The university was barricaded and lectures cancelled, so I took a part-time job with a moving company. I’d sit next to the driver, load and unload the trucks. It was much harder work than I’d imagined, and at first my body ached so much I could barely get up in the morning. But the pay made up for that and, besides, keeping my body active made me forget about the empty cavity inside. Five days a week I worked for the movers in the daytime and three nights a week I had my record shop job. The nights I didn’t work, I’d drink whiskey in my room and read. Kamikaze never touched a drop of liquor and was predictably hyper about the smell of alcohol, complaining that he couldn’t study for the stench whenever I lay on my bed swigging whiskey, so why didn’t I go out to drink?
“You go out,” I said.
“B-But you’re not supposed to be drinking in the d-dorm. It’s against the r-rules,” he said.
“You go out,” I repeated.
He didn’t say another word. I felt miserable and went up on the roof to drink.
June rolled around and I wrote another long letter to Naoko, again sending it to her Kobe address. The contents were pretty much as before, with a final addition that it’s hard waiting for an answer that doesn’t come, so please write, if only to let me know how badly I hurt you. When I posted the letter, I could almost feel the cavity in my heart grow a tiny bit bigger.
Twice in June I went out on the town with Nagasawa and slept with girls. Sheer simplicity both times. One girl put up a bit of a fight when I took her to a hotel and started to take off her clothes. Yet no sooner had I decided it wasn’t worth the fuss and had gotten into bed alone to read a book than she sidled up to me of her own accord. The other girl wanted to know all about me after we’d had sex. How many girls I’d slept with, where I was from, what kind of music I liked, whether I’d ever read any novels by Osamu Dazai, had I traveled overseas, did I think her nipples were too big compared to other girls’—you name it, she asked it. I answered as tactfully as I could, then dozed off. On waking, the girl said she’d like to have breakfast with me, so we went to a coffee shop and ordered their morning special. Awful toast, awful eggs, awful coffee. Meanwhile the girl kept up a steady stream of questions. What kind of work did my father do, did I get good grades in high school, what month was I born, had I ever eaten frogs’ legs, did I this, had I that? I began to get a headache, so when we’d finished breakfast, I told her I really ought to be going to my part-time job.
“Say, can’t we meet again?” she asked despondently.
“We’ll meet again in due time,” I said, then split. Great, just great, I thought to myself as soon as I was on my own. What the hell was I doing? Thoroughly disgusted with myself, I nonetheless considered the alternative. There wasn’t any. My body had cried out for sleeping with those girls. Yet the whole time I slept with them I’d been thinking of Naoko. Her naked body floating up pale white in the dark, her breathing, the sound of the rain. The more I thought of these things, the more acute the hunger my body felt, the thirst. I went up on the roof alone and drank whiskey, wondering what on earth I was to do with myself.
At the beginning of July a letter arrived from Naoko. A short letter.
‘‘Please excuse my long delay in replying. But try to understand. It took me a long time before I could get myself to put things down on paper. This is my tenth time writing this letter. Writing comes hard to me.
‘‘Let me start from the conclusion. I’ve decided for the moment to take a year off from university. I say ‘for the moment,’ but I doubt at this point I’ll be going back to university at all. The leave or absence is merely a formality. This may seem very sudden to you, but it’s something I’d been thinking of for a long time. I thought of talking to you about it many times, but just couldn’t get it out. I guess I was afraid of opening up.
“There’s too much here for you to be worrying about. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, this is just how things turned out. Maybe putting it like this will hurt your feelings, and if that’s the case I apologize, but what I want to say is that I don’t want you to go blaming yourself on my account. This is something I have to do all by myself. I’d been letting it slide all this past year or so and was probably a burden to you because of it. This has to be the end.
“After I moved out of the Kokubunji apartment, I went back to my folks in Kobe and was going to a clinic for treatment. According to the doctor there’s a sanatorium that could help me in the mountains near Kyoto, and I’m thinking of going there for a while. Not a hospital exactly, but a relaxed recuperation center. I can’t say much about it now. I’ll write you more details later. What I need now is somewhere nice and quiet, remote from the outside world, where my nerves can get a rest.
“I’m grateful in my own way for your having stayed by my side this past year. Please believe that, if nothing else. You did not hurt me. The one who hurt me was myself. Of this much I’m sure.
“I’m not ready to see you again just yet. Not that I don’t want to see you—I’m just not prepared. I’ll be sure to write you a letter as soon as I feel I am ready. Then I think we might be able to get to know each other a little better. As you yourself put it, we still have many things to learn about each other.
“Goodbye for now.”
I read the letter hundreds of times. A desolate feeling possessed me with each reading, akin to the desolation I’d felt whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. An inconsolable feeling I couldn’t deal with or find any place for. Without contour or weight, like a wind whistling around my body, it was nothing I could even wrap around myself. Scenes passed before my eyes, other peoples’ words failed to reach my ears.
Saturday nights I passed the hours sitting in the lobby watching television just as before. No expectations of a phone call, but nothing else to do. I was forever turning on baseball broadcasts and pretending to watch. Then I’d divide the vast awkward space lying between the television and myself into two, and divide those two spaces again into halves. Over and over again, until finally I’d made a space tiny enough to fit in the palm of my hand.
At ten o’clock, I’d turn off the TV, go back to my room, and fall asleep.
*
At the end of the month, Kamikaze presented me with a firefly.
The firefly was in an instant coffee jar. The jar contained some stalks of grass and a little water, and its lid was perforated with tiny air holes. It was still daylight, so it seemed only one rather unremarkable black bug, like any you’d find near water. Nevertheless, Kamikaze declared, this was definitely a firefly. He knew all about fireflies, he claimed, and I had no particular reason to challenge him. Fine, so it was a firefly. The firefly looked kind of sleepy. It would slip each time it tried to scale the glass walls.
“It was in the yard.”
“The yard here?” I asked, surprised.
“R-Remember there’s a hotel nearby that lets out fireflies in the summer to attract customers? The thing just found its way here,” he said, stuffing clothes and notebooks into his black Boston bag.
Already several weeks into summer vacation, we were about the only ones still at the dorm. I’d kept up my part-time work, not wanting to return to Kobe, and he’d had job training. Which he’d just finished and was now heading back home. Kamikaze’s family lived in Yamanashi.
“You’d do well to give it to a girl. She’d be thrilled, I’m sure,” he told me.
“Thanks,” I said.
The dorm was dead quiet at the end of the day, a virtual derelict. Down came the flag, on came the lights in the dining hall windows. Only half of them lit since there were so few students. The right half off, left half on. Even so, there was a faint smell of evening meal in the air. Cream stew.
I took the coffee jar with the firefly up to the roof. There wasn’t a soul up there. Only a white shirt someone had forgotten fluttered on the clothesline like some cast-off skin. I mounted the iron ladder at the corner of the roof and climbed up the water tower. The cylindrical tank was still warm from the heat
of the day. I sat down on it and leaned over the railing, with an ever so slightly clipped moon floating right there in plain view. To the right lay the lights of Shinjuku, to the left the lights of Ikebukuro. Rivers of car headlights poured between one center and another. A soft drone composed of all the different sounds hovered hazily over the metropolis.
The firefly glowed at the bottom of the jar, but all too weakly, with hardly any life to it. The last time I’d seen a firefly was long ago. Still, the fireflies of my memory shone far more brightly as they flitted about in the summer night air, nothing like this. I had believed in the brilliance of fireflies.
Maybe the firefly was dying and on its last glow. Holding the jar by the mouth I gave it a couple of gentle shakes. The firefly struck the glass and flew maybe an inch, but its light was as dim as ever.
Just when was the last time I’d seen a firefly? And where? I could picture the scene, but the place and time escaped me. I could hear the dark sound of water at night. There was an old brick floodgate, the kind you cranked the handle to open and close. It wasn’t a big river, more a small stream, the surface thick with reeds that had spread out from the banks. It was dark all about, too dark to see even my own feet when I switched off the flashlight. And there on the pool above the floodgate swarmed what seemed like hundreds of fireflies, skittering like sparks across the water.
I closed my eyes and for a while immersed myself in the dark night of memory. The sound of the wind came through clearer than ever. Not a very strong wind, really, yet it carved astonishingly vivid tracks as it lapped around my body. On opening my eyes, the summer night had grown a shade deeper.
I opened the jar and let the firefly out, setting it down on the inch-high rim of the water tank. This new state of affairs didn’t seem to register with the firefly. It toddled around a bolt, kicking over a scab of paint in its path. It first headed right, ascertained that it had run into a dead end, then turned back left. Then it set at patiently scaling the bolt and squatted motionless there on top. The firefly almost seemed out of breath, not even twitching.
I sat there, leaning on the railing, just looking at the little fellow. Neither of us moved for a good long while. Only the breeze slipped past us, rustling the countless leaves of the giant zelkova in the dark.
I waited.
Ages later, the firefly took off. Flicking open its wings as if it suddenly remembered, the next instant it was over the railing and off into the gloom. Then, making up for lost time, it dashed out in an arc beside the water tower, paused just long enough to let the streak of light adhere to the breeze, then finally flew off to the east.
The firefly had vanished, but its light trail still lingered, a pale glow through the thick eyeshut darkness like some homeless spirit wandering on and on without end.
Over and over I stretched out my hand into the night. My fingers touched nothing. That trace of light was always just a little beyond my fingertips.
CHAPTER 4
Over summer break the university called in the riot police, who broke down the barricades and arrested all the students holed up inside. This was nothing so out of the ordinary: the same thing was happening at all the other universities at the time. The university wasn’t dismantled or anything like it. There was a lot of capital invested in the university and it was not about to come undone just like that—“Sure thing, whatever you say”—simply because some students raised a commotion. In any case, even those who’d barricaded the campus hadn’t really thought to break up the university. All they’d sought was a hand in altering the directives, which to me couldn’t have mattered less. Hence the squelching of the strike was no great loss as far as I was concerned.
Come September, I went back to the university half expecting to find the place in ruins, but the campus was untouched. No books looted from the library, no classrooms in shambles, no Students’ Union burned to the ground. I was shocked. What the hell had those clowns been up to?
The strike broke up and lectures resumed with riot police on the campus. The first students back in attendance were the very crowd who’d led the strike. They came to class, pulled out their notebooks, answered when their names were called. It didn’t make any sense. The resolution to strike was still in effect: no one had declared an end to it. For all the incursion of the riot police and destruction of the barricades, the strike was still on in principle. These were the guys who’d been so vocal about striking, who’d been quick to knock down or string up any student opposing the strike (or even showing any doubts). I went up to them and asked straight out why they didn’t keep on striking, why were they now going to lectures? They didn’t answer. No way they would. How could they? They were afraid of losing credits because of poor attendance. And to think that these were the guys who’d called for the dismantling of the university! What a joke! This miserable flock of opportunists would raise or lower their voices with the least shift in the wind.
Hey, Kizuki! It’s a rotten world we’ve got here, I found myself thinking. These worms’ll be sure to get their college credits, go out into society, and busily set about making one miserable little status quo.
I decided I’d go to class, but for the time being wouldn’t answer when attendance was taken. A meaningless gesture, I knew, but I didn’t feel right otherwise. Still, because of this gesture, I became even more isolated from the rest of the class. My name would be called, I wouldn’t answer, and an awkward silence would sweep through the classroom. No one would talk to me and I would talk to no one.
The second week of September I arrived at the conclusion that my so-called university education was absolutely meaningless. Still, I decided to perceive it all as an exercise in withstanding boredom. There was no compelling reason to quit school and go out into the world. There was nothing I particularly wanted to do. So every day I went to the university, attended lectures, took notes, and in my free time read books and did research in the library.
*
By the second week of September Kamikaze still hadn’t returned. This was more than just strange, it was earthshaking. Classes had already started at his university and it wasn’t like him to miss them. A fine layer of dust collected on his desk and radio. On the shelf above, his plastic cup and toothbrush, tea canister, bug spray, and other sundry items stood neatly arranged as ever.
While Kamikaze was away, I cleaned the room. Cleaning the room had become part of my routine this past year and a half, so if Kamikaze wasn’t around, then it was up to me to maintain its cleanliness. I’d sweep the floor every day, clean the windows every third day, air the bedding once a week. I awaited Kamikaze’s return, his words of praise, “W-Watanabe, what’s come over you? Everything’s so clean.”
But he didn’t return. One day, coming back from school, I found all his things had been removed. Even his name was missing from the door, leaving only my own. I went to the dormitory supervisor to ask what had become of him.
“He’s left the dormitory,” the supervisor said. “You’ll be alone in that room for a while.”
When I asked what had happened, he told me nothing. He was that type of scum who derives the utmost pleasure from maintaining an elite of one, managing things without telling others anything.
I left the photograph of the iceberg on the wall for a while, but eventually took it down and put up pictures of Jim Morrison and Miles Davis instead.
Made the place a bit more like my own. I bought a small stereo with savings from my jobs, and in the evenings I’d have a drink and listen to music all by myself. I thought of Kamikaze from time to time, but found I’d become a confirmed single-room-dweller nonetheless.
*
Monday mornings from ten o’clock I had “History of Theater II,” lectures on Euripides, which ended at eleven-thirty. After the lecture, I’d walk to a little restaurant ten minutes from campus and have an omelet and salad. A bit off the main drag, the restaurant was slightly pricier than your average student spot, but the place was peaceful and they did serve a mean omelet. Three
people worked there, a quiet couple and a girl part-timer. One day, I was sitting alone by the window eating my lunch when four students entered, two men and two women, all neatly dressed. They took a table near the door and looked over the menu, considered their choices a while, then assembled an order, which they relayed to the part-timer.
After a time I noticed that one of the girls kept glancing in my direction. Incredibly short-cropped hair, dark sunglasses, white cotton miniskirt, she wasn’t anyone I recalled seeing before, so I went on eating, until suddenly she stood up and came over. Putting one hand on the edge of the table, she addressed me by name.
“You’re Watanabe, no?”
I glanced up and took a closer look at her face. Still no recognition. She cut such a striking figure I was sure I’d have remembered if I’d met her before. And yet there weren’t that many people around the university who knew me by name.
“Mind if I sit here a while? Or are you expecting someone?”
I shook my head, not knowing exactly what to do. “No, no one’s coming. Sit down.”
She took the seat opposite, pulling out the chair noisily, stared at me from behind her sunglasses, then shifted her gaze to my plate.
“Looks good, that.”
“It is. Mushroom omelet and green pea salad.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll try that next time. I already ordered something else.”
“What did you order?”
“Macaroni au gratin.”
“The macaroni’s not bad,” I said. “But, say, have we met somewhere before? I can’t seem to remember.”
“Euripides,” she said flat out. “Electra. ‘No, not even the gods lend an ear to our misfortunes.’ The class that just finished.”
I took a good long look at her. She removed her sunglasses. Then I remembered. She was a freshman I’d seen in “History of Theater II,” only she’d changed her hairstyle so radically I hardly recognized her.
“Hold on, didn’t you have long hair before summer vacation?” I asked, pointing to four inches below her shoulder.
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 6
