murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

While Naoko was speaking, her fingers unconsciously teased the
tassel of the plume grass, scattering its fibres to the wind. When the
shaft was bare, she wound it around her fingers.
"I was the one who found my sister dead," she went on. "In autumn
when I was in the first year. November. On a dark, rainy day. My
sister was in the sixth-form at the time. I came home from my piano
lesson at 6.30 and my mother was making dinner. She told me to tell
my sister it was ready. I went upstairs and knocked on her door and
yelled "Dinner's ready', but there was no answer. Her room was
completely silent. I thought this was strange, so I knocked again,
opened the door and peeped inside. I thought she was probably
sleeping. She wasn't in bed, though. She was standing by the window,
staring outside, with her neck bent at a kind of angle like this, like she
was thinking. The room was dark, the lights were out, and it was hard
to see anything. "What are you doing?' I said to her. "Dinner is ready.'
That's when I noticed that she looked taller than usual. What was
going on? I wondered: it was so strange! Did she have high heels on?
Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to
speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It
came straight down from a beam in the ceiling - I mean it was
amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a
ruler. My sister had a white blouse on - yeah, a simple white blouse
like this one - and a grey skirt, and her toes were pointing down like a
ballerina's, except there was a space between the tip of her toes and
the floor of maybe seven or eight inches. I took in every detail. Her
face, too. I looked at her face. I couldn't help it. I thought: I've got to
go right downstairs and tell my mother. I've got to scream. But my
body ignored me. It moved on its own, separately from my conscious
mind. It was trying to lower her from the rope while my mind was
telling me to hurry downstairs. Of course, there was no way a little
girl could have the strength to do such a thing, and so I just stood
there, spacing out, for maybe five or six minutes, a total blank, like
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