Norwegian Wood

all the students were doing at the time. The universities were not so easily "dismantled". Massive amounts of capital had been invested in them, and they were not abo

int," I said. "I could never get into Tokyo University; I can't sleep with any girl I want whenever I want to; I'm no great talker; people don't look up to me; I haven't got a girlfriend; and the future's not going to open up to me when I get a literature BA from a second-rate private university. What does it matter if I like the way you live?" "Are you saying you envy the way I live?" "No, I don't," I said. "I'm too used to being who I am. And I don't really give a damn about Tokyo University or the Foreign Ministry. The one thing I envy you for is having a terrific girl friend like Hatsumi." Nagasawa shut up and ate. When dinner was over he said, "You know, Watanabe, I have this feeling like, maybe 10 years or 20 years after we get out of this place, we're going to meet again somewhere. And one way or another, I think we're going to have some connection." "Sounds like Dickens," I said with a smile. "I guess it does," he said, smiling back. "But my hunches are usually right." The two of us left the dining hall and went out to a bar. We stayed there drinking until after nine. "Tell me, Nagasawa," I asked, "what is the "standard of action' in your life?" "You'll laugh if I tell you," he said. "No I won't." "All right," he said. "To be a gentleman." I didn't laugh, but I nearly fell off my chair. "To be a gentleman? A gentleman?" "You heard me." "What does it mean to be a gentleman? How do you define it?" "A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do." "You're the weirdest guy I've ever met," I said. "You're the straightest guy I've ever met," he said. And he paid for us both. I went to the following week's drama lecture, but still saw no sign of Midori Kobayashi. After a quick survey of the room convinced me she wasn't there, I took my usual seat in the front row and wrote a letter to Naoko while I waited for the lecturer to arrive. I wrote about my summer travels - the roads I had walked, the towns I had passed through, the people I had met. And every night I thought of you. Now that I can no longer see you, I realize how much I need you. University is incredibly boring, but as a matter of self-discipline I am going to all my lectures and doing all the assignments. Everything seems pointless since you left. I'd like to have a nice, long talk with you. If possible, I'd like to visit your sanatorium and see you for several hours. And, if possible, I'd like to go out walking with you side by side the way we used to. Please try to answer this letter - even a short note. I won't mind. I filled four sheets, folded them, slipped them into an envelope, and addressed it to Naoko care of her family. By then the lecturer had arrived, wiping the sweat from his brow as he took the register. He was a small, mournfullooking man who walked with a metal cane. While not exactly fun, the lectures in his course were always well prepared and worthwhile. After remarking that the weather was as hot as ever, he began to talk about the use of the deus ex machina in Euripides and explained how the concept of "god" was different in Euripides than in Aeschylus or Sophocles. He had been talking for some 15 minutes when the lecture-hall door opened and in walked Midori. She was wearing a dark blue sports shirt, cream-coloured cotton trousers and her usual sunglasses. After flashing a "sorry I'm late" kind of smile at the professor, she sat down next to me. Then she took a notebook - my notebook - from her shoulder bag, and handed it to me. Inside, I found a note: Sorry about Wednesday. Are you angry? The lecture was about half over and the professor was drawing a sketch of a Greek stage on the blackboard when the door opened again and two students in helmets walked in. They looked like some kind of comedy team, one tall, thin and pale, the other short, round and dark with a long beard that didn't suit him. The tall one carried an armful of political agitation handbills. The short one walked up to the professor and said, with a degree of politeness, that they would like to use the second half of his lecture for political debate and hoped that he would cooperate, adding, "The world is full of problems far more urgent and relevant than Greek tragedy." This was more an announcement than a request. The professor replied, "I rather doubt that the world has problems far more urgent and relevant than Greek tragedy, but you're not going to listen to anything I have to say, so do what you like." Grasping the edge of the table, he set his feet on the floor, picked up his cane and limped out of the classroom. While the tall student passed out his handbills, the round one went to the podium and started lecturing. The handbills were full of the usual simplistic sloganeering: "SMASH FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS FOR UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT!", "MARSHAL ALL FORCES FOR NEW ALL -CAMPUS STRIKE!", "CRUSH THE IMPERIAL -EDUCATIONAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!" I had no problem with what they were saying, but the writing was lame. It had nothing to inspire confidence or arouse the passions. And the round man's speech was just as bad - the same old tune with different words. The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination. "Let's get out of here," said Midori. I nodded and stood, and the two of us made for the door. The round man said something to me at that point, but I couldn't catch it. Midori waved to him and said, "See ya later." ,Hey, are we counter-revolutionaries?" Midori asked me when we were outside. "Are we going to be strung upon telephone poles if the revolution succeeds?" "Let's have lunch first, just in case." "Good. There's a place I want to take you to. It's a bit far, though. Can you spare the time?" "Yeah, I'm free until my two o'clock class." Midori took me by bus to Yotsuya and showed me to a fancy boxed-lunch speciality shop in a sheltered spot just behind the station. The minute we sat down they served us soup and the lunch of the day in square, red-lacquered boxes. This was a place worth a bus ride to eat at. "Great food," I said. "And cheap, too. I've been coming here since school. My old school's just down the street. They were so strict, we had to sneak out to eat here. They'd suspend you if they caught you eating out." Without the sunglasses, Midori's eyes looked somewhat sleepier than they had the last time. When she was not playing with the narrow silver bracelet on her left wrist, she would be rubbing at the corners of her eyes with the tip of her little finger. "Tired?" I asked. "Kind of. I'm not getting enough sleep. But I'm OK, don't worry," she said. "Sorry about the other day. Something important came up and I just couldn't get out of it. All of a sudden, in the morning. I thought about calling you at the restaurant, but I couldn't remember the name, and I didn't know your home number. Did you wait long?" "No big deal. I've got a lot of time on my hands." A lot?" "Way more than I need. I wish I could give you some to help you sleep." Midori rested her cheek on her hand and smiled at me. "What a nice guy you are." "Not nice. I just have time to kill," I said. "By the way, I called your house that day and somebody told me you were at the hospital. Something wrong?" "You called my house?" she asked with a slight wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. "How did you get my number?" "Looked it up in the student affairs office. Anyone can do that." She nodded once or twice and started playing with the bracelet again. "I never would have thought of that. I suppose I could have looked up your number. Anyway, about the hospital, I'll tell you next time. I don't feel like it now. Sorry." "That's OK. I didn't mean to pry." "No, you're not prying. I'm just kind of tired. Like a monkey in the rain." "Shouldn't you go home and get some sleep?" "Not now. Let's get out of here." She took me to her old school, a short walk from Yotsuya. Passing the station, I thought about Naoko and our endless walking. It had all started from there. I realized that if I hadn't run into Naoko on the train that Sunday in May, My life would have been very different from what it was now. But then I changed my mind: no, even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We were supposed to meet. If not then, some other time. I didn't have any basis for thinking this: it was just a feeling. Midori Kobayashi and I sat on a park bench together, looking at her old school. Ivy clung to the walls, and pigeons huddled under the gables, resting their wings. It was a nice, old building with character. A great oak tree stood in the playground, and a column of white smoke rose straight up beside it. The fading summer light gave the smoke a soft and cloudy look. "Do you know what that smoke is?" Midori asked me all of a sudden. "No idea," I said. "They're burning sanitary towels." "Really?" I couldn't think of anything else to say. "Sanitary towels, tampons, stuff like that," she said with a smile. "It is a girls' school. The old caretaker collects them from all the receptacles and burns them in the incinerator. That's the smoke." "Whoa." "Yeah, that's what I used to say to myself whenever I was in class and saw the smoke outside the window. "Whoa'. Think about it: the school had almost a thousand girls. So, say 900 of them have started their periods, and maybe a fifth of them are menstruating at any one time: 180 girls. That's 180 girls' worth of towels in the receptacles every day." "I bet you're right - though I'm not sure about the maths." "Anyway, it's a lot. 180 girls. What do you think it feels like to collect and burn that much stuff?" "Can't imagine," I said. How could I have imagined what the old man was going through? Midori and I went on watching the smoke. "I really didn't want to go to this school," Midori said. She gave her head a little shake. "I wanted to go to an absolutely ordinary State school with ordinary people where I could relax and have fun like an ordinary teenager. But my parents thought it would look good for me to go to this fancy place. They're the ones who stuck me in here. You know: that's what happens when you do well in primary school. The teacher tells your parents "With marks like hers, she ought to go there.' So that's where I ended up. I went for six years and I never liked it. All I could think about was getting out. And you know, I've got certificates of merit for never having been late or missed a day of school. That's how much I hated the place. Get it?" "No, I don't get it." "It's because I hated the place so much. I wasn't going to let it beat me. If I'd let it get to me once I'd be finished. I was scared I'd just keep slipping down and down. I'd crawl to school with a temperature of 103. The teacher would ask me if I was sick, but I'd say no. When I left they gave me certificates for perfect attendance and punctuality, plus a French dictionary. That's why I'm taking German now. I didn't want to owe this school anything. I'm not kidding." "Why did you hate it so much? "Did you like your school?" "Well, no, but I didn't especially hate it, either. I went to an ordinary State school but I never thought about it one way or another." "Well, this school," Midori said, scratching the corner of her eye with her little finger, "had nothing but upper-class girls - almost a thousand girls with good backgrounds and good exam results. Rich girls. They had to be rich to survive. High tuition, endless contributions, expensive school trips. For instance, if we went to Kyoto, they'd put us up in a first-class inn and serve us tea ceremony food on lacquer tables, and they'd take us once a year to the most expensive hotel in Tokyo to study table manners. I mean, this was no ordinaryschool. Out of 160 girls in my class, I was the only one from a middle-class neighbourhood like Toshima. I looked at the school register once to see where the others lived, and every single one of them was from a rich area. Well, no, there was one girl from way out in Chiba with the farmers, so I got kind of friendly with her. And she was really nice. She invited me to her house, though she apologized for how far I'd have to travel to get there. I went and it was incredible, this giant piece of land you'd have to walk 15 minutes to get around. It had this amazing garden and two dogs like compact cars they fed steaks to. But still, this girl felt embarrassed about living out in Chiba. This is a girl who would be driven to school in a Mercedes Benz if she was late! By a chauffeur! Like right out of the Green Hornet: the hat, the white gloves, the whole deal. And still she had this inferiority complex. Can you believe it?" I shook my head. "I was the only one in the whole school who lived in a place like Kita-Otsuka Toshima. And under "parent's profession' it said "bookshop owner'. Everybody in my class thought that was so neat: "Oh, you're so lucky, you can read any book you like' and stuff. Of course, they were thinking of some monster bookshop like Kinokuniya. They could never have imagined the poor, little Kobayashi Bookshop. The door creaks open and you see nothing but magazines. The steady sellers are the women's glossies with illustrated pull-out sections on the latest sexual techniques. The local housewives buy them and sit at the kitchen table reading them from cover to cover, and give 'em a try when their husbands get home. And they've got the most incredible positions! Is this what housewives have on their minds all day? The comics are the other big-seller: Magazine, Sunday, Jump. And of course the weeklies. So this "bookshop' is almost all magazines. Oh, there are a few books, paperbacks, mysteries and swashbucklers and romances. That's all that sells. And How-To books: how to win at Go, how to raise bonsai, how to give wedding speeches, how to have sex, how to stop smoking, you name it. We even sell writing supplies - stacks of ballpoint pens and pencils and notebooks next to the till. But that's it. No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe, no Catcher in the Rye. That's the Kobayashi Bookshop. That's how "lucky' I am. Do you think I'm lucky?" "I can just see the place." "You know what I mean. Everybody in the neighbourhood comes there, some of them for years, and we deliver. It's a good business, more than enough to support a family of four; no debts, two daughters in college, but that's it. Nothing to spare for extras. They should never have sent me to a school like that. It was a recipe for heartache. I had to listen to them grumble to me every time the school asked for a contribution, and I was always scared to death I'd run out of money if I went out with my school friends and they wanted to eat somewhere expensive. It's a miserable way to live. Is your family rich?" "My family? No, my parents are absolutely ordinary working people, not rich, not poor. I know it's not easy for them to send me to a private university in Tokyo, but there's just me, so it's not that big a deal. They don't give me much to live on, so I work part-time. We live in a typical house with a little garden and our car is a Toyota Corolla." "What's your job like?" "I work in a Shinjuku record shop three nights a week. It's easy. I just sit there and mind the shop." "You're joking?" said Midori. "I don't know, just looking at you I sort of assumed you'd never been hard up." "It's true. I have never been hard up. Not that I have tons of money, either. I'm like most people." "Well, "most people' in my school were rich," said Midori, palms resting on her lap. "That was the problem." "So now you'll have plenty of chances to see a world without that problem. More than you want to, maybe." "Hey, tell me, what do you think the best thing is about being rich?" "I don't know." "Being able to say you don't have any money. Like, if I suggested to a school friend we do something, she could say, 'Sorry, I don't have any money'. Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said "I don't have any money', it would really mean "I don't have any money'. It's sad. Like, if a pretty girl says "I look terrible today, I don't want to go out,' that's OK, but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at

rmony, but I was so bad she gave up and sang alone to her heart's content. I worked on my beer and listened to her sing and kept an eye on the fire. It flared up and died down several times. People were yelling and giving orders. A newspaper helicopter clattered overhead, took photographs and flew away. I worried that we might be in the picture. A policeman screamed through a loudspeaker for bystanders to get back. A little kid was crying for his mother. Glass shattered somewhere. Before long the wind began shifting unpredictably, and white ash flakes fell out of the air around us, but Midori went on sipping and singing. After she had gone through most of the songs she knew, she sang an odd one that she said she had written herself: I'd love to cook a stew for you, But I have no pot. I'd love to knit a scarf for you, But I have no wool. I'd love to write a poem for you, But I have no pen. "It's called "I Have Nothing'," Midori announced. It was a truly terrible song, both words and music. I listened to this musical mess thinking that the house would blow apart in the explosion if the petrol station caught fire. Tired of singing, Midori put down her guitar and slumped against my shoulder like a cat in the sun. "How did you like my song?" she asked. I answered cautiously, "It was unique and original and very expressive of your personality." "Thanks," she said. "The theme is that I have nothing." "Yeah, I kind of thought so." "You know," she said, "when my mother died. .." "Yeah?" "I didn't feel the least bit sad." "Oh." "And I didn't feel sad when my father left, either." "Really?" "It's true. Don't you think I'm terrible? Cold-hearted?" "I'm sure you have your reasons." "My reasons. Hmm. Things were pretty complicated in this house. But I always thought, I mean, they're my mother and father, of course I'd be sad if they died or I never saw them again. But it didn't happen that way. I didn't feel anything. Not sad, not lonely. I hardly even think of them. Sometimes I'll have dreams, though. Sometimes my mother will be glaring at me out of the darkness and she'll accuse me of being happy she died. But I'm not happy she died. I'm just not very sad. And to tell the truth, I never shed a single tear. I cried all night when my cat died, though, when I was little." Why so much smoke? I wondered. I couldn't see flames, and the burning area didn't seem to be spreading. There was just this column of smoke winding up into the sky. What could have kept burning so long? "But I'm not the only one to blame," Midori continued. "It's true I have a cold streak. I recognize that. But if they - my father and mother - had loved me a little more, I would have been able to feel more - to feel real sadness, for example." "Do you think you weren't loved enough?" She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod. "Somewhere between "not enough' and "not at all'. I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once. If I tried to cuddle up and beg for something, they'd just shove me away and yell at me. "No! That costs too much!' It's all I ever heard. So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me uncon-ditionally 365 days a year. I was still in primary school at the time, but I made up my mind once and for all." "Wow," I said. "And did your search pay off?" "That's the hard part," said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. "I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough." "Waiting for the perfect love?" "No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don't want it any more and throw it out of the window. That's what 'm looking Ifor." "I'm not sure that has anything to do with love," I said with some amazement. "It does," she said. "You just don't know it. There are times in a girl's life when things like that are incredibly important." "Things like throwing strawberry shortbread out of the window?" "Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. "Now I see, Midori. What a fool I've been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortbread. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I'll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?"' "So then what?" "So then I'd give him all the love he deserves for what he's done." "Sounds crazy to me." "Well, to me, that's what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though." Midori gave her head a little shake against my shoulder. "For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn't begin at all." "I've never met a girl who thinks like you." "A lot of people tell me that," she said, digging at a cuticle. "But it's the only way I know how to think. Seriously. I'm just telling you what I believe. It's never crossed my mind that my way of thinking is different from other people's. I'm not trying to be different. But when I speak out honestly, everybody thinks I'm kidding or play-acting. When that happens, I feel like everything's such a pain!" "And you want to let yourself die in a fire?" "Hey, no, that's different. It's just a matter of curiosity." "What? Dying in a fire?" "No, I just wanted to see how you'd react," Midori said. "But, I'm not afraid of dying. Really. Like here, I'd just be overcome with smoke and lose consciousness and die before I knew it. That doesn't frighten me at all, compared to the way I saw my mother and a few relatives die. All my relatives die after suffering from some terrible illness. It's in the blood, I guess. It's always a long, long process, and at the end you almost can't tell whether the person is alive or dead. All that's left is pain and suffering." Midori put a Marlboro between her lips and lit it. "That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that. I couldn't stand it." Another half hour and the fire was out. They had apparently kept it from spreading and prevented any injuries. All but one of the fire engines returned to base, and the crowd dispersed, buzzing with conversation. One police car remained to direct the traffic, its blue light spinning. Two crows had settled on nearby lamp-posts to observe the activity below. Midori seemed drained of energy. Limp, she stared at the sky and barely spoke. "Tired?" I asked. "Not really," she said. "I just sort of let myself go limp and spaced out. First time in a long time." She looked into my eyes, and I into hers. I put my arm around her and kissed her. The slightest twinge went through her shoulders, and then she relaxed and closed her eyes for several seconds. The early autumn sun cast the shadow of her lashes on her cheek, and I could see it trembling in outline. It was a soft and gentle kiss, one not meant to lead beyond itself. I would probably not have kissed Midori that day if we hadn't spent the afternoon on the laundry deck in the sun, drinking beer and watching a fire, and she no doubt felt the same. After a long time of watching the glittering rooftops and the smoke and the red dragonflies and other things, we had felt something warm and close, and we both probably wanted, half-consciously, to preserve that mood in some form. It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger. The first to speak was Midori. She held my hand and told me, with what seemed like some difficulty, that she was seeing someone. I said that I had sensed as much. "Do you have a girl you like?" she asked. "I do," I said. "But you're always free on Sundays, right?" "It's very complicated," I said. And then I realized that the brief spell of the early autumn afternoon had vanished. At five I said I had to go to work and suggested that Midori come with me for a snack. She said she had to stay home in case the phone rang. "I hate waiting at home all day for a call. When I spend the day alone, I feel as if my flesh is rotting little by little - rotting and melting until there's nothing left but a green puddle that gets sucked down into the earth. And all that stays behind are my clothes. That's how it feels to me, waiting indoors all day." "I'll keep you company next time you have to wait for a call," I said. 'As long as lunch is included." "Great," she said. "I'll arrange another fire for dessert." Midori didn't come to the next day's History of Drama lecture. I went to the cafeteria afterwards and ate a cold, tasteless lunch alone. Then I sat in the sun and observed the campus scene. Two women students next to me were carrying on a long conversation, standing the whole time. One cradled a tennis racquet to her breast with all the loving care she might give a baby, while the other held some books and a Leonard Bernstein LP Both were pretty and obviously en joying their discussion. From the direction of the student club building came the sound of a bass voice practising scales. Here and there stood groups of four or five students expressing whatever opinions they happened to hold, laughing and shouting to one another. There were skateboarders in the car park. A professor with a leather briefcase in his arms crossed the car park, avoiding them. In the quadrangle a helmeted girl student knelt on the ground, painting huge characters on a sign with something about American imperialism invading Asia. It was the usual midday university scene, but as I sat watching it with renewed attention, I became aware of something. In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, a

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