Pinball,1973 - (EPUB全文下载)

文件大小：0.1 mb。
文件格式：epub 格式。
书籍内容：

1
Pinball, 1973
By Murakami Haruki
Translated by Alfred Birnbaum
1969-1973
I used to love listening to stories about faraway places. It was almost pathological. There was a time, a good ten years ago now, when I went around latching onto one person after another, asking them to tell me about the places where they were born and grew up. Times were short of people willing to lend a sympathetic ear, it seemed, so anyone and everyone opened up to me, obligingly and emphatically telling all. People I didn’t even know somehow got word of me and sought me out.
It was as if they were tossing rocks down a dry well: they’d spill all kinds of different stories my way, and when they’d finished, they’d go home pretty much satisfied. Some would talk contentedly; some would work up quite an anger getting it out. Some would put things well, but just as often others would come along with stories I couldn’t make head nor tail of from beginning to end. There were boring stories, pathetic tear-jerkers, jumbles of half-nonsense. Even so, I’d hold out as long as I could and give a serious listen. Everyone had something they were dying to tell somebody or shout to the whole world –
who knows why? I always felt as if I’d been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I’d take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there. They probably ended their days nibbling acorns somewhere. But that, after all, was their fate.
That was the thing about it. There was so little return on all the effort involved. Thinking back on it now, I’ll bet if there had been a World’s Most Earnest Listener contest that year, I’d have won hands down. And I’d probably have won a box of kitchen matches. Among the people who talked to me were a guy from Saturn and another from Venus, one each. Their stories really got to me. First, the one about Saturn.
“Out there, it’s . . . awful cold,” he groaned. “Just thinking about it, g-gives me the willies.”
He belonged to a political group that had staged a take-over of Building 9 in the university. Their motto was “Action Determines Ideology – Not the Reverse!” No one would tell him what determined action. No matter, Building 9 had a water cooler, a telephone, and boiler facilities; and upstairs they had a nice little music lounge complete with Altec A-5 speakers and a collection of two thousand records. It was paradi ............

书籍插图：

以上为书籍内容预览，如需阅读全文内容请下载EPUB源文件，祝您阅读愉快。