Norwegian Wood

  I miss you something awful sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. Just as you take care of the birds and the fields every morning, every morning I wind my own spring. I give it some thirty-six good twists by the time I’ve gotten up, brushed my teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed my clothes, left the dorm, and arrived at the university. I tell myself, “O.K., let’s make this day another good one.” I hadn’t noticed before, but they tell me I talk to myself a lot these days. Probably mumbling to myself while I wind my spring.

  It’s hard not being able to see you, but my life in Tokyo would be a lot worse if it weren’t for you. It’s because I think of you when I’m in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day. I know I have to give it my best here just as you are doing there.

  Today’s Sunday, though, a day I don’t wind my spring. I’ve done my laundry, and now I’m in my room, writing to you. Once I’ve finished this letter and put a stamp on it and dropped it into the mailbox, there’s nothing for me to do until the sun goes down. I don’t study on Sundays, either. I do a good enough job studying between classes in the library on weekdays, so that I don’t have anything left to do on Sundays. Sunday afternoons are quiet, peaceful, and, for me, lonely. I read books or listen to music. Sometimes I think back on the different routes we used to take in our Sunday walks around Tokyo. I can come up with a pretty clear picture of the clothes you were wearing on any particular walk. I remember all kinds of things on Sunday afternoons.

  Say hi from me to Reiko. I really miss her guitar at night.

  When I had finished the letter, I walked a couple of blocks to a mailbox, then went to a nearby bakery where I bought an egg sandwich and a Coke. These I had for lunch while I watched a Little League game from a bench in a local playground. The deepening of autumn had brought an increased blueness and depth to the sky. I glanced up to find two vapor trails heading off to the west in perfect parallel like streetcar tracks. A foul ball came rolling my way, and when I threw it back to them the young players doffed their caps with a polite “Thank you, sir.” As in most Little League games, there were lots of walks and stolen bases.

  After noon I went back to my room to read but couldn’t concentrate on my book. Instead I found myself staring at the ceiling and thinking about Midori. I wondered if her father had really been trying to ask me to look after her when he was gone, but I had no way of telling what had been on his mind. He had probably confused me with somebody else. In any case, he had died on a Friday morning when a cold rain was falling, and now it was impossible to know the truth. I imagined that, in death, he had shriveled up smaller than ever. And then they had burned him in an oven until he was nothing but ashes. And what had he left behind? A nothing-much bookstore in a nothing-much neighborhood and two daughters, at least one of whom was more than a little strange. What kind of life was that? I wondered. Lying in that hospital bed with his cut-open head and his muddled brain, what had been on his mind as he looked at me?

  Thinking thoughts like this about Midori’s father put me in such a miserable mood that I had to bring the laundry down from the roof before it was really dry and head off to Shinjuku to kill time walking the streets. The Sunday crowds gave me some relief. The Kinokuniya bookstore was as jam-packed as a rush-hour train. I bought a copy of Faulkner’s Light in August and went to the noisiest jazz café I could think of, reading my new book while listening to Ornette Coleman and Bud Powell and drinking hot, thick, foul-tasting coffee. At five-thirty I closed my book, went outside, and ate a light supper. How many Sundays—how many hundreds of Sundays like this—lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn’t wind my spring.

  HALFWAY THROUGH THAT WEEK I MANAGED TO CUT MY PALM OPEN on a piece of broken glass. I hadn’t noticed that one of the glass partitions in a record shelf was cracked. I could hardly believe how much blood gushed out of me, turning the floor at my feet bright red. The store manager found a bunch of towels and tied them tightly over the wound. Then he made a telephone call to locate an all-night emergency room. He was a pretty useless guy most of the time, but this he did with great dispatch. The hospital was nearby, fortunately, but by the time I got there the towels were soaked in red, and the blood they couldn’t soak up had been dripping on the asphalt. People scurried out of the way for me. They seemed to think I had been injured in a fight. I felt no pain to speak of, but the blood wouldn’t stop.

  The doctor was cool as he removed the blood-soaked towels, stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet on my wrist, disinfected the wound and sewed it up, telling me to come again the next day. Back at the record shop, the manager told me to go home: he would put me down as having worked. I took a bus to the dorm and went straight to Nagasawa’s room. With my nerves on edge over the cut, I wanted to talk to somebody, and I felt I hadn’t seen Nagasawa for a long time.

  I found him in his room, drinking a can of beer and watching a Spanish lesson on TV. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked when he saw my bandage. I said I had cut myself but that it was nothing much. He asked if I wanted a beer, and I said no thanks.

  “Just wait. This’ll be over in a minute,” said Nagasawa, and he went on practicing his Spanish pronunciation. I boiled some water and made myself a cup of tea with a tea bag. A Spanish woman recited example sentences: “I have never seen such terrible rain! Many bridges were washed away in Barcelona.” Nagasawa read the text aloud in Spanish. “What awful sentences!” he said. “This kind of shit is all they ever give you.”

  When the program ended, Nagasawa turned off the TV and took another beer from his small refrigerator.

  “Are you sure I’m not in the way?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. I was bored out of my mind. Sure you don’t want a beer?”

  “No, I really don’t,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, they posted the exam results the other day. I passed!”

  “The Foreign Ministry exam?”

  “That’s it. Officially, it’s called the ‘Foreign Affairs Public Service Personnel First Class Service Examination.’ What a joke!”

  “Congratulations!” I said, and gave him my left hand to shake.

  “Thanks.”

  “Of course, I’m not surprised you passed.”

  “No, neither am I.” Nagasawa laughed. “But it’s nice to have it official.”

  “Think you’ll go to a foreign country once you get in?”

  “Nah, first they give you a year of training. Then they send you overseas for a while.”

  I sipped my tea, and he drank his beer with obvious enjoyment.

  “I’ll give you this refrigerator when I get out of here,” said Nagasawa. “You’d like to have it, wouldn’t you? It’s great for beer.”

  “Sure, I’d like to have it, but won’t you need it? You’ll be living in an apartment or something.”

  “Don’t be stupid! When I get out of this place, I’m buying myself a big refrigerator. I’m gonna live the high life! Four years in a shit hole like this is long enough. I don’t want to have to look at anything I used in this place. You name it, I’ll give it to you—the TV, the Thermos bottle, the radio …”

  “I’ll take anything you want to give me,” I said. I picked up the Spanish textbook on his desk and stared at it. “You’re starting Spanish?”

  “Yeah. The more languages you know the better. And I’ve got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it’s practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.”

  “Ah, the reflective life!” I said with a sarcastic edge.

  “Anyhow, let’s go out to eat sometime soon.”

  “You mean cruising for women?”

  “No, a real dinner. You, me, and Hatsumi at a good restaurant. To celebrate my new job. My old man’s paying, so we’ll go someplace really expensive.”

  “Shouldn’t it just be you and Hatsumi?”

>   “No, it’d be better with you there. I’d be more comfortable, and so would Hatsumi.”

  Oh no, it was Kizuki, Naoko, and me all over again.

  “I’ll spend the night at Hatsumi’s afterward, so join us just for the meal.”

  “O.K., if you both really want me to,” I said. “But, anyhow, what are you planning to do about Hatsumi? When you’re through with your training, you’ll be assigned overseas, and you probably won’t come back for years. What’s going to happen to her?”

  “That’s her problem, not mine.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Feet on his desk, Nagasawa took a swig of beer and yawned.

  “Look, I’m not planning to get married. I’ve made that perfectly clear to Hatsumi. If she wants to marry somebody, she should go ahead and do it. I won’t stop her. If she wants to wait for me, let her wait. That’s what I mean.”

  “I’ve gotta hand it to you,” I said.

  “You think I’m a shit, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Look, the world is an inherently unfair place. I didn’t write the rules. It’s always been that way. I have never once deceived Hatsumi. She knows I’m a shit and that she can leave me anytime she decides she can’t take it. I told her that straight out.”

  Nagasawa finished his beer and lit a cigarette.

  “Isn’t there anything about life that frightens you?” I asked.

  “Hey, I’m not a total idiot,” said Nagasawa. “Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the premise for everything else, though. I’m going to give it a hundred percent and go as far as I can. I’ll take what I want and leave what I don’t want. That’s how I intend to live my life, and if things go bad, I’ll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.”

  “Sounds like a pretty self-centered way to live,” I said.

  “Maybe so, but I’m not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m working ten times harder than you are.”

  “That’s probably true,” I said.

  “I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don’t these bastards do something? I wonder. They don’t do a damn thing, and then they bitch.”

  Amazed at the harshness of his tone, I looked at Nagasawa. “The way I see it, people are working hard. They’re working their fingers to the bone. Or am I looking at things wrong?”

  “That’s not hard work. It’s just manual labor,” Nagasawa said with finality. “The ‘hard work’ I’m talking about is more self-directed and purposeful.”

  “You mean, like studying Spanish when the job season ends and everybody else is taking it easy?”

  “That’s it. I’m going to have Spanish mastered by next spring. I’ve got English and German and French down pat, and I’m most of the way there with Italian. You think things like that happen without hard work?”

  Nagasawa puffed on his cigarette while I thought about Midori’s father. There was one man who had probably never even thought about starting Spanish lessons on TV. He had probably never thought about the difference between hard work and manual labor, either. He was probably too busy to think about such things—busy with work, and busy bringing home a daughter who had run away to Fukushima.

  “So, about that dinner of ours,” said Nagasawa. “Would this Saturday be O.K. for you?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  NAGASAWA PICKED A FANCY French restaurant in a quiet backstreet of Azabu. He gave his name at the door and the two of us were shown to a secluded private room. Some fifteen prints hung on the walls of the small chamber. While we waited for Hatsumi to arrive, Nagasawa and I sipped a delicious wine and chatted about the novels of Joseph Conrad. He wore an expensive-looking gray suit. I had on an ordinary blue blazer.

  Hatsumi arrived fifteen minutes later. She was carefully made up and wore gold earrings, a beautiful deep blue dress, and tasteful red pumps.When I complimented her on the color of the dress, she told me it was called midnight blue.

  “What an elegant restaurant!” said Hatsumi.

  “My old man always eats here when he comes to Tokyo,” said Nagasawa. “I came here with him once. I’m not crazy about these snooty places.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to eat in a place like this once in a while,” said Hatsumi. Turning to me, she asked. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I guess so. As long as I’m not paying.”

  “My old man usually brings his woman here,” said Nagasawa. “He’s got one in Tokyo, you know.”

  “Really?” asked Hatsumi.

  I took a sip of wine, as if I had never heard anything.

  Eventually a waiter came and took our orders. After choosing hors d’oeuvres and soup, Nagasawa ordered duck, and Hatsumi and I ordered sea bass. The food arrived at a leisurely pace, which allowed us to enjoy the wine and conversation. Nagasawa spoke first of the Foreign Ministry exam. Most of the examinees were scum who might as well be thrown into a bottomless pit, he said, though he supposed there were a few decent ones in the bunch. I asked if he thought the proportion of good ones to scum was higher or lower than in society in general.

  “It’s the same,” he said. “Of course.” It was the same everywhere, he added: an immutable law.

  Nagasawa ordered a second bottle of wine when we had finished the first, and for himself he ordered a double scotch.

  Hatsumi then began talking about a girl she wanted to fix me up with. This was a perpetual topic for the two of us. She was always telling me about some “cute freshman in my club,” and I was always running away.

  “She’s really nice, though, and really cute. I’ll bring her along next time. You ought to talk to her. I’m sure you’ll like her.”

  “It’s a waste of time, Hatsumi,” I said. “I’m too poor to go out with girls from your school. I can’t talk to them.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “This girl is simple and natural and unaffected.”

  “Come on, Watanabe,” said Nagasawa. “Just meet her. You don’t have to screw her.”

  “I should say not!” said Hatsumi. “This one’s a virgin.”

  “Like you used to be,” said Nagasawa.

  “Exactly,” said Hatsumi with a bright smile. “Like I used to be. But really,” she said to me, “don’t give me that stuff about being ‘too poor.’ It’s got nothing to do with anything. Sure, there are a few super stuck-up girls in every class, but the rest of us are just ordinary people. We all eat lunch in the school cafeteria for two hundred fifty yen—”

  “Now wait just a minute, Hatsumi,” I said, interrupting her. “In my school the cafeteria has three lunches: A, B, and C. The A Lunch is a hundred and twenty yen, the B Lunch is a hundred yen, and the C Lunch is eighty yen. Everybody gives me dirty looks when I eat the A Lunch, and guys who can’t afford the C Lunch eat ramen noodles for sixty yen. That’s the kind of school I go to. You still think I can talk to girls from your school?”

  Hatsumi could hardly stop laughing. “That’s so cheap!” she said. “Maybe I should go there for lunch! But really, Toru, you’re such a nice guy, I’m sure you’d get along with this girl. She might even like the hundred-and-twenty-yen lunch.”

  “No way,” I said with a laugh. “Nobody eats that stuff because they like it; they eat it because they can’t afford anything else.”

  “Anyhow, don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s true we go to this hoity-toity girls’ school, but lots of us there are serious people who think serious thoughts about life. Not everybody is looking for a boyfriend with a sports car.”

  “I know that much,” I said.

  “Watanabe’s got a girl. He’s in love,” said Nagasawa. “But he won’t say a word about her. He’s as tight-lipped as they come. A riddle wrapped in an enigma.”

  “Really?” Hatsumi asked me.

  “Really,” I
said. “But there’s no riddle involved here. It’s just that the situation is a complicated one, and hard to talk about.”

  “An illicit love? Ooh! You can talk to me!”

  I took a sip of wine to avoid answering.

  “See what I mean?” said Nagasawa, at work on his third whiskey. “Tight-lipped. When this guy decides he’s not going to talk about something, nobody can drag it out of him.”

  “What a shame,” said Hatsumi as she cut a small slice of terrine and brought it to her mouth. “If you had gotten along with her, we could have gone on double dates.”

  “Yeah, we could’ve gotten drunk and done a little swapping,” said Nagasawa.

  “Enough of that kind of talk,” said Hatsumi.

  “Whaddya mean ‘that kind of talk’? Watanabe’s got his eye on you,” said Nagasawa.

  “That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about,” Hatsumi murmured. “He’s not that kind of person. He’s sincere and caring. I can tell. That’s why I’ve been trying to fix him up.”

  “Oh, sure, he’s sincere. Like the time we swapped women once, way back when. Remember, Watanabe?” Nagasawa said this with a blasé look on his face, then slugged back the rest of his whiskey and ordered another one.

  Hatsumi set her knife and fork down and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. Then, looking at me, she asked, “Toru, did you really do that?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her, and so I said nothing.

  “Tell her,” said Nagasawa. “What the hell.” This was turning ugly. Nagasawa could get nasty when he was drunk, but tonight his nastiness was aimed at Hatsumi, not at me. Knowing that made it all the more difficult for me to go on sitting there.

  “I’d like to hear about that,” said Hatsumi. “It sounds very interesting!”