Norwegian Wood

  “We were drunk,” I said.

  “That’s all right, Toru. I’m not blaming you. I just want you to tell me what happened.”

  “The two of us were drinking in a bar in Shibuya, and we got friendly with this pair of girls. They went to some junior college, and they were pretty plastered, too. So, anyhow, we, uh, went to a hotel and slept with them. Our rooms were right next door to each other. In the middle of the night, Nagasawa knocked on my door and said we should change girls, so I went to his room and he came to mine.”

  “Didn’t the girls mind?”

  “No, they were drunk too.”

  “Anyway, I had a good reason for doing it,” said Nagasawa.

  “A good reason?”

  “Well, the girls were too different. One was really good-looking, but the other one was a dog. It seemed unfair to me. I got the pretty one, but Watanabe got stuck with the other one. That’s why we swapped. Right, Watanabe?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. But in fact, I had liked the not-pretty one. She was fun to talk to, and she was a nice person. After we had sex, we were enjoying talking to each other in bed when Nagasawa showed up and suggested we change partners. I asked the girl if she minded, and she said it was O.K. with her if that’s what we wanted. She probably figured I wanted to do it with the pretty one.

  “Was it fun?” Hatsumi asked me.

  “Switching, you mean?”

  “The whole thing.”

  “Not especially. It’s just something you do. Sleeping with girls that way is not all that much fun.”

  “So why do you do it?”

  “Because of me,” said Nagasawa.

  “I’m asking Toru,” Hatsumi shot back to Nagasawa. “Why do you do something like that?”

  “Because sometimes I have this tremendous desire to sleep with a girl.”

  “If you’re in love with someone, can’t you manage one way or another with her?” Hatsumi asked after a few moments’ thought.

  “It’s complicated.”

  Hatsumi sighed.

  At that point the door opened and the waiters brought the food in. Nagasawa was presented with his roast duck, and Hatsumi and I received our sea bass. The waiters heaped fresh-cooked vegetables on our plates and dribbled sauce on them before withdrawing and leaving the three of us alone again. Nagasawa cut a slice of duck and ate it with gusto, followed by more whiskey. I took a forkful of spinach. Hatsumi didn’t touch her food.

  “You know, Toru,” she said, “I have no idea what makes your situation so ‘complicated,’ but I do think that the kind of thing you just told me about is not right for you. You’re not that kind of person. What do you think?” She set her hands on the table and looked me in the eye.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve felt that way myself sometimes.”

  “So why don’t you stop?”

  “Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth,” I answered honestly. “Sometimes, if I can’t feel something like the warmth of a woman’s skin, I get so lonely I can’t stand it.”

  “Here, let me summarize what I think it’s all about,” interjected Nagasawa. “Watanabe’s got this girl he likes, but for certain complicated reasons, they can’t do it. So he tells himself ‘Sex is just sex,’ and he takes care of his need with somebody else. What’s wrong with that? It makes perfect sense. He can’t just stay locked in his room jerking off all the time, can he?”

  “But if you really love her, Toru, shouldn’t it be possible for you to control yourself?”

  “Maybe so,” I said, bringing a piece of sea bass in cream sauce to my mouth.

  “You just don’t understand a man’s sexual need,” said Nagasawa to Hatsumi. “Look at me, for example. I’ve been with you for three years, and I’ve slept with plenty of women in that time. But I don’t remember a thing about them. I don’t know their names, I don’t remember their faces. I slept with each of them exactly once. Meet ’em, do it, so long. That’s it. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What I can’t stand is that arrogance of yours,” said Hatsumi in a soft voice. “Whether you sleep with other women or not is beside the point. I’ve never really gotten angry at you for fooling around, have I?”

  “You can’t even call what I do fooling around. It’s just a game. Nobody gets hurt,” said Nagasawa.

  “I get hurt,” said Hatsumi. “Why am I not enough for you?”

  Nagasawa kept silent for a moment and swirled the whiskey in his glass. “It’s not that you’re not enough for me. That’s another phase, another question. It’s just a hunger I have inside me. If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry. But it’s not a question of whether or not you’re enough for me. I can only live with that hunger. That’s the kind of man I am. That’s what makes me me. There’s nothing I can do about it, don’t you see?”

  At last Hatsumi picked up her silverware and started eating her fish. “At least you shouldn’t drag Toru into your ‘games.’”

  “We’re a lot alike, though, Watanabe and me,” said Nagasawa. “Neither of us is interested, essentially, in anything but ourselves. O.K., so I’m arrogant and he’s not, but neither of us is able to feel any interest in anything other than what we ourselves think or feel or do. That’s why we can think about things in a way that’s totally divorced from anybody else. That’s what I like about him. The only difference is that he hasn’t realized this about himself, and so he hesitates and feels hurt.”

  “What human being doesn’t hesitate and feel hurt?” Hatsumi demanded. “Are you trying to say that you have never felt those things?”

  “Of course I have, but I’ve disciplined myself to where I can minimize them. Even a rat will choose the least painful route if you shock him enough.”

  “But rats don’t fall in love.”

  “‘Rats don’t fall in love.’” Nagasawa looked at me. “That’s great. We should have background music for this—a full orchestra with two harps and—”

  “Don’t make fun of me. I’m serious.”

  “We’re eating,” said Nagasawa. “And Watanabe’s here. It might be more civil for us to confine ‘serious’ talk to another occasion.”

  “I can leave,” I said.

  “No,” said Hatsumi. “Please stay. It’s better with you here.”

  “At least have dessert,” said Nagasawa.

  “I don’t mind, really.”

  The three of us went on eating in silence for a time. I finished my fish. Hatsumi left half of hers. Nagasawa had finished his duck long before and now was concentrating on his whiskey.

  “This was excellent sea bass,” I offered, but no one took me up on it. I might as well have thrown a rock down a deep shaft.

  The waiters took our plates away and brought lemon sherbet and espresso. Nagasawa barely touched his dessert and coffee, moving directly to a cigarette. Hatsumi ignored her sherbet. “Oh, boy,” I thought to myself as I finished my sherbet and coffee. Hatsumi stared at her hands on the table. Like everything she had on, her hands looked chic and elegant and expensive. I thought about Naoko and Reiko. What would they be doing now? I wondered. Naoko could be lying on the sofa reading a book, and Reiko might be playing “Norwegian Wood” on her guitar. I felt an intense desire to go back to that little room of theirs. What the hell was I doing in this place?

  “Where Watanabe and I are alike is, we don’t give a damn if nobody understands us,” Nagasawa said. “That’s what makes us different from everybody else. They’re all worried about whether the people around them understand them. But not me, and not Watanabe. We just don’t give a damn. Self and others are separate.”

  “Is this true?” Hatsumi asked me.

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not that strong. I don’t feel it’s O.K. if nobody understands me. I’ve got people I want to understand and be understood by. But aside from those few, well, I figure it’s kind of hopeless. I don’t agree with Nagasawa. I do care if people understand me.”

  “That’s practically the same thing as what I’m saying,” sai
d Nagasawa, picking up his coffee spoon. “It is the same! It’s the difference between a late breakfast or an early lunch. Same time, same food, different name.”

  Now Hatsumi spoke to Nagasawa. “Don’t you care whether I understand you or not?”

  “I guess you don’t get it. Person A understands Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A.”

  “So is it a mistake for me to feel that I want to be understood by someone—by you, for example?”

  “No, it’s not a mistake,” answered Nagasawa. “Most people would call that love, if you think you want to understand me. My system for living is way different from other people’s system for living.”

  “So what you’re saying is you’re not in love with me, is that it?”

  “Well, my system and your—”

  “To hell with your fucking system!” Hatsumi shouted. That was the first and last time I ever heard her shout.

  Nagasawa pushed the button by the table, and the waiter came in with the check. Nagasawa handed him a credit card.

  “Sorry about this, Watanabe,” said Nagasawa. “I’m going to see Hatsumi home. You go back to the dorm alone, O.K.?”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me. Great meal,” I said, but no one said anything in response.

  The waiter brought the card, and Nagasawa signed with a ballpoint pen after checking the amount. Then the three of us stood and went outside. Nagasawa started to step into the street to hail a cab, but Hatsumi stopped him.

  “Thanks, but I don’t want to spend any more time with you today. You don’t have to see me home. Thank you for dinner.”

  “Whatever,” said Nagasawa.

  “I want Toru to see me home.”

  “Whatever,” said Nagasawa. “But Watanabe’s practically the same as me. He may be a nice guy, but deep down in his heart he’s incapable of loving anybody. There’s always some part of him somewhere that’s wide awake and detached. He just has that hunger that won’t go away. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  I flagged down a cab and let Hatsumi in first. “Anyhow,” I said to Nagasawa, “I’ll make sure she gets home.”

  “Sorry to put you through this,” said Nagasawa, but I could see that he was already thinking about something else.

  Once inside the cab, I asked Hatsumi, “Where do you want to go? Back to Ebisu?” Her apartment was in Ebisu.

  She shook her head.

  “O.K. Want to go for a drink somewhere?”

  “Yes,” she said with a nod.

  “Shibuya,” I told the driver.

  Folding her arms and closing her eyes, Hatsumi sank back into the corner of the seat. Her small gold earrings caught the light as the taxi swayed. Her midnight blue dress seemed to have been made to match the darkness of the cab. Every now and then her thinly daubed, beautifully formed lips would quiver slightly as if she had caught herself on the verge of talking to herself. Watching her, I could see why Nagasawa had chosen her as his special companion. There were any number of women more beautiful than Hatsumi, and Nagasawa could have made any of them his. But Hatsumi had some quality that could send a tremor through your heart. It was nothing forceful. The power she exerted was a subtle thing, but it called forth deep resonances. I watched her all the way to Shibuya, and wondered, without ever finding an answer, what this emotional reverberation that I was feeling could be.

  IT FINALLY HIT ME some dozen or so years later. I had come to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlor, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red—my hand, the plate, the table, the world—as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything. In the midst of this overwhelming sunset, the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained—and would forever remain—unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, all-but-seared-in longing: forgotten for years to remember that such feelings had ever existed inside me. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears. She had been an absolutely special woman. Someone should have done something—anything—to save her.

  But neither Nagasawa nor I could have managed that. As so many of those I knew had done, Hatsumi reached a certain stage in life and decided—almost on the spur of the moment—to end it. Two years after Nagasawa left for Germany, she married, and two years after that she slashed her wrists with a razor blade.

  It was Nagasawa, of course, who told me what had happened. His letter from Bonn said this: “Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something. This is unbearably sad and painful, even to me.” I ripped his letter to shreds and threw it away. I never wrote to him again.

  HATSUMI AND I WENT to a small bar and downed several drinks. Neither of us said much. Like a bored, old married couple, we sat opposite each other, drinking in silence and munching peanuts. When the place began to fill up, we went out for a walk. Hatsumi said she would pay the bill, but I insisted on paying because the drinks had been my idea.

  There was a deep chill in the night air. Hatsumi wrapped herself in her pale gray cardigan and walked by my side in silence. I had no destination in mind as we ambled through the nighttime streets, my hands shoved deep into my pockets. This was just like walking with Naoko, it occurred to me.

  “Do you know someplace we could shoot pool around here?” Hatsumi asked me without warning.

  “Pool?! You shoot pool?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty good. How about you?”

  “I play a little four-ball. Not that I’m very good at it.”

  “O.K. then. Let’s go.”

  We found a pool hall nearby and went in. It was a small place at the far end of an alley. The two of us—Hatsumi in her chic dress and I in my blue blazer and regimental tie—clashed with the scruffy pool hall, but this didn’t seem to concern Hatsumi at all as she chose and chalked her cue. She pulled a barrette from her bag and held her hair aside at one temple to keep it from interfering with her game.

  We played two rounds of four-ball. Hatsumi was as good as she had claimed to be, while my own game was hampered by the thick bandage I still wore on my cut hand. She crushed me.

  “You’re great,” I said in admiration.

  “You mean appearances can be deceiving?” she asked as she sized up a shot, smiling.

  “Where’d you learn to play like that?”

  “My grandfather—my father’s father—was an old playboy. He had a table in his house. I used to shoot pool with my brother just for fun, and when I got a little bigger my grandfather taught me the right moves. He was a wonderful guy—stylish, handsome. He’s dead now, though. He always used to boast how he once met Deanna Durbin in New York.”

  She got three in a row, then missed on the fourth try. I managed to squeeze in a ball, then missed an easy shot.

  “It’s the bandage,” said Hatsumi to comfort me.

  “No, it’s because I haven’t played in such a long time,” I said. “Two years and five months.”

  “How can you be so sure of the time?”

  “My friend died that night after our last game together,” I said.

  “So you quit shooting pool?”

  “No, not really,” I said after giving it some thought. “I just never had the opportunity to play after that. That’s all.”

  “How did your friend die?”

  “Traffic accident,” I said.

  She made several more shots, aiming with deadly seriousness and adjusting the cue ball’s speed with precision. Watching her in action—her carefully set hair swept back out of her eyes, golden earrings sparkling, pumps set firmly on the floor, lovely, slender fingers pressing the felt as she took her shot—I felt as if her area of the scruffy pool parlor had been tra
nsformed into part of some elegant social event. I had never spent time with her alone before, and this was a marvelous experience for me, as if I had been drawn up to a higher plane of life. At the end of the third game—in which, of course, she crushed me again—my cut began to throb, and so we stopped playing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with what seemed like genuine concern, “I should never have suggested this.”

  “That’s O.K.,” I said. “It’s not a bad cut. I enjoyed playing. Really.”

  As we were leaving the pool parlor, the skinny woman owner said to Hatsumi, “You’ve got a nice stroke, sister.” Hatsumi gave her a sweet smile and thanked her as she paid the bill.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked when we were outside.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Do you think it opened?”

  “No, it’s probably O.K.”

  “I know! You should come to my place. I’ll change your bandage for you. I’ve got disinfectant and everything. C’mon, I’m right over there.”

  I told her it wasn’t worth worrying about, that I’d be O.K., but she insisted we had to check to see if the cut had opened or not.

  “Or is it that you don’t like being with me? You want to go back to your room as soon as possible, is that it?” she said with a playful smile.

  “No way,” I said.

  “All right, then. Don’t stand on ceremony. It’s a short walk.”

  Hatsumi’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from Shibuya toward Ebisu. By no means a glamorous building, it was more than decent, with a nice little lobby and an elevator. Hatsumi sat me at the kitchen table and went to the bedroom to change. She came out wearing a Princeton hooded sweatshirt and cotton slacks—and no more gold earrings. Setting a first-aid box on the table, she undid my bandage, checked to see that the wound was still sealed, put a little disinfectant on the area, and tied a new bandage over the cut. She did all this like an expert. “How come you’re so good at so many things?” I asked.

  “I used to do volunteer work at a hospital. Kind of like playing nurse. That’s how I learned.”

  When she was through with the bandage, Hatsumi went and got two cans of beer from the refrigerator. She drank half of hers, and I drank mine plus the half she left. Then she showed me pictures of the freshman girls in her club. She was right: several of them were cute.