I'm getting the order of events mixed up. If there were a photograph of Sumire taken at that time, I know it would be a valuable record of how special certain people are.

Leave behind for posterity a Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man. She detested having her photograph taken-no desire to I'd love to show you a photo of her, but I don't have any. She'd get so engrossed in her thoughts at times that she'd forget to eat, and she wasĪs thin as one of those war orphans in an old Italian movie-like a stick with eyes.

She smoked too much, and you could count on her to lose her ticket every time she rode the train. Start her talking, and she'd go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn't get along with-most people in the world, in other words-sheīarely opened her mouth. Sumire was a hopeless romantic, set in her ways-a bit innocent, to put a nice spin on it. Life, and it'd lose even its imperfection. I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect Unsurprisingly, then, just before her junior year, she just up and quit. She found the college totally out of touch, a lukewarm, dispirited place, and she loathed it-andįound her fellow students (which would include me, I'm afraid) hopelessly dull, second-rate specimens. Nothing could come between her and herĪfter she graduated from a public high school in Kanagawa Prefecture, she entered the liberal arts department of a cozy little private college in Tokyo. Her resolve was a regular Rock of Gibraltar. No matter how many choices life might bring her way, it was novelist or nothing. Almost.Īt the time, Sumire-Violet in Japanese-was struggling to become a writer. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. And was married.Īnd, I should add, was a woman. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persianĭesert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains-flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds,Ĭrushing them to bits. In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

Sputnik sweetheart by haruki murakami