Located on a hill with open views in the middle of the city, the dormitory compound sat on a large quadrangle surrounded by a concrete wall. A huge, towering zelkova tree stood just inside the front gate. People said it was at least a hundred and fifty years old. Standing at its base, you could look up and see nothing of the sky through its dense cover of green leaves.
The paved road leading from the gate curved around the tree and continued on long and straight across a broad quadrangle, two three-story concrete dorm buildings facing each other on either side of the road. These were large buildings with lots of windows, and they gave the impression of being either apartment houses that had been converted into jails or jails that had been converted into apartment houses. There was nothing dirty about them, however, nor did they feel dark. You could hear radios playing through open windows, all of which had the same cream-colored curtains that could not be faded by the sun.
Beyond the two dormitories, the road led up to the entrance of a two-story common building, the first floor of which contained a dining hall and bath facility, the second consisting of an auditorium, meeting rooms, and even guest rooms, whose use I could never fathom. Next to the common building stood a third dormitory, also three stories high. Broad green lawns filled the quadrangle, and circulating sprinklers caught the sunlight as they turned. Behind the common building there was a field used for baseball and soccer, and six tennis courts. The complex had everything you could want.
There was just one problem with the place: its political smell. The complex was run by some kind of fishy foundation that centered on some kind of extreme right-wing guy, and there was something strangely twisted—as far as I was concerned—about the way they ran the place. You could see it in the pamphlet they gave to new students and in the dorm rules. The proclaimed “founding spirit” of the dormitory was “to strive to nurture human resources of service to the nation through the ultimate in educational fundamentals,” and many financial leaders who endorsed this “spirit” had contributed their private funds to the construction of the facility. This was the public face of the project, though what lay behind it was vague in the extreme. Some said it was a tax dodge, while others saw it as a publicity stunt for the contributors, and still others claimed that the construction of the dormitory was a cover for swindling the public out of a prime piece of real estate. One thing was certain, though: in the dorm complex there existed a privileged club composed of elite students from various universities. They formed “study groups” that met several times a month and that included some of the founders. Any member of the club could be assured of a good job upon graduation. I had no idea which—if any—of these theories was correct, but all shared the assumption that there was “something fishy” about the place.
In any case, I spent two years—from the spring of 1968 to the spring of 1970—living in this “fishy” dormitory. Why I put up with it so long, I can’t really say. In terms of everyday life, it made no practical difference to me whether the place was right wing or left wing or anything else.
Each day at the complex began with the solemn raising of the flag. They played the national anthem, too, of course. You can’t have one without the other. The flagpole stood in the very center of the compound, where it was visible from every window of all three dormitories.
The head of the east dormitory (my building) was in charge of the flag. He was a tall, eagle-eyed man in his late fifties or early sixties. His bristly hair was flecked with gray, and his sunburned neck bore a long scar. People whispered that he was a graduate of the wartime Nakano spy school, but no one knew for sure. Next to him stood a student who acted as his assistant. No one really knew this guy, either. He had the world’s shortest crewcut and always wore a navy blue student uniform. I didn’t know his name or which room he lived in, never saw him in the dining hall or the bath. I’m not even sure he was a student, though you would think he must have been, given the “Uniform,” which quickly became his nickname. In contrast to Sir Nakano, Uniform was short, pudgy, and pasty-faced. This creepy couple would raise the banner of the Rising Sun every morning at six.
When I first entered the dormitory, the sheer novelty of the event would often prompt me to get up in the morning to observe this patriotic ritual. The two would appear in the quadrangle at almost the exact moment the radio beeped the six o’clock signal. Uniform was wearing his uniform, of course, with black leather shoes, and Nakano wore a short jacket and white training shoes. Uniform held a ceremonial box of unfinished paulownia wood, while Nakano carried a Sony tape player at his side. Nakano set the player at the base of the flagpole. Uniform opened the box to reveal a neatly folded banner. This he reverentially proffered to Nakano, who would clip it to the rope on the flagpole, revealing the bright red circle of the rising sun on a field of pure white. Then Uniform pressed the switch for the playing of the anthem.
“May Our Lord’s Reign …”
And up the flag would climb.
“Until pebbles turn to boulders …”
It would reach halfway up the pole.
“And be covered with moss.”
Now it was at the top. The two stood at rigid attention, looking up at the flag. This was quite a sight on clear days when the wind was blowing.
The lowering of the flag at dusk was carried out with the same ceremonial reverence, but in reverse. Down the banner would come and find its place in the box. The national flag does not fly at night.
I did not know why the flag had to be taken down at night. The nation continued to exist after dark, and plenty of people worked the whole night through—track construction crews and taxi drivers and bar hostesses and firemen and night watchmen: it seemed unfair to me that such people were denied the protection of the flag. Or maybe it didn’t matter all that much and nobody really cared—aside from me. Not that I really cared, either. It was just something that happened to cross my mind.
The rules for room assignments put freshmen and sophomores in doubles while juniors and seniors had single rooms. Double rooms were a little longer and narrower than nine-by-twelve, with an aluminum-framed window in the wall opposite the door and two desks by the window arranged so the inhabitants of the room could study back-to-back. To the left of the door stood a steel bunk bed. The supplied furniture was sturdy and simple in the extreme and included a pair of lockers, a small coffee table, and some built-in shelves. Even the most well-disposed observer would have had trouble calling this setting poetic. The shelves of most rooms carried such items as transistor radios, hair dryers, electric carafes and cookers, instant coffee, tea bags, sugar lumps, and simple pots and bowls for preparing instant ramen. The walls bore pinups from girlie magazines or stolen porno movie posters. One guy had a photo of pigs mating, but this was a far-out exception to the usual naked women or girl pop singers or actresses. Bookshelves on the desks held textbooks and dictionaries and novels.
The filth of these all-male rooms was horrifying. Moldy mandarin orange skins clung to the bottoms of wastebaskets. Empty cans used for ashtrays held mounds of cigarette butts, and when these started to smolder they’d be doused with coffee or beer and left to give off a sour stink. Blackish grime and bits of indefinable matter clung to all the bowls and dishes on the shelves, and the floors were littered with ramen wrappers and empty beer cans and lids from one thing or another. It never occurred to anyone to sweep up and throw these things in a wastebasket. Any wind that blew through would raise clouds of dust. Each room had its own horrendous smell, but the components of that smell were the same: sweat and body odor and garbage. Dirty clothes would pile up under the beds, and without anyone bothering to air the mattresses on a regular basis, these sweat-impregnated pads would give off odors beyond redemption. In retrospect, it seems amazing that these shit piles gave rise to no killer epidemics.
My room, on the other hand, was as sanitary as a morgue. The floor and window were spotless, the mattresses were aired each week, all pencils stood in the pencil holders, and even the curtains wer
e laundered once a month. My roommate was clean crazy. None of the others in the dorm believed me when I told them about the curtains. They didn’t know that curtains could be laundered. They believed, rather, that curtains were semipermanent parts of the window. “There’s something wrong with that guy,” they’d say, labeling him a Nazi or a storm trooper.
We didn’t even have pinups. No, we had a photo of an Amsterdam canal. I had put up a nude shot, but my roommate had pulled it down. “Hey, Watanabe,” he said, “I, I’m not too crazy about this kind of thing,” and up went the canal photo instead. I wasn’t especially attached to the nude, so I didn’t protest.
“What the hell’s that?” was the universal reaction to the Amsterdam photo whenever any of the other guys came to my room.
“Oh, Storm Trooper likes to jerk off to this,” I said.
I meant it as a joke, but they all took me seriously—so seriously that I began to believe it myself.
Everybody sympathized with me for having pulled Storm Trooper as a roommate, but I really wasn’t that upset about it. He left me alone as long as I kept my area clean, and in fact having him as my roommate made things easier for me in many ways. He did all the cleaning, he took care of sunning the mattresses, he threw out the trash. He’d give a sniff and suggest a bath for me if I’d been too busy to wash for a few days. He’d even point out when it was time for me to go to the barber’s or trim my nose hair. The one thing that bothered me was the way he’d spray clouds of insecticide if he noticed a single bug in the room, because then I had to take refuge in a neighboring shit pile.
Storm Trooper was majoring in geography at a national university.
As he said it the first time we met, “I’m studying muh-muh-maps.”
“You like maps?” I asked.
“Yup. When I graduate, I’m going to work for the Geographical Survey Institute and make muh-muh-maps.”
I was impressed anew by the variety of dreams and goals that life could offer. This was one of the very first new impressions I received when I came to Tokyo for the first time. The thought struck me that society needed a few people—just a few—who were interested in and even passionate about map making. Odd, though, that someone who wanted to work for the government’s Geographical Survey Institute should stutter every time he said the word map. Storm Trooper often didn’t stutter at all, except when he pronounced the word map, for which it was a 100-percent certainty.
“Wha-what are you going to major in?” he asked me.
“Drama,” I said.
“Gonna put on plays?”
“Nah, just read scripts and do research. Racine, Ionesco, Shakespeare, like that.”
He said he had heard of Shakespeare but not the others. I hardly knew anything about the others myself, had just seen their names in lecture handouts.
“You like plays?” he asked.
“Not especially,” I said.
This confused him, and when he was confused, his stuttering got worse. I felt sorry I had done that to him.
“I could have picked anything,” I said. “Ethnology, Asian history. I just happened to pick drama, that’s all,” which was not the most convincing explanation I could have come up with.
“I don’t get it,” he said, looking as if he really didn’t get it. “I like muh-muh-maps, so I decided to come to Tokyo and get my parents to se-send me money so I could study muh-muh-maps. But not you, huh?”
His approach made more sense than mine. I gave up trying to explain myself to him. Then we drew lots (matchsticks) to choose bunks. He got the upper bunk, I got the lower.
Tall, with a crewcut and high cheekbones, he always wore the same outfit: white shirt, black pants, black shoes, navy blue sweater. To these he would add a uniform jacket and black briefcase when he went to his school: a typical right-wing student. Which is why everybody called him Storm Trooper. But in fact he was 100-percent indifferent to politics. He wore a uniform because he didn’t want to be bothered choosing clothes. What interested him were things like changes in the coastline or the completion of a new rail tunnel. Nothing else. He’d go on for hours once he got started on a subject like that, until you either ran away or fell asleep.
He was up at six each morning with the strains of “May Our Lord’s Reign.” Which is to say that that ostentatious flag-raising ritual was not entirely useless. He’d get dressed, go to the bathroom, and wash his face—forever. I sometimes got the feeling he must be taking out each tooth and washing it, one at a time. Back in the room, he would snap the wrinkles out of his towel and lay it on the radiator to dry, then return his toothbrush and soap to the shelf. Finally he’d do Radio Calisthenics with the rest of the nation.
I was used to reading late at night and sleeping until eight o’clock, so even when he started shuffling around the room and exercising, I stayed unconscious—until the part where the jumping started. He took his jumping seriously and made the bed bounce every time he hit the floor. I stood it for three days because they had told us that communal life called for a certain degree of resignation, but by the morning of the fourth day, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Hey, can you do that on the roof or someplace?” I said. “I can’t sleep.”
“But it’s already six-thirty!” he said, open-mouthed.
“Yeah, I know it’s six-thirty. I’m still supposed to be asleep. I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but that’s how it works for me.”
“Anyhow, I can’t do it on the roof. Somebody on the third floor would complain. Here, we’re over a storeroom.”
“So go out on the quad. On the lawn.”
“That’s no good, either. I don’t have a transistor radio. I need to plug it in. And you can’t do Radio Calisthenics without music.”
True, his radio was an old piece of junk without batteries. Mine was a transistor portable, but it was strictly FM, for music.
“O.K., let’s compromise,” I said. “Do your exercises but cut out the jumping part. It’s so damned noisy. Whaddya say?”
“Juh-jumping? What’s that?”
“Jumping is jumping. Bouncing up and down.”
“But there isn’t any jumping.”
My head was starting to hurt. I was ready to give up, but at least I wanted to finish making my point. I got out of bed and started bouncing up and down and singing the opening melody of NHK’s Radio Calisthenics. “I’m talking about this,” I said.
“Oh, that. I guess you’re right. I never noticed.”
“See what I mean?” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Just cut out that part. I can put up with the rest. Stop jumping and let me sleep.”
“But that’s impossible,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can’t leave anything out. I’ve been doing the same thing every day for ten years, and once I start I do the whole routine unconsciously. If I left something out, I wouldn’t be able to do any of it.”
There was nothing more for me to say. What could I have said? The quickest way to put a stop to this was to wait for him to leave the room and throw his goddamn radio out the goddamn window, but I knew if I did that all hell would break loose. Storm Trooper treasured everything he owned. He smiled when he saw me sitting on the bed at a loss for words, and he tried to comfort me.
“Gee, Watanabe, why don’t you just get up and exercise with me?” And he went off to breakfast.
NAOKO CHUCKLED when I told her the story of Storm Trooper and his Radio Calisthenics. I hadn’t been trying to amuse her, but I ended up laughing myself. Though her smile vanished in an instant, I enjoyed seeing it for the first time in a long while.
We had left the train at Yotsuya and were walking along the embankment by the station. It was a Sunday afternoon in the middle of May. The brief off-and-on showers of the morning had cleared up before noon, and a south wind had swept away the low-hanging clouds. The cherry trees’ brilliant green leaves stirred in the air and splashed sunlight in all directions. This was an early summer day. The people we passed had their sweaters or jacket
s over their shoulders or in their arms. Everyone looked happy in the warm Sunday afternoon sun. The young men playing tennis in the courts beyond the embankment had stripped down to their short pants. Only where two nuns in winter habits sat talking on a bench did the summer light seem not to reach, though both wore looks of satisfaction as they enjoyed chatting in the sun.
Fifteen minutes of walking and I was sweaty enough to take off my thick cotton shirt and go with a T-shirt. Naoko had rolled the sleeves of her light gray sweatshirt up to her elbows. The shirt was nicely faded, having obviously been laundered many times. I felt as if I had seen her in that shirt long before. This was just a feeling I had, not a clear memory. I didn’t have that much to remember about Naoko at the time.
“How do you like communal living?” she asked. “Is it fun to live with a lot of other people?”
“I don’t know, I’ve only been doing it a month or so. I guess it’s not that bad, I can stand it.”
She stopped at a fountain and took a sip, wiping her mouth with a white handkerchief she took from her pants pocket. Then she bent over and carefully retied her shoes.
“Do you think I could do it?”
“What? Live in a dorm?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I guess it’s all a matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to—the rules, the jerks who think they’re hot shit, the roommates doing Radio Calisthenics at six-thirty in the morning. But if you figure it’s pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.”
“I guess so,” she said with a nod. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind. Then she looked straight into my eyes as if peering at some unusual object. Now I saw that her eyes were so deep and clear they made my heart thump. I realized that I had never had occasion to look into her eyes like this. It was the first time the two of us had ever gone walking together or talked at such length.
“Are you thinking about living in a dorm or something?” I asked.
Norwegian Wood (Vintage International) Page 2
