Norwegian Wood

  “How are you feeling, Daddy?” said Midori, speaking into her father’s ear as if testing a microphone. “How are you today?”

  Her father moved his lips. , he said, not so much speaking the words as forming them from dried air at the back of his throat. , he said.

  “You have a headache?” Midori asked.

  , he said, seemingly incapable of pronouncing more than a syllable or two at a time.

  “Well, no wonder,” she said. “You’ve just had your head cut open. Of course it hurts. Too bad, but try to stand it a little more. This is my friend Watanabe.”

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. Midori’s father opened his lips partway, then closed them again.

  Midori gestured toward a vinyl stool near the foot of the bed and suggested that I sit. I did as I was told. Midori gave her father a drink of water and asked if he’d like a piece of fruit or some jelled fruit dessert. , he said, and when Midori insisted that he had to eat something, he said, .

  A night table stood near the head of the bed, holding a water bottle, a glass, a dish, and a small clock. From a large paper bag under the table, Midori took some fresh pajamas, underwear, and other things, straightened them out, and put them into the locker that stood by the door. Food for the patient lay in the bottom of the bag: two grapefruits, fruit jelly, and three cucumbers.

  “Cucumbers?! What are these doing in here?” Midori asked. “I can’t imagine what my sister was thinking. I told her on the phone exactly what I wanted her to buy, and I’m sure I never mentioned cucumbers! She was supposed to bring kiwifruit.”

  “Maybe she misunderstood you,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe, but if she had thought about it she would have realized that cucumbers couldn’t be right. I mean, what’s a hospital patient supposed to do? Sit in bed chewing on raw cucumbers? Hey, Daddy, want a cucumber?”

  , said Midori’s father.

  Midori sat by the head of the bed, telling her father bits and pieces of news from home. The TV picture had gone bad and she’d called the repairman; their aunt from Takaido had said she would come to visit in a few days; the druggist, Mr. Miyawaki, had fallen off his bike: stuff like that. Her father responded with grunts.

  “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

  , her father answered.

  “How about you, Watanabe? Some grapefruit?”

  “No,” I answered.

  A few minutes later, Midori took me to the TV room and smoked a cigarette on the sofa. Three patients in pajamas were also smoking there and watching some kind of political discussion show.

  “Hey,” whispered Midori with a twinkle in her eye. “That old guy with the crutches has been looking at my legs ever since we came in here. The one with glasses in the blue pajamas.”

  “What do you expect, wearing a skirt like that?”

  “It’s nice, though. I bet they’re all bored. It probably does them good. Maybe the excitement helps them get well faster.”

  “As long as it doesn’t have the opposite effect, I suppose.”

  Midori stared at the smoke rising straight up from her cigarette.

  “You know,” she said, “my father’s not such a bad guy. I get mad at him sometimes because he says terrible things, but deep down he’s honest and he really loved my mother. In his own way, he’s lived life with all the intensity he could muster. He’s a little weak, maybe, and he has absolutely no head for business, and people don’t like him very much, but he’s a hell of a lot better than the cheats and liars who go around smoothing things over ’cause they’re so slick. I’m as bad as he is about not backing down once I’ve said something, so we fight a lot, but really, he’s not a bad guy.”

  Midori took my hand, as if she were picking up something someone had dropped in the street, and placed it on her lap. Half my hand lay atop the cloth of her skirt, while the other half was touching her thigh. She looked into my eyes for a while.

  “Sorry to bring you to a place like this,” she said, “but would you mind staying with me a little longer?”

  “I’ll stay with you all day if you want,” I said. “Until five. I like spending time with you, and I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “How do you usually spend your Sundays?”

  “Doing laundry,” I said. “And ironing.”

  “I guess you don’t want to tell me too much about her … your girlfriend?”

  “No, I guess not. It’s complicated, and I, kind of, don’t think I could explain it very well.”

  “That’s O.K. You don’t have to explain anything,” said Midori. “But do you mind if I tell you what I imagine is going on?”

  “No, go ahead. I suspect anything you’d imagine would have to be interesting.”

  “I think she’s a married woman.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, she’s thirty-two or-three and she’s rich and beautiful and she wears fur coats and Charles Jourdan shoes and silk underwear and she’s hungry for sex and she likes to do really yucky things. The two of you meet on weekday afternoons and devour each other’s bodies. But her husband’s home on Sundays, so she can’t see you. Am I right?”

  “Very, very interesting.”

  “She has you tie her up and blindfold her and lick every square inch of her body. Then she makes you put weird things inside her and she gets into these incredible positions like a contortionist and you take pictures of her with a Polaroid camera.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “She’s dying for it all the time, so she does everything she can think of. And she thinks about it every day. She’s got nothing but free time, so she’s always planning: Hmm, next time Watanabe comes, we’ll do this, or we’ll do that. You get in bed and she goes crazy, trying all these positions and coming three times in every one. And she says to you. ‘Don’t I have a sensational body? You can’t be satisfied with young girls anymore. Young girls won’t do this for you, will they? Or this. Feel good? But don’t come yet!’”

  “You’ve been seeing too many porno flicks,” I said with a laugh.

  “You think so? I was kinda worried about that. But I love porno flicks. Take me to one next time, O.K.?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Next time you’re free.”

  “Really? I can hardly wait. Let’s go to a real S and M one, with whips and, like, they make the girl pee in front of everybody. That’s my favorite.”

  “We’ll do it.”

  “You know what I like best about porno theaters?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “Whenever a sex scene starts, you can hear this ‘Gulp!’ sound when everybody swallows all at once,” said Midori. “I love that ‘Gulp!’ It’s so sweet!”

  BACK IN THE HOSPITAL ROOM, Midori aimed a stream of talk at her father again, and he would either grunt in response or say nothing. Around eleven the wife of the man in the other bed came to change her husband’s pajamas and peel fruit for him and such. She had a round face and seemed like a nice person, and she and Midori shared a lot of small talk. A nurse showed up with a new intravenous feeding bottle and talked a little while with Midori and the wife before she left. I let my eyes wander around the room and out the window to the power lines. Sparrows would show up every now and then and perch on the lines. Midori talked to her father and wiped the sweat from his brow and let him spit phlegm into a tissue and chatted with the neighbor’s wife and the nurse and sent an occasional remark my way and checked the intravenous contraption.

  The doctor came on rounds at eleven-thirty, so Midori and I stepped outside to wait in the corridor. When he came out, Midori asked him how her father was doing.

  “Well, he’s just come out of surgery, and we’ve got him on painkillers so, well, he’s pretty drained,” said the doctor. “I’ll need another two or three days to evaluate the results of the operation. If it went well, he’ll be O.K., and if it didn’t, we’ll have to make some decisions at that point.”

  “You’
re not going to open his head up again, are you?”

  “I really can’t say until the time comes,” said the doctor. “Wow, that’s some short skirt you’re wearing!”

  “Nice, huh?”

  “What do you do on stairways?” the doctor asked.

  “Nothing special. I let it all hang out,” said Midori. The nurse chuckled behind the doctor.

  “Incredible. You ought to come and let us open your head one of these days to see what’s going on in there. Do me a favor and use the elevators while you’re in the hospital. I can’t afford to have any more patients. I’m way too busy as it is.”

  Soon after the doctor’s rounds it was lunchtime. A nurse pushing a cart loaded with meals was circulating from room to room. Midori’s father was given potage, fruit, boiled deboned fish, and vegetables that had been ground into some kind of jelly. Midori turned him on his back and raised him up using the crank at the foot of the bed. She fed him the soup with a spoon. After five or six swallows, he turned his face aside and said, .

  “You’ve got to eat at least this much,” Midori said.

  , he said.

  “You’re hopeless—if you don’t eat properly, you’ll never get your strength back,” she said. “Don’t you have to pee yet?”

  , he said.

  “Hey, Watanabe, let’s go down to the cafeteria.”

  I agreed to go, but in fact I didn’t feel much like eating. The cafeteria was crammed with doctors and nurses and visitors. Long lines of chairs and tables filled the huge, windowless underground cavern where every mouth seemed to be eating and talking—about sickness, no doubt, the voices echoing and reechoing as in a tunnel. Now and then the P. A. system would break through the reverberation with calls for a doctor or nurse. While I laid claim to a table, Midori bought two set meals and carried them over on an aluminum tray. Croquettes with cream sauce, potato salad, shredded cabbage, boiled vegetables, rice, and miso soup: these were lined up in the tray in the same white plastic dishes they used for patients. I ate about half of mine and left the rest. Midori seemed to enjoy her meal to the last mouthful.

  “You’re not too hungry?” she asked, sipping hot tea.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “It’s the hospital,” she said, scanning the cafeteria. “This always happens when people aren’t used to the place. The smells, the sounds, the stale air, patients’ faces, stress, irritation, disappointment, pain, fatigue—all those things are what do it. They grab you in the stomach and kill your appetite. Once you get used to them, though, they’re no problem at all. Plus, you can’t really take care of a sick person unless you eat right. It’s true. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve done it with my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, and now my father. You never know when you’re going to have to miss your next meal, so it’s important to eat when you can.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  “Relatives come to visit and they eat with me here, and they always leave half their food, just like you. And they always say, ‘Oh, Midori, it’s wonderful you’ve got such a healthy appetite. I’m too upset to eat.’ But get serious, I’m the one who’s actually here taking care of the patient! They just have to stop by and show a little sympathy. I’m the one who wipes the shit and takes the phlegm and dries the bodies off. If sympathy was all it took to clean up shit, I’d have fifty times as much sympathy as anybody else! Instead, they see me eating all my food and they give me this look and say, ‘Oh, Midori, you’ve got such a healthy appetite.’ What do they think I am, a donkey pulling a cart? They’re old enough to know how the world really works, so why are they so stupid? It’s easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit. I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too. I mean, you try watching a gang of doctors get together and cut open somebody’s head when there’s no hope of saving them, and stirring things up in there, and doing it again and again, and every time they do it it makes the person worse and a little bit crazier, and see how you like it! And on top of it, you see your savings go to hell. I don’t know if I can keep going to school another three and a half years, and there’s no way my sister can afford a wedding ceremony at this rate.”

  “How many days do you come here in a week?” I asked.

  “Usually four,” said Midori. “This place claims they offer total nursing care, and the nurses themselves are great, but there’s just too much for them to do. Some member of the family has to be around to take up the slack. My sister’s watching the store, and I’ve got my classes. Still, she manages to get here three days a week, and I come four. And we sneak in a little time for a date now and then. Believe me, it’s a full schedule!”

  “How can you spend time with me if you’re so busy?”

  “I like spending time with you,” said Midori, playing with a plastic teacup.

  “Get out of here for a couple of hours and go take a walk,” I said. “I’ll take care of your father for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to get away from the hospital and relax by yourself—not talk to anybody, just clear your mind out.”

  Midori thought about it for a minute and nodded. “Hmm, you may be right. But do you know what to do? How to take care of him?”

  “I’ve been watching. I’ve pretty much got it. You check the intravenous thing, give him water, wipe the sweat off, and help him spit phlegm. The bedpan’s under the bed, and if he gets hungry I feed him the rest of his lunch. Anything I can’t figure out I’ll ask the nurse.”

  “I think that should do it,” Midori said with a smile. “There’s just one thing, though. He’s starting to get a little funny in the head, so he says weird things once in a while—things that nobody can understand. Don’t let it bother you if he does that.”

  “I’ll be fine.” I said.

  BACK IN THE ROOM, Midori told her father she had some business to take care of and that I would be watching him while she was out. He seemed to have nothing to say to this. It might have meant nothing to him. He just lay there on his back, staring at the ceiling. If he hadn’t been blinking every once in a while, he could have passed for dead. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he had been drinking, and each time he took a deep breath his nose swelled the slightest bit. Otherwise, he didn’t move a muscle, and he made no effort to reply to Midori. I couldn’t begin to grasp what he might be thinking or feeling in the murky depths of his consciousness.

  After Midori left, I thought about trying to speak to her father, but I had no idea what to say to him or how to say it, and so I just kept quiet. Before long, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. I sat on the stool by the head of the bed and studied the occasional twitching of his nose, hoping all the while that he might not die on the spot. How strange it would be, I thought, if this man were to breathe his last with me by his side. After all, I had just met him for the first time in my life, and the only thing binding us together was Midori, a girl I happened to know from my History of Drama class.

  He was not dying, though, just sleeping soundly. Bringing my ear close to his face, I could hear his faint breathing. This allowed me to relax and chat with the wife of the man in the next bed. She talked of nothing but Midori on the assumption that I was her boyfriend.

  “She’s really a wonderful girl,” she said. “She takes wonderful care of her father; she’s kind and gentle and sensitive and solid, and on top of all that, she’s pretty. You’d better treat her right. Don’t ever let her go. You won’t find another one like her.”

  “I’ll treat her right,” I said without elaborating.

  “I have a son and daughter at home. He’s seventeen and she’s twenty-one, and neither of them would ever think of coming to the hospital. The minute school lets out, they’re off surfing or dating or whatever. They’re terrible. They squeeze me for all the pocket money they can get and then they disappear.”

  At one-thirty the Mrs. left the hospital
room to do some shopping. Both men were sound asleep. Gentle afternoon sunlight flooded the room, and I felt as though I might drift off at any moment atop the stool on which I was perched. White and yellow chrysanthemums in a vase on the table by the window announced to people that it was autumn. In the air floated the sweet smell of boiled fish left untouched from lunch. The nurses continued to clip clop up and down the hall, talking to one another in clear, penetrating voices. They would peek into the room now and then and flash me a smile when they saw that both patients were sleeping. I wished I had something to read, but there were no books or magazines or newspapers in the room, just a calendar on the wall.

  I thought about Naoko. I thought about her naked, wearing only her barrette. I thought about the curve of her waist and the dark shadow of her pubic hair. Why had she shown herself to me like that? Had she been sleepwalking? Or was it just a fantasy of mine? As time went by and that little world receded into the distance, I grew increasingly unsure that the events of that night had actually happened. If I told myself they were real, I believed they were real, and if I told myself they were a fantasy, they seemed like a fantasy. They were too clear and detailed to have been a fantasy, and too whole and beautiful to have been real: Naoko’s body and the moonlight.

  Midori’s father suddenly woke and started coughing, which put a stop to my daydreaming. I let him spit his phlegm into a tissue, and wiped the sweat from his brow with a towel.

  “Would you like some water?” I asked, to which he gave a four-millimeter nod. I held the small glass water bottle so that he could sip a little bit at a time, dry lips trembling, throat twitching. He drank every bit of the seemingly lukewarm water in the bottle.

  “Would you like some more?” I asked. He seemed to be trying to speak, so I brought my ear close.

  , he said in a small, dry voice—a voice even smaller and dryer than before.