“Right. Only I got a permanent this summer. A real horror, that. I seriously considered ending it all, it was so, like…really gruesome. Like seaweed tangles on a drowned corpse. But if it was worth killing myself over, I thought, I might as well lop the whole lot off, have a crew-cut. And this is loads cooler,” she said, running a hand over her two-inch shag. Then she turned to me and smiled.
“It’s not bad at all,” I said, eating my omelet. “Let’s have a look from the side.”
She turned to the side and held the position for maybe five seconds.
“Mmm, looks good on you, I’d say. I guess it’s the shape of your head. Shows off your ears nicely, too,” I offered.
“Right you are. I think so, too. Cutting it all off like this wasn’t half-bad, I thought. But y’know, guys, they never say so. ‘Elementary school’ or ‘concentration camp,’ that’s all I get. Tell me, why are guys so hung up on girls with long hair? Downright fascist. Stupid. Why do men have this thing about girls with long hair being so elegant, refined, feminine, and all that? Me, I must know two hundred and fifty low-life girls with long hair. Honest.”
“I like you much better this way,” I said. And that was no lie. When she’d had long hair, she hadn’t made much of an impression on me. As far as I could remember, she’d been, well, your ordinary cute girl. Whereas the girl sitting across from me now seemed like some fantastic creature just sprung into the world with the advent of spring, body bristling with life. The pupils of her eyes darted about excitedly, separate life-forms unto themselves, laughing, raging, pausing, withdrawing. It’d been ages since I’d seen anyone so absolutely alive. I just gazed at her, enthralled.
“You really think so?”
I nodded as I ate my salad.
Donning her sunglasses once more, she looked at me from their depths.
“Say, you wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
“Well, if at all possible, I’d like to think of myself as an honest person,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said.
“Why do you wear such dark sunglasses?” I ventured.
“It was all so sudden, getting my hair cut short, I felt defenseless. Like I’d been cast out naked into the crowd. It made me nervous. That’s why I got these.”
“Fair enough,” I said, then finished the rest of my omelet. She watched me eat with singular intensity.
“You don’t have to be getting back?” I asked, nodding at the three members of her group.
“No big deal. I’ll get back to them when the food comes. Not to worry. Unless I’m bothering you.”
“No bother at all, I was just finishing,” I said. She showed no sign of heading back to her table, so I ordered a coffee. The lady of the house cleared away my plate and set down cream and sugar in its place.
“Tell me, why didn’t you answer today in class when they were taking roll call? Watanabe’s your name, isn’t it? Toru Watanabe?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you answer?”
“I just didn’t feel like answering today.”
She took her sunglasses off once again, placed them on the table, and gave me a look as if she were peering into the cage of some rare species of animal. “ ‘I just didn’t feel like answering today,’ ” she repeated. “Y’know, you talk like Humphrey Bogart. Cool and tough.”
“Give me a break. I’m just an ordinary person. Like you find all over the place.”
The lady brought my coffee and put it down in front of me. I took a sip. Black.
“See, what’d I tell you, no cream or sugar.”
“I don’t happen to like sweet things, that’s all,” I explained as patiently as I could. “Don’t go getting any wrong ideas.”
“Why are you so tan?”
“I took a two-week hiking trip. Here and there. Backpack and sleeping bag. That’s why.”
“Whereabouts?
“From Kanazawa all around the Noto Peninsula. Up to Niigata.”
“All by yourself?”
“Sure,” I said. “Some places I might have company, though.”
“Any romance along the way? A girl you maybe met at some stopover?”
“Romance?” I said, taken aback. “Listen, now I know you’ve got the wrong picture. Just tell me, a guy with a sleeping bag, unshaven, traipsing around, just where do you suppose he’s going to run across romance?”
“You always travel around by yourself like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“You like loneliness?” she asked, propping her chin in her hand. “Traveling alone, eating meals alone, sitting off alone in class, is that what you like?”
“Nobody likes loneliness. I just don’t go out of my way to make friends. I’d only get let down in the end.”
She put her sunglasses to her lips and said in a low voice, “ ‘Nobody likes loneliness. I’d only get let down in the end.’ If you ever write your memoirs, you could use that line.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Do you like green?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s a green polo shirt you’re wearing. I thought I’d ask.”
“It’s nothing special by me. Anything’ll do.”
“ ‘Nothing special by me. Anything’ll do.’ ” She was repeating again. “I just love the way you talk. It’s like plastered over smooth. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Never, I told her.
“Well, I just did. My name’s Midori. I know it means ‘green,’ but I don’t look good in the color. Strange, isn’t it? And my sister’s name means ‘pink.’ It isn’t fair.”
“Does your sister look good in pink?”
“She was born to wear pink. It’s just not fair.”
The food arrived over at her table and a fellow in a Madras check shirt was calling. She gave a “gotcha” hand signal in his direction.
“Say, Watanabe, do you take notes in lectures? ‘History of Theater II’?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I hate to ask, but could you lend me them? I missed two lectures. And there’s nobody I know in the class.”
“Sure, of course.” I took the notebook out of my satchel, and after checking that there wasn’t anything extraneous written in it, I handed it over to Midori.
“Thanks. So, Watanabe, you going to be in school the day after tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Well, then, can you come here at twelve? I’ll give you back your notes and treat you to lunch. It’s not like you get indigestion if you don’t eat alone, is it?”
“Come off it,” I said. “And I don’t need any thank-yous. Not for lending you my notes, I don’t.”
“That’s okay. I’d like to. So it’s set then? You don’t need to write it down? You won’t forget?”
“I won’t forget. I’m to meet you here the day after tomorrow at twelve.”
Again a call from across the room. “Hey, Midori, hurry up, the food’s getting cold!”
“Tell me, have you always spoken like you do?” she asked, ignoring the call.
“I guess so. It’s nothing I pay much attention to,” I answered. In fact, it was the first time I was aware there was anything strange at all about the way I spoke.
She seemed to think something over for a second, then smiled and went back to her table. When I passed by her table as I was leaving, Midori waved. The other three just looked at me.
Wednesday at twelve Midori didn’t show. I’d only meant to have a beer while waiting for her, but the place got crowded so I felt I ought to order some food. It was twelve-thirty-five by the time I finished eating. Still no Midori. I paid the bill and stepped outside, took a seat on the stone steps of a little Shinto shrine across the way and let the beer wear off, waiting for her until one. Nothing doing. I gave up and headed back to campus to read in the library. I had a German class from two.
When the lecture was over, I went to the Students’ Union to look at the class register and found her name listed in “H
istory of Theater II”—Midori Kobayashi. No other Midori in the class. Next I went to the student card file, searched out a “Kobayashi, Midori, matriculated 1969,” and jotted down her address and telephone number. The address was in Toshima, northwest Tokyo, her family home. I went to a phone booth and gave the number a call.
“Hello, Kobayashi Book Shop,” came a man’s voice. Kobayashi Book Shop?
“Excuse me, but would Midori be there?” I inquired.
“No, she’s out right now,” said the man.
“Has she gone to the university?”
“Hmm, er…maybe the hospital. And your name is?”
I didn’t leave my name, but simply said thanks and hung up. Hospital? Had she injured herself or been taken ill? There’d been no out-of-the-ordinary urgency in the man’s voice. “Hmm, er…maybe the hospital.” From the sound of it, the hospital constituted a regular part of her life, like going to market to buy fish. All said in passing. I tried thinking this one through, but I could tell it was going to be a while before I got anywhere, so I simply went back to the dorm, stretched out on the bed, and finished reading the copy of Conrad’s Lord Jim I’d borrowed from Nagasawa. Then I went to return it to him.
Nagasawa was just stepping out for dinner, so I went with him to the dining hall.
“How’d the Foreign Ministry exam go?” I asked. The second part of the exam had been in August.
“Straightforward,” said Nagasawa blandly. “Passing’s equally straightforward. You’ve got your group discussion and your interview. No different than spinning a line to a girl.”
“So it was easy,” I said. “When are the results announced?”
“Beginning of October. Buy you a good meal if I top the list.”
“Tell me, then, just what is there to the Foreign Ministry exams? Is everyone who takes them ‘Nagasawa class’?”
“You kidding? Most are jerks. If not, then loonies. Ninety-five percent of your would-be bureaucrats are downright trash. I kid you not. Most of ’em are functionally illiterate.”
“Then why’d you want to enter the Foreign Ministry?”
“I have my reasons,” said Nagasawa. “Say I like the notion of working overseas, things like that. But the greatest reason is that I want to test my own abilities. And if I’m going to give it the Nagasawa try, I want to test my mettle in the biggest pool around, the state. Just to see how far I can rise in this vast bureaucracy, how far I can go on my own talents. You follow?”
“It all sounds like a game.”
“Exactly. It has all the makings of one. I don’t have any of this lust for wealth or power—well, hardly any. And that’s the truth. Maybe I’m one small-minded jerk, but it’d surprise you how little of that there is in me. I’m your selfless, emotionless, detached man. What I do have is curiosity. That and a will to try my stuff in the tough, wide world.”
“Which leaves no room for ideals, I take it?”
“Of course not,” he said. “There’s no need of that in life. What’s needed isn’t ideals but role models.”
“But surely there must be loads of lives not like that,” I protested.
“You have something against the way I live?”
“Oh, stop it,” I said. “It’s got nothing to do with like or dislike. Am I right or am I right? Granted, I didn’t make it into Tokyo University and I don’t have the knack for sleeping with any woman I want whenever I want and smooth talk doesn’t come easy to me. Nobody holds me in awe or steps out of the way for me. I don’t even have a girlfriend. And graduating from the literature department of a second-rate university, what hope have I of a future? What is there I could possibly say to you?”
“So does that mean you’re jealous of my life?”
“Nothing of the kind,” I said. “I’m much too used to my own. Moreover, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t the least interest in Tokyo University or the Foreign Ministry. The one and only thing I’m jealous of is your having a wonderful girlfriend like Hatsumi.”
He ate his meal in silence.
“You know, Watanabe,” Nagasawa said after he’d finished, “I just know our paths are going to cross somewhere ten, twenty years after we leave this place. And I also know that in some way or another we’re both going to be in need of each other’s services.”
“A Dickens novel if ever there was one,” I joked.
“Maybe so.” He laughed. “But my hunches generally hit the mark.”
After dinner Nagasawa and I went drinking in a nearby bar. We stayed there until past nine.
“So tell me, Nagasawa, what the hell kind of role model do you have?” I thought to ask.
“You’d laugh, I know,” he said.
“Laugh? Not me,” I said.
“A gentleman, that is what I aspire to be.”
I didn’t laugh, but I did nearly fall out of my chair, incredulous. “By gentleman, do you mean a…gentleman?”
“That’s it—a gentleman,” he said.
“And just what does this being a gentleman entail? If you’ve a definition, would you care to enlighten me?”
“A gentleman is he who does not what he wants to do but what he ought to do.”
“Of all the people I’ve met up to now, you’ve got to be the biggest oddball,” I said.
“And of all the people I’ve met up to now, you’ve got to be the most regular,” he said. Then he paid the whole bill.
*
At the following Monday’s “History of Theater II,” there was again no sign of Midori Kobayashi. I scanned the entire classroom to make sure she wasn’t there, then took my usual seat in the last row and wrote a letter to Naoko until the professor showed. I wrote about my travels this past summer. The paths I’d walked, towns I’d passed through, people I’d met. Each night always brought thoughts of you, I added. Only since I’d been unable to see you have I come to realize how much I want you. University was boring beyond measure, but I’d resolved to attend classes and study as a form of self-discipline. Since you’ve been gone, everything’s seemed dull and lifeless. I want to see you, if only once, and just talk. If at all possible, I’d like to visit your sanatorium and spend some time with you. Could that be arranged? And again, if possible, I’d like to take a walk side by side with you, like before. And dare I make one last imposition, I wrote. Please send a reply, however short.
Keeping it at that, I neatly folded the four sheets and slid them into the envelope I’d brought along, addressing it care of Naoko’s family.
At last the short, grim-faced professor made his appearance and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He had a bad leg and always walked with a metal cane. “History of Theater II,” if not exactly a fun lecture, was at least a well-delivered, worthwhile listen. Starting off with “It’s as hot as usual,” he plunged into an explication of the role of the deus ex machina in Euripidean drama. The gods in Euripides were different from those in Aeschylus and Sophocles, he maintained. Ten minutes on, the door to the classroom opened and in walked Midori. She wore a dark blue sports shirt with cream-colored cotton slacks and the same sunglasses as before. Directing a sorry-I’m-late smile at the professor, she found her way to the seat next to me. Then she extracted a notebook from her shoulder-bag and handed it to me. Attached was a memo. “Sorry about Wednesday. Mad?”
The lecture was about halfway through and the professor was sketching the set-up of the Greek stage on the blackboard when the door flew open and two helmeted students strode in. A vaudeville duo, one lanky and wan, the other dark-complexioned, portly, and with a “radical” growth of beard that did absolutely nothing for him. The tall one was clutching a stack of handbills. The short one filed over to the professor and informed him that, with all due respect, they would be turning the latter half of his lecture into a debate. There were issues in today’s world far more serious than Greek tragedy, he said. It was not a demand; it was a simple declaration. I can’t imagine anything more serious than Greek tragedy, the professor scoffed, but whatever I say will sure
ly be pointless, so go ahead and do what you’re going to do. Then, pulling himself up by the edge of the desk, he took up his cane and fumed out of the classroom, dragging his foot.
The tall student set about passing out handbills, while the round-faced student mounted the podium and began a speech. The handbills were in that facile block writing uniquely capable of reducing all phenomena to succinct formulae. “Smash the Deceitful Chancellor Elections!” “Gather Forces Behind the Renewed All-University Strike!” “Bring Down the Hammer on the Path of Industrial-Academic Collusion! Japanese Imperial System!” The argument was fine, the contents hardly objectionable, but the writing failed to convince. It imparted no confidence, nor was there any power to command hearts and minds. The round-faced student’s speech likewise wove in and out, embroidering on similar themes. The same old song. The melody remained constant, only the lyrics of who-did-what-to-whom had changed. This crew’s real enemy wasn’t the System, it was their own lack of imagination.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Midori.
I nodded and stood up, then the two of us walked out of the classroom. Round Face said something to me as we were leaving, which I didn’t quite catch. Midori told him “Bye-bye” with a fluttering wave of her hand.
“Tell me, does this mean we’re counter-revolutionary?” Midori asked once we were out of the classroom. “If the revolution succeeds, we’re both sure to be hung from telephone poles.”
“Well, before that I’d like to eat some lunch if we might,” I said.
“Why yes, there’s a little out-of-the-way place I’d like to take you to. That is, if you’ve got some time.”
“Why not? I’m free until my two o’clock class.”
Midori led me to a bus and we rode to Yotsuya. The shop turned out to be a tiny traditional box-lunch place tucked away in the backstreets. No sooner were we seated at a table than the day’s set menu was brought forth in square vermilion-lacquered boxes along with bowls of clear broth. Well worth the bus trip.
“Delicious.”
“And cheap, too. That’s why I’ve been coming here occasionally for lunch since high school. ’Cause you know, my high school was right around here. A real strict school. We’d have to sneak out to eat here. It was the sort of school that would suspend you if they ever caught you eating out.”
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 7
