Norwegian Wood Vol 1.

by Haruki Murakami

  She was attending a women’s university on the edge of Musashino. Small, but with a solid reputation for English studies. A canal ran near her apartment and we’d often stroll along it. Naoko might take me to her place and make me a meal, but she never seemed to think anything of the two of us being alone in her room. She kept her place tidy, with not one unnecessary item, and except for the stockings hung up to dry in the corner, you’d never think it a girl’s room. She lived simply and frugally, and had very few friends, an inconceivable break from her high school ways. The Naoko I used to know was always dressed in fancy clothes and surrounded by lots of friends. Seeing her room, I guessed that, just like me, she’d wanted to leave home and start a new life where she didn’t know anyone.

  “I chose this university because I figured nobody from my school would come here,” Naoko joked. “Not us girls. We’d all go someplace a little more chic. You known what I mean, I’m sure.”

  Still, relations with Naoko were not entirely without progress. Little by little, Naoko took to me and I to her. Summer vacation ended and automatically, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a new semester found her walking alongside me. Which I took as a sign that Naoko had recognized me as a full-fledged friend. And it wasn’t so bad having a beautiful girl by your side. We wandered aimlessly all over Tokyo—up hills, across streams, over train tracks, everywhere. No particular direction, just walking for the sake of it. Relentless as some healing spiritual rite. And if it rained, we’d open our umbrellas and keep walking.

  Come autumn and the dormitory courtyard was covered in zelkova leaves. We pulled on sweaters and enjoyed the scent of the new season in the air. Having by now worn one pair of shoes to death, I bought a new pair of suedes.

  I can’t actually recall what we talked about, but it probably didn’t amount to anything. As always, we never uttered a word about the past. The name Kizuki almost never came up. We didn’t really exchange many words at all, having by then grown completely accustomed to sitting silently across from each other in cafés.

  Naoko always asked about Kamikaze, and that was our standard topic. Kamikaze once went out on a date with a girl in his class (a geography major, obviously), but he’d only come home that evening looking singularly depressed. This was in June. He asked me, “T-Tell me, Watanabe, what do you usually talk about with a g-girl?” What I said, I don’t remember, but certainly he couldn’t have picked a worse person to ask. In July, someone had taken down the photo of the Amsterdam canal while he was out and substituted a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Just to see if he could masturbate to the Golden Gate Bridge,” no other reason. I told the guy that he’d been really pleased, just to have something to say, and the next thing I knew someone else had put up a photo of an iceberg. Each time the photo changed, Kamikaze would be plunged into confusion.

  “I mean, w-who is doing this?” he stammered.

  “Hmm, dunno, but it’s not so bad, is it? They’re all pretty pictures. Whoever’s doing it, we ought to be thankful,” I said to console him.

  “Sure, maybe, but it’s un-un-nerving,” said he.

  These Kamikaze stories always made Naoko laugh. Honestly speaking, though, I never felt quite right about using the guy as joke material. He may have been about the only thing that always got a rise out her, but he was also merely the third son of a not-so-well-to-do family. Overly serious maybe, but that’s all. And if making maps was the single modest dream of his modest life, who could fault him for that?

  Me, apparently. By then the Kamikaze jokes had already become standard material throughout the dorm and no longer anything I could control. And there was definitely something to be said about seeing Naoko smile. So I kept supplying everyone with Kamikaze stories.

  Only once did Naoko ask me if I had a girlfriend. I told her about the girl I’d broken up with, that she was a nice girl and I liked sleeping with her and I still thought of her from time to time. I don’t know, I told her, things just never clicked. Probably I had a hard shell around my heart and only a very few things could break in. That’s why I couldn’t really love anybody.

  “Haven’t you ever loved anyone?” asked Naoko.

  “No,” I said.

  She didn’t ask any more.

  As autumn drew to an end and cold winds whipped through the streets, she’d sometimes lean close to my arm. Through the thick material of her duffel coat, I could just barely feel Naoko’s breathing. She’d take my arm in hers, or warm her hand in my pocket, or, when it got really cold, she’d cling shivering to my arm. But there wasn’t anything more to it than that. I just kept walking with both hands in my pockets, same as ever. We both wore rubber-soled shoes, so we hardly made any sound as we walked. Only when we stepped on the dead leaves from the plane trees lining the street did we make a rustle. The sound made me feel sorry for Naoko. What Naoko wanted was not my arm, but someone’s arm, not my warmth, but someone’s warmth. It made me feel almost sorry it had to be me.

  With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that led nowhere. Occasionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of loneliness and inadequacy.

  I began to think she was trying to get something across to me, only she couldn’t put it into words. No, it was something preceding words, something she herself couldn’t grasp. All the more reason why the words wouldn’t come. Which had her constantly fiddling with her hairclip, wiping her lips with her handkerchief, and staring meaninglessly into my eyes. I would have loved to hold her, to comfort her, but I always stopped short. Probably that would only have hurt her. So it was that we kept walking the streets of Tokyo and Naoko kept searching for words in a void. Same as ever.

  Whenever there was a telephone call from Naoko or I went out on Sunday mornings, the guys at the dorm would always kid me about it. Only to be expected, really. They all thought I’d gotten myself a girlfriend. There was no way to explain otherwise and no need to, so I just let things ride. When I’d return in the evening somebody’d invariably ask me what position we’d made it in or what hers felt like or what color panties she wore or some other stupid remark. To which I inevitably made some appropriate response.

  *

  And so I turned nineteen. The sun rose and fell, the national flag was raised and lowered, and every Sunday I dated the girlfriend of my dead best friend. What the hell was I doing? What was I trying to do? I had absolutely no idea. In class we read Claudel, Racine, Eisenstein, all of which did precious little for me. I didn’t make one new friend at school, and relations at the dorm were one-time-around at best. Everyone thought that because I was always reading I wanted to become a writer, but I never even entertained the idea. I didn’t especially think about becoming anything.

  On a number of occasions I tried to talk to Naoko about these things. She at least could come close to knowing what I meant. But I never could find the words to express myself. Strange, I thought. It was as if I’d caught her disease of groping for words.

  Saturday evening I’d be in a chair in the lobby by the phone, waiting for Naoko’s call. Saturday evenings, with almost everyone out on the town, the place was emptier than usual. Sitting there in that stillness, I’d stare at the particles of light drifting through space, trying to divine my own thoughts. What the hell was I after? And what did people want of me? No answer was forthcoming. At times I’d reach out my hand toward those drifting pan tides of light, but my fingertips never touched anything.

  *

  I was always reading, yet I wasn’t your voracious reader. I read my favorites over and over again, which at the time included Truman Capote, Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. I never ran into another soul in my classes or at the dorm with my tastes in fiction. They’d generally be reading Kazumi Takahashi or Kenzaburo Oe or Yukio Mishima. Either that or contemporary French writers. So, of course, our conversation never meshed. I’d just keep my nose to my
own books, read them time and again, close my eyes, and inhale their essence. The smell of the print, the feel of the pages, these things alone were enough to thrill me.

  To my eighteen-year-old tastes, John Updike’s Centaur had been the pinnacle of writing, yet after a few readings it began to lose its original luster, making way for The Great Gatsby to ease into the number one slot. Whenever I felt like it, I’d take Gatsby down from the shelf, open it at random, and read a passage. It never once let me down. Never a boring page. Just amazing. Nonetheless, there wasn’t another person around who’d read Gatsby, or anyone even conceivably a Gatsby-reader type. Even if no one campaigned against the reading of Fitzgerald, no one exactly recommended it either.

  At the time there was but one other person who’d read The Great Gatsby, and that was how he fell in with me. A Tokyo University law student named Nagasawa, two years my senior. He lived in the same dorm, so I pretty much knew him by sight. When I was sitting soaking up the sun in a spot in the dining hall one day with my copy of Gatsby, he came up and sat beside me. He wanted to know what I was reading and I told him Gatsby. Interesting? he asked. Interesting enough for me to read it three times through and still feel tingles.

  “Any guy who reads The Great Gatsby three times through has gotta be okay by me,” he said, half to himself. And so we became friends. That was October.

  The more I learned about this Nagasawa, the more he struck me as an oddball. Now, I’ve crossed paths with and gotten to know my share of oddballs in my time, but none was as offbeat as he. I can’t even begin to touch the number of books he’d read, yet he made it a rule never to read anything by writers who’d been dead for less than thirty years. Can’t trust them, he’d say.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust contemporary literature. It’s just that I don’t want to waste my precious hours on something that hasn’t stood the test of time. Life is short.”

  “So tell me, Nagasawa, what sort of writers do you like?” I asked.

  “Balzac, Dante, Conrad, Dickens,” he rattled off.

  “Nobody very up-to-date, as writers go.”

  “That’s why I read them. If I read what everybody else reads, I’d only wind up thinking like everybody else. That’s for hicks, riff-raff. People with a decent head on their shoulders shouldn’t stoop to that. Think about it, Watanabe. Do you know you and I are the only two halfway decent guys in this dorm? The rest are trash.”

  “What makes you think that?” I asked, taken aback.

  “I just know, clear as if there was a mark on our foreheads. That and we’re the only ones who’ve read Gatsby.”

  I did a quick calculation in my head. “But Scott Fitzgerald’s only been dead twenty-eight years.”

  “Who’s to quibble over two years?” he said. “Under par is fine for a writer as great as Fitzgerald.”

  Still, it was one of the best-kept secrets in the dorm that here was a closet classicist. Not that anybody would have cared much if they’d known. What he was famous for, above all, were his brains. He’d gotten into Tokyo University with no problem, had impeccable grades, and would pass his public service examinations and enter the Foreign Ministry and be a diplomat. His father ran a large hospital in Nagoya that his elder brother, predictably a Tokyo University med-school graduate, was slated to take on. Your storybook household. He had loads of pocket money, on top of which he had style, so everyone always showed him respect. Even the dorm supervisor couldn’t bring himself to say anything too strong to Nagasawa. If he requested something of someone, it would get done, no complaints. That’s all there was to it.

  Nagasawa was equipped with an inborn something that made others just naturally fall in line. An ability to be up on everyone by assessing situations virtually instantaneously, by delivering succinct, well-calculated instructions, and by getting people to do his bidding promptly. An aura hovered halolike above his head as a sign of these powers. Anyone had but to set eyes on him to recognize with fear and trembling that “This man is special.” Accordingly, everyone was dumbfounded that Nagasawa should have chosen an undistinguished nobody like me to be his friend. Thanks to which, people I hardly even knew began treating me with no mean respect. It boggled the mind, but the reason was simple enough. Nagasawa liked me because I didn’t pay him any special homage or attention. I was interested in his oddball human side, the convoluted workings of his person, but couldn’t have cared less about any grade-point average or aura or manly stature. Very probably a refreshing change for him.

  Nagasawa was a man of extremes, pulled together from a number of contradictory characteristics. Times he would be so kind even I’d be touched; yet, at the same time, deep down he was one nasty bastard. He embodied all the noble aspects of the spirit even as he indulged in the most common vulgarities. He’d forge ahead optimistically, carrying everyone along with him, a lonely sea of despair in his heart the whole while. I’d distinctly sensed these contradictions from the very first and couldn’t for the life of me understand how the others could be so blind to them. The guy lugged around his own living hell.

  As a rule, however, I believe I harbored good feelings toward him. His greatest virtue was his honesty: he positively never lied, and always admitted his own errors and faults. Nor did he hide things that were not to his advantage. He was invariably considerate toward me and took care of all kinds of things for me. I’m sure that if he hadn’t, dorm life would have been considerably more complicated and unpleasant. Yet I never once gave myself over wholeheartedly to him, and in that sense my relationship with him was completely different from my relationship with Kizuki. From the time I saw Nagasawa mistreat a drunk girl, I made up my mind never to give myself over to him no matter what.

  There were a number of dorm legends concerning Nagasawa. One was that he’d swallowed three slugs; another was that he had an extremely large prick and had slept with one hundred women.

  The slug story was true. He told me so himself when I asked him: “Three big ones.”

  “Why’d you want to do a thing like that?”

  “It’s a long story,” he began, “but the year I entered the dorm, there was something of a row between the incoming students and the upperclassmen. September, I’m pretty sure it was. So I went on behalf of the newcomers to talk to the upperclassmen. Real right-wingers, the lot of them, with wooden kendo swords, not a very conducive atmosphere for talking things over. I knew then and there it’d be up to me, so I told them I’d do whatever it took, just let’s get things settled. All right, then, let’s see you swallow some slugs, they said. Fine by me, I told them, I’ll swallow them. And I did. Three huge slugs the thugs rounded up.”

  “What’d it feel like?”

  “What’d it feel like? Like nothing that anyone who hasn’t swallowed slugs could possibly understand. That slimy ooze as the slugs slide down your throat and plop into your stomach. Unbearable. All cold and wet, and that aftertaste in your mouth. Simply revolting just to think of it. I wasn’t going to retch up those things if it killed me. If I had, they’d just have made me swallow them again. Altogether I swallowed three of the things.” “What did you do afterwards?”

  “I went back to my room and gulped down pitchers of salt water, of course,” said Nagasawa. “I mean, what else was there for me to do?”

  “You have a point there,” I granted.

  “But after that nobody could say a word against me, upperclassmen included. I dare say there’s no one else around who’d swallow three slugs like that.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  Verifying prick size was a simple matter. All I had to do was go to the baths with him. To be sure, it was a fine specimen. But one hundred women? Well, that was just bragging. More like seventy-five or so, he said after some reflection. Seventy, easy. When I told him I’d only slept with one girl, he merely ribbed me that, hey, there was nothing to it.

  “Tag along with me next time. Believe me, you’ll get it right off.”

  His talk seemed all too incredible
at the time, but in actual practice it really did prove remarkably easy. So easy, it almost took the fun out of it. We’d go to a bar or club in Shibuya or Shinjuku (generally one of his regulars), find two likely looking girls and strike up a conversation (the world is filled with girls sitting in pairs), have some drinks, then take them to a hotel and have sex. In any case, he was one smooth talker. Not that he talked about anything in particular, but when he turned on the charm, the girls would all swoon in a haze of admiration, get dragged along in the verbal undertow, drink too much in the process, and end up sleeping with him. And, of course, he was handsome, considerate, and clever, so the girls would be giddy just to be around him. Plus somehow—and this was the strangest thing of all for me—simply being with Nagasawa cast me in an attractive light, making even me seem a seductive type. Spurred on by Nagasawa, I’d say something and the girls would be all ears and laugh as they did for him. All because of Nagasawa’s magic. An amazing talent, his. It’d bowl me over every time. By comparison, Kizuki’s gift for gab was mere child’s play. This was on a completely different scale. Even so, for all Nagasawa’s flaunting of his abilities, I really began to miss Kizuki. I saw him in a new light: he’d been one faithful guy. Whatever minor talents he possessed, he’d saved them all for Naoko and me, whereas Nagasawa dispensed his overwhelming mastery all over the place as if it were all a game. Generally, he wouldn’t even want to sleep with the girls sitting across from him. He was only playing.

  I myself can’t say I was too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn’t know. As a method of letting off sexual steam it was easy enough, and the flesh-on-flesh contact felt pleasant as such. What got to me were those goodbyes the morning after. I’d wake up and there’d be some girl I’d never seen before fast asleep beside me, the whole room stinking of alcohol. The bed, the lights, the curtains, and the rest, all in that uniquely chintzy love-hotel decor, and me, my head blanked-out with a hangover. Eventually the girl would wake up and grope around for her underwear. Then, as she put on her stockings, she’d say, “I sure hope you remembered to wear one of those things last night, ’cause it was the worst possible day of my cycle.” Then she’d sit at the mirror muttering about how her head hurt, or how she couldn’t get her makeup right, while she put on lipstick and eyelashes. I just hated all that. Really, I always meant to leave before morning, but you can’t very well be casting lines at girls while minding a twelve o’clock curfew (physically impossible, that), the only alternative to which was obtaining night leave. Then you’d have no choice but to stay out until morning, whereupon you’d drag yourself back to the dorm disillusioned and hating yourself. Sun glaring in your eyes, mouth all grotty, feeling as if there was someone else’s head on your shoulders.