Norwegian Wood

ed. In front of me, behind me, I can see nothing but the endless darkness of a swamp. Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps. The people around me had gone on ahead long before,

, green and trembling in an almost imperceptible breeze. Why did such a beautiful body have to be so ill? I wondered. Why didn't they just leave Naoko alone? I went inside and drew my curtains, but even indoors there was no escape from the smell of spring. It filled everything from the ground up. But the only thing the smell of spring brought to mind for me now was that putrefying stench. Shut in behind my curtains, I felt a violent loathing for spring. I hated what the spring had in store for me; I hated the dull, throbbing ache it aroused inside me. I had never hated anything in my life with such intensity. I spent three full days after that all but walking on the bottom of the sea. I could hardly hear what people said to me, and they had just as much trouble catching anything I had to say. My whole body felt enveloped in some kind of membrane, cutting off any direct contact between me and the outside world. I couldn't touch "them", and "they" couldn't touch me. I was utterly helpless, and as long as I remained in that state, "they" were unable to reach out to me. I sat leaning against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. When I felt hungry I would nibble anything within reach, drink some water, and when the sadness of it got to me, I'd knock myself out with whisky. I didn't bathe, I didn't shave. This is how the three days went by. A letter came from Midori on 6 April. She invited me to meet her on campus and have lunch on the tenth when we had to enroll for lectures. I put off writing to you as long as I could, which makes us even, so let's make up. I have to admit it, I miss you. I read the letter again and again, four times all together, and still I couldn't tell what she was trying to say to me. What could it possibly mean? My brain was so fogged over, I couldn't find the connection from one sentence to the next. How would meeting her on enrolment day make us "even"? Why did she want to have "lunch" with me? I was really losing it. My mind had gone slack, like the soggy roots of a subterranean plant. But somehow I knew I had to snap out of it. And then those words of Nagasawa's came to mind: "Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only arseholes do that." "OK, Nagasawa. Right on," I heard myself thinking. I let out a sigh and got to my feet. I did my laundry for the first time in weeks, went to the public bath and shaved, cleaned my place up, shopped for food and cooked myself a decent meal for a change, fed the starving Seagull, drank only beer, and did 30 minutes of exercise. Shaving, I discovered in the mirror that I was becoming emaciated. My eyes were popping. I could hardly recognize myself. I went out the next morning on a longish bike ride, and after finishing lunch at home, I read Reiko's letter one more time. Then thought seriously about what I ought to do next. The main reason I had taken Reiko's letter so hard was that it had upset my optimistic belief that Naoko was getting better. Naoko herself had told me, "My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots." And Reiko had warned me there was no telling what might happen. Still, I had seen Naoko twice, and had gained the impression she was on the mend. I had assumed that the only problem was whether she could regain the courage to return to the real world, and that if she managed to, the two of us could join forces and make a go of it. Reiko's letter smashed the illusory castle that I had built on that fragile hypothesis, leaving only a flattened surface devoid of feeling. I would have to do something to regain my footing. It would probably take a long time for Naoko to recover. And even then, she would no doubt be more debilitated and would have lost even more of her self confidence than ever. I would have to adapt myself to this new situation. As strong as I might become, though, it would not solve all the problems. I knew that much. But there was nothing else I could do: just keep my own spirits up and wait for her to recover. Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I've chosen to live - and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it's hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that's something I will never do. I will never, ever, turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I'm stronger than she is. And I'm just going to keep on getting stronger. I'm going to mature. I'm going to be an adult. Because that's what I have to do. I always used to think I'd like to stay 17 or 18 if I could. But not any more. I'm not a teenager any more. I've got a sense of responsibility now. I'm not the same person I was when we used to hang out together. I'm 20 now. And I have to pay the price to go on living. "Shit, Watanabe, what happened to you?" Midori asked. "You're all skin and bones!" "That bad, huh?" "Too much you-know-what with that married girlfriend of yours, I bet." I smiled and shook my head. "I haven't slept with a girl since the beginning of October." "Whew! That can't be true. We're talking six months here!" "You heard me." "So how did you lose so much weight?" "By growing up," I said. Midori put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye with a twisted scowl that soon turned into a sweet smile. "It's true," she said. "Something's kind of different. You've changed." "I told you, I grew up. I'm an adult now." "You're fantastic, the way your brain works," she said as though genuinely impressed. "Let's eat. I'm starving." We went to a little restaurant behind the literature department. I ordered the lunch special and she did the same. "Hey, Watanabe, are you mad at me?" "What for?" "For not answering you, just to get even. Do you think I shouldn't have done that? I mean, you apologized and everything." "Yeah, but it was my fault to begin with. That's just how it goes." "My sister says I shouldn't have done it. That it was too unforgiving, too childish." "Yeah, but it made you feel better, didn't it, getting even like that?" "Uh-huh." "OK, then, that's that." "You are forgiving, aren't you?" Midori said. "But tell me the truth, Watanabe, you haven't had sex for six months?" "Not once." "So, that time you put me to bed, you must have really wanted it bad." "Yeah, I guess I did." "But you didn't do it, did you?" "Look, you're the best friend I've got now," I said. "I don't want to lose you." "You know, if you had tried to force yourself on me that time, I wouldn't have been able to resist, I was so exhausted." "But I was too big and hard," I said. Midori smiled and touched my wrist. "A little before that, I decided I was going to believe in you. A hundred per cent. That's how I managed to sleep like that with total peace of mind. I knew I'd be all right, I'd be safe with you there. And I did sleep like a log, didn't I?" "You sure did." "On the other hand, if you were to say to me, "Hey, Midori, let's do it. Then everything'll be great,' I'd probably do it with you. Now, don't think I'm trying to seduce you or tease you. I'm just telling you what's on my mind, with total honesty." "I know, I know." While we ate lunch, we showed each other our enrolment cards and found that we had enrolled for two of the same courses. So I'd be seeing her twice a week at least. With that out of the way, Midori told me about her living arrangements. For a while, neither she nor her sister could get used to living in a flat - because it was too easy, she said. They had always been used to running around like mad every day, taking care of sick people, helping out at the bookshop, and one thing or another. "We're finally getting used to it, though," she said. "This is the way we should have been living all along - not having to worry about anyone else's needs, just stretching out any way we felt like it. It made us both nervous at first, as if our bodies were floating a few inches off the ground. It didn't seem real, like real life couldn't actually be like that. We were both tense, as though everything was about to be tipped upside down any minute." "A couple of worriers," I said with a smile. "Well, it's just that life has been so cruel to us until now," Midori said. "But that's OK. We're going to get back every thing it owes us." "I bet you are," I said, "knowing you. But tell me, what's your sister doing these days?" "A friend of hers opened this swanky accessory shop a little while ago. My sister helps out there three times a week. Otherwise, she's studying cookery, going on dates with her fiancé, going to the cinema, vegging out, and just enjoying life. Midori then asked about my new life. I gave her a description of the layout of the house, and the big garden and Seagull the cat, and my landlord. "Are you enjoying yourself?" she asked. "Pretty much," I said. "Could have fooled me," said Midori. "Yeah, and it's springtime, too," I said. "And you're wearing that cool pullover your girlfriend knitted for you." With a sudden shock I glanced down at my wine-coloured jumper. "How did you know?" "You're as honest as they come," said Midori. "I'm guessing, of course! Anyway, what's wrong with you?" "I don't know. I'm trying to whip up a little enthusiasm." "Just remember, life is a box of chocolates." I shook my head a few times and looked at her. "Maybe I'm not so smart, but sometimes I don't know what on earth you're talking about." "You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. "Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK.' Life is a box of chocolates." "I suppose you could call it a philosophy." "It's true, though. I've learned it from experience." We were drinking our coffee when two girls came in. Midori seemed to know them from university. The three of them compared enrolment cards and talked about a million different things: "What kind of mark did you get in German?" "So-and-so got hurt in the campus riots." "Great shoes, where did you buy them?" I half-listened, but it felt as though their comments were coming from the other side of the world. I sipped my coffee and watched the scene passing by the shop window. It was a typical university springtime scene as the new year was getting under way: a haze hanging in the sky, the cherry trees blooming, the new students (you could tell at a glance) carrying armloads of new books. I felt myself drifting off a little and thought about Naoko, unable to return to her studies again this year. A small glass full of anemones stood by the window. When the other two went back to their table, Midori and I left to walk around the neighbourhood. We visited a few second-hand bookshops, bought some books, went to another café for another cup, played some pinball at an arcade, and sat on a park bench, talking - or, rather, Midori talked while I merely grunted in response. When she said she was thirsty, I ran over to a newsagent's and bought us two Cokes. I came back to find her scribbling away with her ballpoint pen on some ruled paper. "What's that?" I asked. "Nothing," she said. "I have to go," she announced at 3.30. "I'm supposed to meet my sister at the Ginza." We walked to the subway station and went off in different directions. As she left, Midori stuffed the piece of paper, now folded in four, into my pocket. "Read this when you get home," she said. I read it on the train. I'm writing this letter to you while you're off buying drinks. This is the first time in my life I've ever written a letter to somebody sitting next to me on a bench, but I feel it's the only way I can get through to you. I mean, you're hardly listening to anything I say. Am I right? Do you realize you did something terrible to me today? You never even noticed that my hairstyle had changed, did you? I've been working on it forever, trying to grow it out, and finally, at the end of last week, I managed to get it into a style you could actually call girlish, but you never even noticed. It was looking pretty good, so I thought I'd give you a little shock when you saw me for the first time after so long, but it didn't even register with you. Don't you think that's awful? I bet you can't even remember what I was wearing today. Hey, I'm a girl! So what if you've got something on your mind? You can spare me one decent look! All you had to say was "Cute hair", and I would have been able to forgive you for being sunk in a million thoughts, but no! Which is why I'm going to tell you a lie. It's not true that I have to meet my sister at the Ginza. I was planning to spend the night at your place. I even brought my pyjamas with me. It's true. I've got my pyjamas and a toothbrush in my bag. I'm such an idiot! I mean, you never even invited me over to see your new place. Oh well, what the hell, you obviously want to be alone, so I'll leave you alone. Go ahead and think away to your heart's content! But don't get me wrong. I'm not totally mad at you. I'm just sad. You were so nice to me when I was having my problems, but now that you're having yours, it seems there's not a thing I can do for you. You're all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside. So now I see you coming back with our drinks - walking and thinking. I was hoping you'd trip, but you didn't. Now you're sitting next to me drinking your Coke. I was holding out one last hope that you'd notice and say "Hey, your hair's changed!" but no. If you had, I would have torn up this letter and said: "Let's go to your place. I'll make you a nice dinner. And afterwards we can go to bed and cuddle." But you're about as sensitive as a steel plate. Goodbye. PS. Please don't talk to me next time we meet. I rang Midori's flat from the station when I got off the train in Kichijoji, but there was no answer. With nothing better to do, I ambled around the neighbourhood looking for some part-time work I could take after lectures began. I would be free all day Saturday and Sunday and could work after five o'clock on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; but finding a job that fitted my particular schedule was no easy matter. I gave up and went home. When I went out to buy groceries for dinner, I tried Midori's place again. Her sister told me that Midori hadn't come home yet and that she had no idea when she'd be back. I thanked her and hung up. After eating, I tried to write to Midori, but I gave up after several false starts and wrote to Naoko instead. Spring was here, I said, and the new university year was starting. I told her I missed her, that I had been hoping, one way or another, to be able to meet her and talk. In any case, I wrote, I've decided to make myself strong. As far as I can tell, that's all I can do. There's one other thing. Maybe it's just to do with me, and you may not care about this one way or another, but I'm not sleeping with anybody any more. It's because I don't want to forget the last time you touched me. It meant a lot more to me than you might think. I think about it all of the time. I put the letter in an envelope, stuck on a stamp, and sat at my desk a long while staring at it. It was a much shorter letter than usual, but I had the feeling that Naoko might understand me better that way. I poured myself an inch-and-a-half of whisky, drank it in two swallows, and went to sleep. The next day I found a job near Kichijoji Station that I could do on Saturdays and Sundays: waiting on tables at a smallish It alian restaurant. The conditions were pretty poor, but travel and lunch expenses were included. And whenever somebody on the late shift took the day off on a Monday, Wednesday or Thursday (which happened often) I could take their place. This was perfect for me. The manager said they would raise my pay when I had stayed for three months, and they wanted me to start that Saturday. He was a much more decent guy than the idiot who ran the record shop in Shinjuku. I tried phoning Midori's flat again, and again her sister answered. Midori hadn't come back since yesterday, she said, sounding tired, and now she herself was beginning to worry: did I have any idea where she might have gone? All I knew was that Midori had her pyjamas and a toothbrush in her bag. I saw Midori at the lecture on Wednesday. She was wearing a deep green pullover and the dark sunglasses she had often worn that summer. She was seated in the last row, talking with a thin girl with glasses I had seen once before. I approached her and said I'd like to talk afterwards. The girl with glasses looked at me first, and then Midori looked at me. Her hairstyle was, in fact, somewhat more feminine than it had been before: more mature. "I have to meet someone," she said, cocking her head slightly. "I won't take up much of your time," I said. "Five minutes." Midori removed her sunglasses and narrowed her eyes. She might just as well have been looking at a crumbling, abandoned house some hundred yards in the distance. "I don't want to talk to you. Sorry," she said. The girl with glasses looked at me with eyes that said: She says she doesn't want to talk to you. Sorry. I sat at the right end of the front row for the lecture (an overview of the works of Tennessee Williams and their place in American literature), and when it was over, I did a long count to three and turned around. Midori was gone. April was too lonely a month to spend all alone. In April, everyone around me looked happy. People would throw off their coats and enjoy each other's company in the sunshine - talking, playing catch, holding hands. But I was always by myself. Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa: all of them had gone away from where I stood. Now I had no one to say "Good morning" to or "Have a nice day". I even missed Storm Trooper. I spent the whole month with this hopeless sense of isolation. I tried to speak to Midori a few times, but the answer I got from her was always the same: "I don't want to talk to you now" - and I knew from the tone of her voice that she meant it. She was always with the girl with glasses, or else I saw her with a tall, short-haired guy. He had these incredibly long legs and always wore white basketball shoes. April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice b ut to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass - but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache in its path. At those times I would write to Naoko. In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a film I'd seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me. I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one. I wrote any number of letters like this, but from Naoko or Reiko I heard nothing. At the restaurant where I worked I got to know another student my age named Itoh. It took quite a while before this gentle, quiet student from the oil-painting department of an art college would engage me in conversation, but eventually we started going to a nearby bar after work and talking about all kinds of things. He also liked to read and to listen to music, so we'd usually talk about books and records we liked. He was a slim, good-looking guy with much shorter hair and far cleaner clothes than the typical art student. He never had a lot to say, but he had his definite tastes and opinions. He liked French novels, especially those of Georges Bataille and Boris Vian. For music, he preferred Mozart and Ravel. And, like me, he was looking for a friend with whom he could talk about such things. Itoh once invited me to his flat. It was not quite as hard to get to as mine: a strange, one-floored house behind Inokashira Park. His room was stuffed with painting supplies and canvases. I asked to see his work, but he said he was too embarrassed to show me anything. We drank some Chivas Regal that he had quietly removed from his father's place, grilled some smelts on his charcoal stove, and listened to Robert Casadesus playing a Mozart piano concerto. Itoh was from Nagasaki. He had a girlfriend he would sleep with whenever he went home, he said, but things weren't going too well with her lately. "You know what girls are like," he said. "They turn 20 or 21 and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super-realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and loveable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing. Now when I see her, usually after we do it, she starts asking me, "What are you going to do after you graduate?"' "Well, what are you going to do after you graduate?" I asked him. Munching on a mouthful of smelt, he shook his head. "What can I do? I'm in oil painting! Start worrying about stuff like that, and nobody's going to study oil painting! You don't do it to feed yourself. So she's like, "Why don't you come back to Nagasaki and become an art teacher?' She's planning to be an English teacher." "You're not so crazy about her any more, are you?" "That just about sums it up," Itoh admitted. "And who on earth wants to be an art teacher? I'm not gonna spend my whole fuckin' life teaching teenaged monkeys how to draw!" "That's beside the point," I said. "Don't you think you ought to break up with her? For both your sakes." "Sure I do. But I don't know how to say it to her. She's planning to spend her life with me. How the hell can I say, "Hey, we ought to split up. I don't like you any more'?" We drank our Chivas straight, without ice, and when we ran out of smelts we cut up some cucumbers and celery and dipped them in miso. When my teeth crunched down on my cucumber slices, I thought of Midori's father, which reminded me how flat and tasteless my life had become without Midori and this put me in a foul mood. Without my being aware of it, she had become a huge presence inside me. "Got a girlfriend?" asked Itoh. "Yeah," I said, then, after a pause added, "but I can't be with her at the moment." "But you understand each other's feelings, right?" "I like to think so. Otherwise, what's the point?" I said with a chuckle. Itoh talked in hushed tones about the greatness of Mozart. He knew Mozart inside out, the way a country boy knows his mountain trails. His father loved the music and had exposed him to it ever since he was tiny. I didn't know so much about classical music, but listening to this Mozart concerto with Itoh's smart and heartfelt commentary ("There - that part," "How about that?"), I felt myself calming down for the first time in ages. We stared at the crescent moon hanging over Inokashira Park and drank our Chivas Regal to the last drop. Fantastic whisky. Itoh said I could spend the night there, but I told him I had to do something, thanked him for the whisky and left his flat before nine. On the way back to my place I called Midori from a phone box. Much to my surprise she actually answered. "Sorry," she said, "but I don't want to talk to you right now." "I know, I know. But I don't want our relationship to end like this. You're one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least." "When I feel like talking to you," she said. "How are you?" I asked. "Fine," she said, and hung up. A letter came from Reiko in the middle of May. Thanks for writing so often. Naoko enjoys your letters. And so do I. You don't mind if I read them, do you? Sorry I haven't been able to answer for such a long time. To tell you the truth, I've been feeling a bit exhausted, and there hasn't been much good news to report. Naoko's not doing well. Her mother came from Kobe the other day. The four of us - she and Naoko and the doctor and I - had a good, long talk and we reached the conclusion that Naoko should move to a real hospital for a while for some intensive treatment and then maybe come back here depending on the results. Naoko says she'd like to stay here if possible and make herself well, and I know I am going to miss her and worry about her, but the fact is that it's getting harder and harder to keep her under control here. She's fine most of the time, but sometimes her emotions become extremely unstable, and when that happens we can't take our eyes off her. There's no telling what she would do. When she has those intense episodes of hearing voices, she shuts down completely and burrows inside herself. Which is why I myself agree that the best thing for Na

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