The Elephant Vanishes

She was getting to be more and more like our mother. Women are like salmon: In the end, they all swim back to the same place.

“Sometimes, I don’t know, it scares me. The future.” “You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.” I gave her the same speech I had given Noboru Watanabe. “But what if things don’t work out the way you want them to?” “If they don’t work out, that’s when you think again.”

I swear, just watching her do this for ten or twenty minutes—she and I kept up a running conversation at the counter of this bar, her “peeling mandarin oranges” the whole while, almost without a second thought—I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away. Unnerving, to say the least. Back when Eichmann stood trial in Israel, there was talk that the most fitting sentence would be to lock him in a cell and gradually remove all the air. I don’t really know how he did meet his end, but that’s what came to mind. “Seems you’re quite talented,” I said. “Oh, this is nothing. Talent’s not involved. It’s not a question of making yourself believe there is an orange there, you have to forget there isn’t one. That’s all.”

I used to keep a diary, but if I forgot for two or three days, I’d lose track of what had happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I’d sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was—very simply—amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them.

By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

I closed my eyes and tried to recall the sensation of sleeping, but all that existed for me inside was a wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness: What it called to mind was death.

Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike sleep, something that belonged to a different category altogether—like the deep, endless, wakeful darkness I was seeing now.