haruki Murakami). Concerning the Sound of a Train Whistle in the Night
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