Chapter 2 Prologue 2

1969 | 1973 I used to like to listen to things about places I have never been to, almost morbidly. For a period of time, even though it was ten years ago, whenever I caught up with someone I might meet, I would definitely ask him about the hometown where he grew up, or the place where he grew up.Perhaps in that era, people like me who took the initiative to ask other people's affairs were extremely scarce, so no matter who they were, they would tell me kindly and enthusiastically.Even some strangers who have never met before, don't know where they heard my rumors, but came to tell me specially.

It was like throwing stones into a dry well, and they really told me all kinds of things.And after finishing speaking, they all went back contentedly.Some people said it happily, some people said it angrily, some people said it logically, and some people didn't know what they were talking about from beginning to end.Some of them sound dull, some of them make you cry, and some of them are half-joking and nonsense, but either way, I listen as carefully as I can. I don't know why, but it seems like everyone is desperately trying to tell something to someone or to the world.This reminded me of a group of apes stuffed into cardboard boxes. I caught those apes out of the cardboard box one by one, carefully brushed off the dust on their bodies, and then slapped their buttocks and put them back on the grassland.Since then they have disappeared.It must have gnawed on acorns somewhere, and gradually died away.It turned out that fate was like that.

It was a thankless job, and now that I think about it, if there had been a world competition for the most eager to listen to people that year, I must have been selected as the champion without a doubt.And maybe get a bunch of kitchen matches or something! ◇ Among the people I talked to, there was one born of Saturn and one born of Venus.I was very impressed by what they said.First Saturn said: It's freezing as hell in there.He said like a groan: When I think about it, I will, I will go crazy. He belonged to a political society that occupied Hall 9 of the university.The so-called action determines thinking, and vice versa.is their creed.As for what decides to act, no one tells them.However, Hall No. 9 has air-conditioning, telephone and hot water facilities. On the second floor, there is an elegant music room with a collection of 2,000 records and ALTEC A5 audio equipment.It was heaven (compared to Hall 8, for example, which smelled like a racetrack toilet).They shaved off their beards with hot water every morning, they were free to make long-distance calls in the corner of the room in the afternoon, and they gathered together to listen to music after the sun went down, so that by the end of the autumn, they all became almost classical music crazy.

On a pleasantly sunny November afternoon, when the Third Mobile Team rushed into Hall 9, it was said that Vivaldi's Fantasy of Harmony was playing at full volume. Whether it was true or not, no one knew, but it was It is one of the heart-warming legends in 1969. When I slipped under the piles of benches that looked dangerous and used to replace the barriers, I could faintly hear Haydn's piano sonata in G minor.The nostalgic atmosphere is exactly the same as walking up the slope halfway up the mountain, smelling the fragrance of camellias, and going to ask my girlfriend's house.He seated me in one of the most respectable chairs, then took out a beaker he had snatched from the premises of the Faculty of Science, and poured me lukewarm beer, not chilled.

And gravity is very strong.He went on talking about Saturn.There was a guy who got hit in the foot with chewing gum that came out of his mouth, and the back of his foot was shattered!What a hell. I see.After a two-second pause, I answered him.During that time, I really experienced more than three hundred kinds of different ways of answering. Tai, the sun is also very small, as small as an orange on home plate when viewed from the outfield.So it's often dark and dark.He sighed. Why don't you leave?I try to ask like this.There must be an easier planet to live in elsewhere! do not know.Probably because it is the planet I was born on.That's it.After I graduate, I want to go back to Saturn, and I want to create a great country, revolution, revolution, revolution!

◇ All in all I like to hear stories from distant places.In those places, like a bear before hibernation, I have stored a lot.As long as I close my eyes, those streets and houses will emerge one by one, I can hear people's voices, and I can even feel the gentle and sure life waves of people in those distant places who will never be able to associate with me. ◇ Naoko has said similar things to me several times.I remember every word she said clearly. I don't know what to call that place. Naoko sat in the university lounge where the sun was shining, resting her chin on one hand, and said with a troublesome smile.I waited patiently for her to continue.She always spoke slowly, thinking of the right words.

We sat across from each other at a red plastic table with a paper cup stuffed with cigarette butts.The sunlight coming in from the high windows, like in a Rubens painting, draws a clear line of light and dark in the very center of the table.My right hand on the table is just in the light, and my left is in shadow. In the spring of 1969, we lived our twenties like this.The lounge is full of freshmen wearing new leather shoes, holding new lecture outlines, and stuffing their heads with new brains, so there is no place to step, and there are always people next to us, bumping into others, and complaining to each other, or Apologizing to each other.

In short, it cannot be called a city or a town.She went on like this.There is a straight railway with stations.On rainy days, the kind of bleak little station that drivers may miss. I nod.Then for a full thirty seconds or so, the two of them stared aimlessly at the cigarette smoke dangling in the light. From one end of the platform to the other, there are always dogs walking.That kind of station, you know? I nod. After leaving the station, there is a circle, and there is a bus stop.Then there are a few stores that seem to be awake.Go straight from there and you will come across a park.There is a slide and three swings in the park.

Is there a bunker? bunker?She thought about it slowly, then nodded affirmatively.have! We fell silent again.I carefully extinguished the nearly burnt cigarette in a paper cup. It's a dreadfully dull street.It is really unimaginable why such a boring street was built. God presents His gestures in various ways.I try to say that. Naoko shook her head and smiled alone.The kind of laugh that girls with all the A's on their report cards often have.And that smile stayed in my heart wonderfully for a long time.It was like the Shexian cat that appeared in Alice in Wonderland, after she disappeared, the smile still remained.

Having said that, no matter what, I want to see that dog walking on the platform. ◇ Four years have passed since then, in May 1973, to watch the dog.And for this trip, I shaved my beard, wore a tie for the first time in six months, and took out new horseback shoes to wear. When I got off the pitiful two tandem suburban trams that were about to rust, the first thing that hit my nostrils was a nostalgic smell of grass.It's like the aroma I smelt on a hike long ago.In this way, the wind of May blew over from the other side of the time tunnel.I can hear even the cry of the skylark if I just lift my head and listen.

After I yawned for a long time, I sat down on the bench at the station and lit a cigarette impatiently.The novelty of coming out of the apartment in the morning had completely gone now, the feeling that everything was just recurring over and over again.The endless déjavu phenomenon (dejavu: a phenomenon of memory disturbance as if seeing it for the first time) only worsens with each recurrence. Once upon a time, there was a time when I slept with some friends like squeezing sardines.Someone stepped on my head at dawn and said sorry, and since then, I've heard the sound of urinating, repeated over and over again. I loosened my tie, and with the cigarette still in the corner of my mouth, I tried to make the soles of my shoes, which I was not used to wearing, rub against the concrete floor to make a creaking sound, hoping that this would relieve the pain in my feet.Although the pain was not very intense, it gave me a sense of strangeness as if my body was about to split into several different parts. Dog, not even a shadow in sight. ◇ Alienation I often feel that sense of alienation.It's like putting together the pieces of two sets of jigsaw puzzles jumbled together at the same time.Anyway, at those times I drank whiskey to bed and got worse in the morning, and so on and on. When I opened my eyes, two twin girls appeared under my flanks.I've experienced it several times by now, but it's really the first time to have twin girls in both arms.The tips of their noses touched my shoulders, and they fell asleep as if they were very comfortable.It was a very sunny Sunday morning. The two finally woke up almost at the same time, then put on the shirts and jeans that had been taken off the bed, and went to the kitchen without saying a word to make coffee, bake toast, and take out cream from the refrigerator. On the table.The action is really skilled.On the barbed wire fence of the golf course outside the window, unknown birds are stopping and singing like machine guns. What is your name?I asked them both, my head about to split from the previous day's hangover. There is no decent name.Said the one sitting on the right. Really, no big names.The left side said: Do you understand? I understand.I said. We sat facing each other across the dining table, eating toast and drinking coffee.That's really delicious coffee. It's nerve-wracking to not have a name, isn't it?one asked. how to say? The two pondered for a moment. If you want a name anyway, you can just pick one for us.suggested another. Call it whatever you like. They always take turns talking, almost like cross talk on FM radio.It made my head hurt even more. For example? I try to ask. left and right.one said. Straight and horizontal.said another. Up and down. Inside and outside. East and West. entrance and exit.Not to be outdone, I reluctantly add a sentence.The two looked at each other face to face and smiled contentedly. ◇ Where there is an entrance, there is an exit.Most things are born that way.Post box, electric vacuum cleaner, zoo, soy sauce pot.Of course, there are also things that are not like this, for example: mousetrap. ◇ There is a mousetrap under the kitchen counter in the apartment, and the bait is made of peppermint gum.Because I've searched the whole house and there's nothing else that could be called food except this.It was finally discovered from the winter coat pocket along with the movie ticket stub. On the morning of the third day, a small mouse was stuck on the trap, the same color as the pile of cashmere sweaters in the duty-free shop in London, a very young mouse.If it were a human being, it would be about fifteen or six years old.It is the age of loneliness.Crumbs of chewing gum rolled underfoot. I had no way of understanding what it was like to be caught. The hind feet were always clamped by the wire. The mouse died on the fourth morning, and its posture left me with a lesson. Everything must have an entrance and an exit, that's all. ◇ The railway stretches out in a straight line along the hills, as if drawn with a ruler.The dark green miscellaneous woods in the distance ahead looked so small like crumpled confetti.A railway track reflects the sun bluntly on one side and disappears into the green as if overlapping each other.No matter where I go, there must be a scene like this, and it will last forever.I'm tired just thinking about it.Compared with this, the subway is much better. After smoking, I stretch my body and look at the sky.It has been a long time since I looked at the sky.Rather than saying that, it's been a long time since I even had the act of gazing at something. There is not a cloud in the sky.And the whole thing was indistinct, shrouded in the opaque fog characteristic of spring.From the elusive mist, the blue of the sky seeped in bit by bit.The sunlight is like fine dust, silently shining down in the atmosphere, and then allowing no one to feel it deposited on the ground. A gentle wind shakes the light, and the air moves slowly like flocks of birds in the forest.The wind slid across the gently sloping green fields along the railroad, over the tracks, and through the trees without shaking the leaves.The cuckoo's cry pierced through the soft light and disappeared into the distant skyline.The hills undulate several layers, forming a row like giant sleeping cats, squatting under the sunlight of time. ◇ The foot hurts worse. ◇ Let's talk about the well again. Naoko came to this land when she was twelve years old.According to the Western calendar, it was 1961.That's Rick Nielsen singing hello!The year of Mary Road.At that time, there was nothing striking in this green valley, just a few farmhouses, a few fields, a river full of crayfish, a single-track suburban tram, and a yawning station, that's all.There are always a few persimmon trees planted in front of most farmyards, and there is a barn in the corner of the yard that is exposed to the sun and rain, and it may collapse immediately if you lean on it. Toilet paper and soap are nailed to the wall of the barn facing the railway. Such as foreign tin advertising boards.It's that kind of place.Not even a dog, Naoko said. The house they moved to lived in was a two-story bungalow built during the Korean War.It is not very spacious, but the thick pillars and the high-quality materials carefully selected according to the purpose make this house look thick and solid.The exterior is painted in three different shades of green, each faded so badly by wind, sun, and rain that it completely dissolves into the surrounding landscape.The yard is very large, with several woods and small ponds in it. There is also an elegant octagonal pavilion used as a work room in the woods. There are still curtains on the bay windows that have completely lost their original colors.The narcissus blooms in disorder and luxuriantly in the pond, and the birds flock there to play in the water in the morning. The designer of this house was also the original owner, an old Western painter, but the winter before Naoko moved in, he had already contracted chronic pneumonia and died.1960, the year Bobby Yi sang Rubber Ball.It's been an annoyingly rainy winter.It hardly ever snows in this land, but instead it rains a lot of frightful cold.The rain seeped into the soil, and the ground was covered with a dank chill, while the ground was filled with sweet-smelling groundwater. ◇ Just five minutes walk along the railway from the station is the home of the well digger.It was a damp lowland by the river, and in summer the house was densely surrounded by mosquitoes and frogs.The well-digger is a man in his early fifties with a eccentric temper, but he is indeed a true and unrivaled genius in well-digging.As long as someone asked him to dig a well, he would first walk around the land of the entrusted family for several days, muttering to himself, and from time to time he picked up various soils with his hands to smell them.When we found a place that we thought was acceptable, we called in the workers of several accomplices and dug straight down from the ground. Because of this, people in this place can drink such delicious well water.The clear and cold water was so transparent that the hand holding the glass almost became transparent.Everyone calls this water Fuji Snow Water, which is of course a lie, and there is no reason for it to flow so far. In the autumn when Naoko was seventeen, the well digger was run over by a tram and died.Because of heavy rain, cold wine and hard of hearing.The corpse turned into thousands of pieces of flesh and splashed across the surrounding fields. When five buckets were used to recover them, seven policemen had to use long sticks with hooks on the tip to drive away the pack of hungry wild dogs.In fact, there was a bucket or so of sliced ​​meat that fell into the river and flowed into the pond as bait. The man who dug the well had two sons, but none of them stayed to inherit his father's business. They all left the land, and no one dared to approach the house that remained. It just became ruins and gradually decayed after a long time.Since then, there have been rare wells in the land that have produced delicious well water. I love wells.Every time I see a well, I have to throw a stone into it. Nothing makes me feel more peaceful than the sound of pebbles falling on the surface of the water in a deep well. ◇ In 1961, Naoko's family moved to this land, which was decided by his father alone.On the one hand, because he was a close friend with the dead old painter, and on the other hand, because he liked this land. He seemed to be a well-known scholar in French, but when Naoko was just in elementary school, he suddenly resigned from his post at the university, and from then on he translated some strange ancient books as he pleased, and lived a rather comfortable life.Books like Fallen Angel, Breaking Monk, Exorcist, Vampire, etc.I don't know the details, but I only once saw the photo published in a magazine.I heard from Naoko that her father seemed to have a very interesting life when he was young.That feeling can be seen more or less from the style of the photo.Wearing a peaked cap and a pair of black-rimmed glasses, he stared sharply about one meter above the lens, as if he really saw something. ◇ When Naoko's family moved here, many of these crazy cultural people gathered in this place, forming a colonial-like fuzzy special zone, perhaps like the situation in the Russian Empire when thought prisoners were sent to the Siberian exile area. I have read a little about the exile in Trotsky's biography.I don't know why, but I still remember the cockroaches and reindeer clearly.Take reindeer, for example. Hiding in the shadows, Trotsky stole the reindeer and the sled, and escaped from exile. Four reindeer dragged the sled and ran non-stop in the ice and snow. When they finally arrived at the parking lot, the reindeer had collapsed from exhaustion and never got up again.Trotsky picked up the dead reindeer and swore in his heart with tears that he must bring justice, ideals, and revolution to this country.Up to now, there are still bronze statues of these four deer standing on the red square.One end faces east, one end faces west, one end faces south, and one end faces north.Even Stalin can't destroy these reindeer. People who visit Moscow visit Red Square on Saturday morning, and they should be able to see the freshness of the red-cheeked middle school students mopping these reindeer while puffing. About this zone. They avoided the convenient flat land near the station, but deliberately chose the mountainside to build all kinds of houses they wanted to build.Each house has a ridiculously large yard, which retains the original miscellaneous woods, pools and hills.There is a small river running through the yard of a family, and wild catfish swim in the river. In the morning they woke up to the crowing of the turtledoves, walked in the yard while stepping on the beech fruit, stopped and stood still, and looked up at the morning light penetrating through the leaves. As time passed, the wave of residentialization rapidly extending outward from the urban center also affected this land to some extent.That was around the time of the Tokyo Olympics and the World Games.Looking down from the mountain, the large mulberry field that was originally like a vast sea has been pushed into black by bulldozers, and a flat street with the station as the center has been formed bit by bit. The new residents are all middle-income earners who go to work in the metropolis. They jump out of bed after 5:00 in the morning, can't wait to wash their face, then rush to catch the tram, and come back late at night as if they were dead. So the only time they could take a slow look at the houses on their street was on Sunday afternoons.And they all raised dogs as if they had made an appointment with each other.Dogs mated one by one and gave birth to puppies that became wild dogs. In the past, there were no dogs. That's what Naoko meant. ◇ I waited for over an hour and the dog didn't show up.I lit more than a dozen cigarettes and put them out again.I walked to the middle of the platform and drank the luscious water that flowed from the tap so cold that my fingers would freeze.Yet the dog still didn't show up. Next to the station is a large pool, which looks like a long, twisted pool formed by damming up a river.There are tall and dense aquatic plants growing all around, and occasionally fish can be seen jumping out of the water, and several men are sitting on the shore at a distance, silently hanging the fishing line on the dark water surface, and the fishing line remains motionless like a silver needle pierced on the water surface. In the misty spring light, a big white dog, which looked like it had been brought by fishermen, was going around eagerly sniffing the smell of woodsorrel. When the dog came about ten meters away from me.I leaned over the railing and tried to call him. The dog raised his head, looked at me with those pitifully shallow brown eyes, then wagged his tail two or three times. He leaned over and licked my hand with his long tongue. come over!I stepped back and called the dog. The dog seemed hesitant to look back and continued to wag its tail. Come inside!I have been waiting for a long time. I took the gum out of my pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and showed it to the dog. At first the dog watched the gum, and finally made up his mind to crawl through the railing.I touched the dog's head a few times, then rolled the chewing gum into a round shape with the palm of my hand, and threw it hard towards the edge of the platform, and the dog galloped in a straight line. I went home contented. ◇ On the tram ride back, I said to myself several times, it's all over here, forget it!Isn't that why you came here?But how could I forget it?The love for Naoko, and the fact that she's dead, it turns out that nothing is over. ◇ Venus is a sweltering planet covered in clouds.Because of the heat and humidity, most of the residents died early, and even living for thirty years would become a legend.Because of this, their hearts are full of love. All Venusians love all Venusians. They neither hate others, envy others, despise others, speak ill of others, kill people, or quarrel. Just love and thoughtfulness. For example, even if someone dies today, we are not sad. The quiet man born on Venus said so, in order to compensate for this, we have to love as much as possible in our lifetime, so as not to regret it in the future. Are you saying fall in love early? I really don't understand your terminology.He shook his head. Is it really possible to be so contented?I try to ask. If not, he said: Wouldn't Venus be buried in sorrow? ◇ I got home and the twins were giggling under the covers side by side like canned sardines. I'm back.one said. Where did you go? Where is the station?As I said that, I untied my tie, got between the twins and closed my eyes.ah!sleepy. Where is the station? What to do? Far away at the station, go see the dog. what kind of dog Do you like dogs? It's a big white dog, but I don't like it that much. I lit a cigarette, and neither of us spoke a word until I finished. Are you sad?a question. I nodded silently. sleep?said another. So I fell asleep. ◇ It's about me, and it's about a man called Rat.That autumn, we lived in a place seventy kilometers away from the city. September 1973, and the novel begins then.That is the entrance, I think it would be great if there is an exit, if not, then writing this article is meaningless.