Norwegian Wood

  I said I liked her wrinkles a lot. She thanked me.

  “But don’t ever tell another woman that you find her wrinkles attractive,” she added. “I like to hear it, but I’m the exception.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  She slipped a wallet from her pants pocket and handed me a photo from the card holder. It was a color snapshot of a cute girl around ten years old wearing skis and brightly colored ski clothes and standing on the snow with a sweet smile for the camera.

  “Don’t you think she’s pretty? My daughter,” said Reiko. “She sent me this in January. She’s in—what?—fourth grade now.”

  “She’s got your smile,” I said, returning the photo. Reiko put the wallet back into her pocket and, with a sniff, put a cigarette between her lips and lit up.

  “I was going to be a concert pianist,” she said. “I had talent, and people recognized it and made a fuss over me while I was growing up. I won competitions and had top grades in the conservatory, and I was set to study in Germany after graduation. Not a cloud on the horizon. Everything worked out perfectly, and when it didn’t there was always somebody to fix it. But then one day something happened, and it all blew apart. I was in my senior year at the conservatory and there was a fairly important competition coming up. I practiced for it constantly, but all of a sudden the little finger of my left hand stopped moving. I don’t know why, it just did. I tried massaging it, soaking it in hot water, taking off from practice for a few days: nothing worked. So then I got scared and went to the doctor’s. They tried all kinds of tests but they couldn’t come up with anything. There was nothing wrong with the finger itself, and the nerves were O.K., they said: there was no reason it should stop moving. The problem must be psychological. So I went to a psychiatrist, but he didn’t really know what was going on, either. Probably precompetition stress, he figured, and told me to get away from the piano for a while.”

  Reiko inhaled deeply and let the smoke out. Then she bent her neck to the side a few times.

  “So I went to recuperate at my grandmother’s place on the coast in Izu. I figured I’d forget about that particular competition and really relax, spend a couple of weeks away from the piano doing anything I wanted. But it was hopeless. Piano was all I could think about. Maybe my finger would never move again. How would I live if that happened? The same thoughts kept going round and round in my brain. And no wonder: piano had been my whole life up to that point. I had started playing when I was four and grew up thinking about the piano and nothing else. I never did housework to make sure I wouldn’t injure my fingers. People paid attention to me for that one thing: my talent at the piano. Take the piano away from a girl who’s grown up like that, and what’s left? So then, snap! My mind became a complete jumble. Total darkness.”

  She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stamped it out, and then she bent her neck a few times again.

  “That was the end of my dream of becoming a concert pianist. I spent two months in the hospital. My finger started to move shortly after I went in, so I was able to return to the conservatory and graduate, but something inside me had vanished. Some jewel of energy or something had disappeared—evaporated—from inside my body. The doctor said I lacked the mental strength to become a professional pianist and advised me to abandon the idea. So after graduating I took pupils and taught them at home. But the pain I felt was excruciating. It was as if my life had ended. Here I was in my early twenties and the best part of my life had ended. Do you see how terrible that would be? I had had my hands on such potential, and I woke up one day and all of it was gone. No one would applaud me, no one would make a big fuss over me, no one would tell me how wonderful I was. I spent day after day in the house teaching neighborhood children Beyer exercises and sonatinas. I felt so miserable, I cried all the time. To think what I had missed! I would hear about people who were far less talented than I was taking second place in a competition or holding a recital in such-and-such a hall, and the tears would pour out of me.

  “My parents walked around me on tiptoe, afraid of hurting me. But I knew how disappointed they were. All of a sudden the daughter they had been so proud of was a returnee from a mental hospital. They couldn’t even marry me off. When you’re living with people, you sense what they’re feeling, and I hated it. I was afraid to go out, afraid the neighbors were talking about me. So then, snap! It happened again—the jumble, the darkness. It happened when I was twenty-four, and this time I spent seven months in a sanatorium. Not this place: a regular insane asylum with high walls and locked gates. A filthy place without pianos. I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I knew was I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could, so I struggled desperately to get better. Seven months: a long seven months. That’s when my wrinkles got started.”

  Reiko smiled, stretching her lips from side to side.

  “I hadn’t been out of the hospital for long when I met a man and got married. He was a year younger than me, an engineer who worked in an airplane manufacturing company, and one of my pupils. A nice man. He didn’t say a lot, but he was warm and sincere. He had been taking lessons from me for six months when all of a sudden he asked me to marry him. Just like that—one day when we were having tea after his lesson. Can you believe it? We had never dated or held hands. He took me totally off guard. I told him I couldn’t get married. I said I liked him and thought he was a nice person but that, for certain reasons, I couldn’t marry him. He wanted to know what those reasons were, so I explained everything to him with complete honesty—that I had been hospitalized twice for mental breakdowns. I told him everything—what the cause had been, my condition, and the possibility that it could happen again. He said he needed time to think, and I encouraged him to take all the time he needed. But when he came for his lesson a week later, he said he still wanted to marry me. I asked him to wait three months. We would see each other for three months, I said, and if he still wanted to marry me at that point, we would talk about it again.

  “We dated once a week for three months. We went everywhere, and talked about everything, and I got to like him a lot. When I was with him, I felt as if my life had finally come back to me. It gave me a wonderful sense of relief to be alone with him: I could forget all those terrible things that had happened. So what if I hadn’t been able to become a concert pianist? So what if I had spent time in mental hospitals? My life hadn’t ended. Life was still full of wonderful things I hadn’t experienced. If only for having made me feel that way, I felt tremendously grateful to him. After three months went by, he asked me again to marry him. And this is what I said to him: ‘If you want to sleep with me, I don’t mind. I’ve never slept with anybody, and I’m very fond of you, so if you want to make love to me, I don’t mind at all. But marrying me is a whole different matter. If you marry me, you take on all my troubles, and they’re a lot worse than you can imagine.’

  “He said he didn’t care, that he didn’t just want to sleep with me, he wanted to marry me, to share everything I had inside me. And he meant it. He was the kind of person who would only say what he really meant, and do anything he said. So I agreed to marry him. It was all I could do. We got married, let’s see, four months later, I think it was. He fought with his parents over me, and they disowned him. He was from an old family that lived in a rural part of Shikoku. They had my background investigated and found out that I had been hospitalized twice. No wonder they opposed the marriage. So, anyhow, we didn’t have a wedding ceremony. We just went to the ward office and registered our marriage and took a trip to Hakone for two nights. That was plenty for us: we were happy. And finally, I remained a virgin until the day I married. I was twenty-five years old! Can you believe it?”

  Reiko sighed and picked up the basketball again.

  “I figured that as long as I was with him, I would be all right,” she went on. “As long as I was with him, my troubles would stay away. That’s the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this person
’s hands, I’ll be O.K. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit—if a screw comes loose—he’ll notice right away, and with tremendous care and patience he’ll fix it, he’ll tighten the screw again, put all the jumbled threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away. No more snap! I was so happy! Life was so great! I felt as if someone had pulled me out of a cold, raging sea and wrapped me in a blanket and laid me in a warm bed. I had a baby two years after we were married, and then my hands were really full! I practically forgot about my sickness. I’d get up in the morning and do the housework and take care of the baby and feed my husband when he came home from work. It was the same thing day after day, but I was happy. It was probably the happiest time of my life. How many years did it last, I wonder? At least until I was thirty-one. And then, all of a sudden, snap! It happened again. I fell apart.”

  Reiko lit a cigarette. The wind had died down. The smoke rose straight up and disappeared into the darkness of night. Just then I realized that the sky was filled with stars.

  “Something happened?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “something very strange, as if a trap had been set for me. Even now, it gives me a chill just to think about it.” Reiko rubbed a temple with her free hand. “I’m sorry, though, making you listen to all this talk about me. You came here to see Naoko, not listen to my story.”

  “I’d really like to hear it, though,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear the rest.”

  “Well,” Reiko began, “when our daughter entered kindergarten, I started playing again, little by little. Not for anyone else, but for myself. I started with short pieces by Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti. After such a long blank period, of course, my feel for the music didn’t come back right away. And my fingers wouldn’t move the way they used to. But I was thrilled to be playing the piano again. With my hands on the keys, I realized how much I had loved music—and how much I had hungered for it. To be able to perform music for yourself is a wonderful thing.

  “As I said before, I had been playing from the time I was four years old, but it occurred to me that I had never once played for myself. I had always been trying to pass a test or practice an assignment or impress somebody. Those are all important things, of course, if you are going to master an instrument. But after a certain age you have to start performing for yourself. That’s what music is. I had to drop out of the elite course and pass my thirty-first birthday before I was finally able to see that. I would send my child off to kindergarten and hurry through the housework, then take an hour or two playing music I liked. So far so good, right?”

  I nodded in affirmation.

  “Then one day I had a visit from one of the ladies of the neighborhood, someone I at least knew well enough to say hello to on the street, asking me to give her daughter piano lessons. I didn’t know about the daughter—though we lived in the same general ‘neighborhood’ our houses were still pretty far apart—but according to the woman, her daughter used to pass my house and loved to hear me play. She had seen me at some point, too, and now she was pestering her mother to get me to teach her. She was in her second year of middle school and had taken lessons from a number of people, but things had not gone well for one reason or another and now she had no teacher.

  “I turned her down. I had had that blank of several years, and while it might have made sense for me to take on an absolute beginner, it would have been impossible for me to pick up with someone who had had lessons for a number of years. Besides, I was too busy taking care of my own child. And though I didn’t say this to the woman, nobody can deal with the kind of child who changes teachers constantly. So then the woman asked me to at least do her daughter the favor of meeting her once. This was a fairly pushy lady and I could see she was not going to let me off the hook easily, so I agreed to meet the girl—but just meet her. Three days later the girl came to the house by herself. She was an absolute angel, with a kind of pure, sweet, transparent beauty. I had never—and have never—seen such a beautiful little girl. She had long, shiny hair as black as freshly ground India ink, slim, graceful arms and legs, bright eyes, and a soft little mouth that looked as if someone had just made it. I couldn’t speak when I first saw her, she was so beautiful. Sitting on my couch, she turned my living room into a gorgeous parlor. It hurt to look straight at her: I had to squint. So, anyhow, that’s what she was like. I can still picture her clearly.”

  Reiko narrowed her eyes as if she were actually picturing the girl.

  “Over coffee we talked for a whole hour—talked about all kinds of things: music, her school, just everything. I could see right off she was a smart one. She knew how to hold a conversation: she had clear, sharp opinions and a natural gift for captivating the other person. Frighteningly so. Exactly what it was that made her frightening, I couldn’t tell at the time. It just struck me how frighteningly intelligent she was. But in her presence I lost any normal powers of judgment I might have had. She was so young and beautiful, I felt overwhelmed to the point of seeing myself as an inferior specimen, a clumsy excuse for a human being who could only have negative thoughts about her because of my own warped and filthy mind.”

  Reiko shook her head several times.

  “If I were as pretty and smart as she was, I’d have been a more normal human being. What more could you want if you were that smart and that beautiful? Why would you have to torment and walk all over your weaker inferiors if everybody loved you so much? What reason could there possibly be for acting that way?”

  “Did she do something terrible to you?”

  “Well, let me just say the girl was a pathological liar. She was sick, pure and simple. She made up everything. And while she was making up her stories, she would come to believe them. And then she would change things around her to fit her story. She had such a quick mind, she could always keep a step ahead of you and take care of things that would ordinarily strike you as odd, so it would never cross your mind that she was lying. First of all, no one would ever suspect that such a pretty little girl would lie about the most ordinary things. I certainly didn’t. She told me tons of lies for six months before I had the slightest inkling that anything was wrong. She lied about everything, and I never suspected. I know it sounds crazy.”

  “What did she lie about?”

  “When I say everything, I mean everything.” Reiko gave a sarcastic laugh. “When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. Mythomania is the word for it. When the usual mythomaniac tells lies, they’re usually the innocent kind, and most people notice. But not with that girl. To protect herself, she’d tell hurtful lies without batting an eyelash. She’d use everything she could get her hands on. And she would lie either more or less, depending on who she was talking to. To her mother or close friends who would know right away, she hardly ever lied, or if she had to tell one, she’d be really, really careful to tell lies that wouldn’t come out. Or if they did come out, she’d find an excuse or apologize in that clingy voice of hers with tears pouring out of her beautiful eyes. No one could stay mad at her then.

  “I still don’t know why she chose me. Was I another victim to her, or a source of salvation? I just don’t know. Of course, it hardly matters now. Now that everything is over. Now that I’m like this.”

  A short silence followed.

  “She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me on the street a few times, too, and begun to worship me. She actually used that word: worship. It made me turn bright red. I mean, to be ‘worshiped’ by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don’t think it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course, and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me, something that was missing in her, I would guess. Which must have been what got her interested in me to begin with. I believe that now, looking ba
ck. And I’m not boasting.”

  “No, I think I know what you mean.”

  “She had brought some music with her and asked if she could play for me. So I let her. It was a Bach Invention. Her performance was … interesting. Or should I say strange? It just wasn’t ordinary. Of course it wasn’t polished. She hadn’t been going to a professional school, and what lessons she had taken had been an on-and-off kind of thing; she was very much self-taught. Her sound was untrained. She’d have been rejected immediately if this had been a music school audition. But she made it work. Ninety percent was just terrible, but the other ten percent was there—she made it sing: it was music. And this was a Bach Invention! So I got interested in her. I wanted to know what she was all about.

  “Needless to say, the world is full of kids who can play Bach way better than she could. Twenty times better. But most of their performances would have nothing to them. They’d be hollow, empty. This girl’s technique was bad, but she had that little bit of something that could draw people—or draw me, at least—into her performance. So I decided it might be worthwhile to teach her. Of course, retraining her at that point to where she could become a pro was out of the question. But I felt it might be possible to make her into the kind of happy pianist I was then—and still am—someone who could enjoy making music for herself. This turned out to be an empty hope, though. She was not the kind of person who quietly goes about doing things for herself. This was a child who would make detailed calculations to use every means at her disposal to impress other people. She knew exactly what she had to do to make people admire and praise her. And she knew exactly what kind of performance it would take to draw me in. She had calculated everything, I’m sure, and put everything she had into practicing the most important passages over and over again for my benefit. I can see her doing it.

  “Still, even now, after all this came clear to me, I believe it was a wonderful performance, and I would feel the same chills down my spine if I could hear it again. Knowing all I know about her flaws, her cunning and lies, I would still feel it. I’m telling you, there are such things in this world.”