Norwegian Wood

  The gatekeeper remembered my name and marked it on the list of visitors when I went out. “I see you’re from Tokyo,” the old fellow said. “I went there once. Just once. They serve great pork.”

  “They do?” I asked, uncertain how to answer him.

  “I didn’t like much of what I ate in Tokyo, but the pork was delicious. I guess they’ve got some special way of raisin’ ’em, eh?”

  I said I didn’t know, it was the first time I’d heard of it. “When was that, by the way, when you went to Tokyo?”

  “Hmm, let’s see,” he said, cocking his head, “was it the time His Majesty the crown prince got married? My son was in Tokyo and said I ought to see the place at least once. That time. Nineteen fifty-nine.”

  “Oh, well then, sure, pork must have been good in Tokyo back then,” I said.

  “How about these days?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure, I said, but I hadn’t heard anything special about it. This seemed to disappoint him somewhat. He gave every sign of wanting to continue our conversation, but I told him I had to catch a bus and started walking in the direction of the road. Patches of fog remained floating on the road where it skirted the stream, but the breeze carried them over to the steep flanks of a nearby mountain. Every now and then as I walked along I would stop and turn and heave a sigh for no particular reason. I felt almost as if I had come to a planet where the gravity was a little different. Yes, of course, I told myself, feeling sad: I was in the outside world now.

  BACK AT THE DORM BY FOUR-THIRTY, I changed right away and left for the record shop in Shinjuku to put in my hours. I minded the store from six o’clock to ten-thirty and sold a few records, but mainly I sat there in a daze, watching the incredible variety of people streaming by outside. There were families and couples and drunks and gangsters and lively looking girls in short skirts and bearded hippies and bar hostesses and some indefinable types. Whenever I put on hard rock, hippies and runaway kids would gather outside to dance and sniff paint thinner or just sit on the ground doing nothing in particular, and when I put on Tony Bennett, they would disappear.

  Next door was a shop where a middle-aged, sleepy-eyed guy sold “adult toys.” I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want the kind of sex paraphernalia he had there, but he seemed to do a lot of business. In the alley diagonally across from the record store I saw a drunken student vomiting. In the games center across from us at another angle, the cook from a local eatery was killing his break time with a game of bingo that took cash bets. Beneath the eaves of a shop that had closed for the night, a dark-faced homeless guy was crouching, motionless. A girl with pale pink lipstick who couldn’t have been more than junior-high school age came in and asked me to play the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” When I found the disk and put it on for her, she started snapping her fingers to the rhythm and shaking her hips as she danced around the shop. Then she asked me for a cigarette. I gave her one of the manager’s, which she smoked with obvious pleasure, and when the record ended she left the shop without so much as a “thank you.” Every fifteen minutes or so I would hear the siren of an ambulance or cop car. Three drunken company employees in suits and ties came by, laughing at the tops of their voices every time they yelled “Piece of ass!” at a pretty, long-haired girl in a telephone booth.

  The more I watched, the more mixed-up my head became. What the hell was this all about? I wondered. What could it possibly mean?

  The manager came back from dinner and said to me, “Hey, know what, Watanabe? Night before last I made it with the boutique chick.” For some time now he had had his eye on the girl who worked in a nearby boutique, and every once in a while he would take a record from the shop as a gift for her.

  “Good for you,” I said to him, whereupon he told me every last detail of his conquest.

  “lf ya really wanna make a chick, here’s what ya gotta do,” he began, very pleased with himself. “First, ya gotta give ’er presents. Then ya gotta get ’er drunk. I mean really drunk. Then ya just gotta do it. It’s easy. See what I mean?”

  Head mixed up as ever, I boarded the commuter train and went back to my dorm. Closing the curtains, I doused the lights, stretched out in bed, and felt as if Naoko might come crawling in beside me at any moment. With my eyes closed, I could feel the soft swell of her breasts on my chest, hear her whispering to me, and feel the outline of her body in my hands. In the darkness, I returned to that small world of hers. I smelled the meadow grass, heard the rain at night. I thought of her naked, as I had seen her in the moonlight, and pictured her cleaning the birdhouse and caring for the vegetables with that soft, beautiful body of hers wrapped in the yellow rain cape. Clutching my erection, I thought of Naoko until I came. This seemed to clear my brain somewhat, but it didn’t help me sleep. I felt exhausted, even desperate for sleep, but it simply refused to cooperate.

  I got out of bed and stood at the window, my unfocused eyes wandering out toward the flagpole. Without the national flag attached to it, the pole looked like a gigantic white bone thrusting up into the darkness of night. What was Naoko doing now? I wondered. Of course, she must be sleeping, sleeping deeply, wrapped in the darkness of that strange little world of hers. Let her be spared from anguished dreams, I found myself hoping.

  IN P.E. CLASS THE NEXT MORNING, THURSDAY, I SWAM SEVERAL lengths of the fifty-meter pool. The hard exercise cleared my head somewhat and gave me an appetite. After downing a good-size lunch at a student eatery known for its good-size lunches, I was headed for the literature department library to do some research when I bumped into Midori Kobayashi. She had someone with her, a petite girl with glasses, but when she spotted me, she approached me alone.

  “Where you going?” she asked.

  “Lit Library,” I said.

  “Why don’t you forget it and come have lunch with me?”

  “I already ate.”

  “So what? Eat again.”

  We ended up going to a nearby café where she had a plate of curry and I had a cup of coffee. She wore a white long-sleeved shirt under a yellow woollen vest with a fish knitted into the design, a narrow gold necklace, and a Disney watch. She seemed to love the curry and drank three glasses of water with it.

  “Where’ve you been all this time?” Midori asked. “I don’t know how many times I called.”

  “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Nothing special. I just called.”

  “I see.”

  “You see what?”

  “Nothing. Just ‘I see,’” I said. “Any fires lately?”

  “That was fun, wasn’t it? It didn’t do much damage, but all that smoke made it kind of like reality. Great stuff.” Midori chugged down another glass of water, took a breath, and studied my face for a while. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” she asked. “You’ve got this spaced-out look. Your eyes aren’t focused.”

  “I’m O.K.,” I said. “I just got back from a trip and I’m kinda tired.”

  “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “I see.”

  “Hey, do you have classes this afternoon?”

  “German and religion.”

  “Can you skip ’em?”

  “Not German. I’ve got a test today.”

  “When’s it over?”

  “Two.”

  “O.K. How about going into the city with me after that for some drinks?”

  “Drinks at two o’clock in the afternoon?!”

  “For a change, why not? You look so spaced. C’mon, go drinking with me and get a little life into you. That’s what I want to do—drink with you and get some life into myself. Whaddya say?”

  “O.K., let’s go,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll look for you in the lit quad at two.”

  AFTER GERMAN we caught a bus to Shinjuku and went to an underground bar called DUG behind the Kinokuniya bookstore. We each started with two vodka and tonics.

  “I come here once in a while,” she said. “They don’t embarrass
you about drinking in the afternoon.”

  “Do you drink in the afternoon a lot?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, rattling the ice in her glass. “Sometimes, when the world gets hard to live in, I come here for a vodka and tonic.”

  “Does the world get hard to live in?”

  “Sometimes,” said Midori. “I’ve got my own special little problems.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like family, like boyfriends, like irregular periods. Stuff.”

  “So have another drink.”

  “I will.”

  I waved the waiter over and ordered two more vodka and tonics.

  “Remember how, when you came over that Sunday, you kissed me?” Midori asked. “I’ve been thinking about it. That was nice. Really nice.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “‘That’s nice,’” she mimicked me. “The way you talk is so weird!”

  “It is?”

  “Anyhow, I was thinking, that time. I was thinking how great it would be if that had been the first time in my life a boy had kissed me. If I could switch around the order of my life, I would absolutely absolutely make that my first kiss. And then I would live the rest of my life thinking stuff like, Hey, I wonder whatever happened to that boy named Watanabe I gave my first kiss to on the laundry deck, now that he’s fifty-eight? Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Yeah, really,” I said, cracking open a pistachio nut.

  “Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven’t answered me.”

  “I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world,” I said after giving it some thought. “I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.”

  Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. “There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I’m pretty sure.”

  “‘People are strange when you’re a stranger.’”

  “Peace,” said Midori.

  “Peace,” I said.

  “You really ought to go to Uruguay with me,” Midori said, still leaning on the bar. “Girlfriend, family, school—just dump ’em all.”

  “Not a bad idea,” I said, laughing.

  “Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go someplace where you don’t know a soul? Sometimes I feel like doing that. I really really want to do it sometimes. So, like, say you whisked me away somewhere far far away. I’d make a pile of babies for you as tough as little bulls. And we’d all live happily ever after, rolling on the floor.”

  I laughed and drank down my third vodka and tonic.

  “I guess you don’t really want a pile of babies as tough as little bulls yet,” said Midori.

  “I’m tremendously interested,” I said. “I’d like to see what they look like.”

  “That’s O.K., you don’t have to want them,” said Midori, eating a pistachio. “Here I am, drinking in the afternoon, saying whatever pops into my head: ‘I wanna dump everything ’n’ run off somewhere.’ What’s the point of going to Uruguay? All they’ve got there is donkey shit.”

  “You may be right.”

  “Donkey shit everywhere. Here a shit, there a shit, the whole world is donkey shit. Hey, I can’t open this. You take it.” Midori handed me a pistachio with an uncracked shell. I struggled with it until I got it open. “But oh, gee, what a relief it was last Sunday! Going up to the laundry deck with you, watching the fire, drinking beer, singing songs. I don’t know how long it’s been since I had such a total sense of relief. People are always trying to force stuff on me. The minute they see me they start telling me what to do. At least you don’t try to force stuff on me.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to force stuff on you.”

  “You mean, if you knew me better, you’d force stuff on me like everybody else?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “That’s how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.”

  “You wouldn’t do that. I can tell. I’m an expert when it comes to forcing stuff and having stuff forced on you. You’re just not that type. That’s why I can relax with you. Do you have any idea how many people there are in the world who like to force stuff on people and have stuff forced on them? Tons! And then they make a big fuss, like, ‘I forced her,’ ‘You forced me’! That’s what they like. But I don’t like it. I just do it ’cause I have to.”

  “What kind of stuff do you force on people or do they force on you?”

  Midori put a piece of ice in her mouth and sucked on it for a while.

  “Do you want to get to know me better?” she asked.

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Hey, look, I just asked you, ‘Do you want to get to know me better?’ What the hell kind of answer is that?”

  “Yes, Midori, I would like to get to know you better,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Even if you had to turn your eyes away from what you saw?”

  “Are you that bad?”

  “Well, in a way,” Midori said with a frown. “I want another drink.”

  I called the waiter and ordered a fourth round of drinks. Until they came, Midori cupped her chin in her hand with her elbow on the bar. I kept quiet and listened to Thelonious Monk playing “Honeysuckle Rose.” There were five or six other customers in the place, but we were the only ones drinking alcohol. The rich smell of coffee gave the gloomy interior an intimate atmosphere.

  “Are you free this Sunday?” Midori asked.

  “I think I told you before, I’m always free on Sunday. Until I go to work at six.”

  “O.K., then, this Sunday, will you hang out with me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’ll pick you up at your dorm Sunday morning. I’m not sure exactly what time, though. Is that O.K.?”

  “Fine,” I said. “No problem.”

  “Now, let me ask you: do you have any idea what I would like to do right now?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, first of all, I want to lie down on a big, wide, fluffy bed. I want to get all comfy and drunk and not have any donkey shit anywhere nearby, and I want to have you lying down next to me. And then, little by little, you take my clothes off. Sooo tenderly. The way a mother takes a little child’s clothing off. Sooo softly.”

  “Hmmm …”

  “And I’m just spacing out and feeling really nice until, all of a sudden, I realize what’s happening and I yell at you, ‘Stop it, Watanabe!’ And then I say, ‘I really like you, Watanabe, but I’m seeing someone else. I can’t do this. I’m very proper about these things, believe it or not, so please stop.’ But you don’t stop.”

  “But I would stop,” I said.

  “I know that. Never mind, this is just my fantasy,” said Midori. “So then you show it to me. Your thing. Sticking way up. I immediately cover my eyes, of course, but I can’t help seeing it for a split second. And I say, ‘Stop it! Don’t do that! I don’t want anything so big and hard!’”

  “It’s not so big. Just ordinary.”

  “Never mind, this is a fantasy. So then you put on this really sad face, and I feel sorry for you and try to comfort you. ‘There there, poor thing.’”

  “And you’re telling me that’s what you want to do now?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  ———

  WE LEFT THE BAR after five rounds of vodka and tonic. When I tried to pay, Midori slapped my hand and paid with a brand-new ten-thousand-yen bill she took from her purse.

  “It’s O.K.,” she said. “I just got paid, and I invited you. Of course, if you’re a card-carrying fascist and you refuse to let a woman buy you a drink …”

  “No no, I’m O.K.”

  “And I didn’t let you put it in, either.”

  “Because it’s so big and hard,” I said.

  “Right,” said Midori. “Because it’s so big
and hard.”

  A little drunk, Midori missed one step, and we almost fell back down the stairs. The layer of clouds that had darkened the sky before was gone now, and the late-afternoon sun poured its gentle light on the city streets. Midori and I strolled those streets for a time. Midori said she wanted to climb a tree, but unfortunately there were no climbable trees in Shinjuku, and the Shinjuku Imperial Gardens were closing.

  “Too bad,” said Midori. “I love to climb trees.”

  We continued walking and window-shopping, and soon the street scene seemed realer to me than it had before.

  “I’m glad I ran into you,” I said. “I think I’m a little more adapted to the world now.”

  Midori stopped short and peered at me. “It’s true,” she said. “Your eyes are much more in focus than they were. See? Hanging out with me does you good.”

  “No doubt about it,” I said.

  At five-thirty Midori said she had to go home and make dinner. I said I would take a bus back to my dorm, and I saw her as far as the station.

  “Know what I want to do now?” Midori asked me as she was leaving.

  “I have absolutely no idea what you could be thinking,” I said.

  “I want you and me to be captured by pirates. Then they strip us and press us together face to face all naked and wind these ropes around us.”

  “Why would they do a thing like that?”

  “Perverted pirates,” she said.

  “You’re the perverted one,” I said.

  “So then they lock us in the hold and say. ‘In one hour, we’re gonna throw you into the sea, so have a good time until then.’”

  “And …?”

  “And so we enjoy ourselves for an hour, rolling all over the place and twisting our bodies.”