Norwegian Wood Vol 1.

by Haruki Murakami

  “Open the shutter and come on in,” she yelled.

  “I got here a little early,” I yelled back.

  “No problem. I’m afraid I’ve got my hands full at the moment, so why don’t you just come on up,” she said, then slid the window shut.

  The shutter made the most horrible racket when I pulled it up a few feet to duck inside. And when I pushed it down again, the shop went pitch black. As I made my way to the back of the shop, I nearly tripped over bundles of magazines that lay about the floor. Once safely across, I took off my shoes, then stepped into the gloomy interior of the house proper. By the dim light that filtered in from a window like in some classic Polish film, I could see a fair-sized parlor of sorts, complete with a simple sofa set. Immediately to the left was a storage area-cum-trunk room as well as the door to a toilet. I maneuvered cautiously up the steep stairway to the right and was relieved to find the upstairs a good deal brighter than below.

  “Over here, this way,” I could hear Midori’s voice calling. To the right of the head of the stairs was something of a dining room, with a kitchen beyond. Although the house itself was old, the kitchen looked brand-new, a very recent addition, with sink and faucet and cabinets gleaming. And there was Midori preparing lunch. Something was simmering away in a pot, and there was a smell of grilling fish.

  “There’s beer in the refrigerator, so help yourself and take a seat,” said Midori, glancing over her shoulder in my direction. I took out a dan of beer and sat down at the table. The beer was so chilled I’d almost bet it had been six months in there. On the table were a white ashtray and a newspaper and a bottle of soy sauce. There was also a ballpoint pen and a notepad with scribbled telephone numbers and what seemed to be grocery accounts.

  “It’ll be about another ten minutes, so just be patient. I hope you don’t mind waiting.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Then get hungry while you wait, will you? There’s a lot of food.”

  I sipped my beer and watched from behind as Midori worked. Utterly concentrated, her body moved with great efficiency, managing four separate cooking processes at once. One second she was tasting the simmering vegetables, the next she’d be dicing on the cutting board, then scooping something from the refrigerator into a dish, now washing up pots and pans. I felt as if I were watching an Indian musician ringing a bell here, striking a block there, tapping on ox bones. Each motion was incisive and economical, the whole balanced and graceful. I looked on with admiration.

  “Can I help you with anything?” I offered.

  “Everything’s fine. I’m used to doing it all by myself,” said Midori, throwing a quick grin in my direction. Over slim blue jeans she was wearing a T-shirt with a big Apple Records logo emblazoned behind. She was unbelievably skinny from the back. Her hips looked as if she had skipped one whole stage of filling out in the course of her development. Far from blossoming, these were dried bulbs of hips. Which gave her an androgynous appearance not the least like your ordinary girl in tight jeans. The light from the window over the sink highlighted the outline of her body.

  “You know, you didn’t have to fix anything fancy,” I said.

  “It’s nothing fancy at all,” said Midori over her shoulder. “I was busy yesterday and didn’t really have time to shop, so I’m only throwing together stuff that was in the fridge. So don’t feel it’s anything special. Honest. And besides, we always go all out for guests in this house. Basically, we like to treat people well. It’s kind of a family tradition, almost pathological. It’s not like we’re especially generous as a family, or are especially popular because of it, but whenever we have company it’s simply something we do. All of us have this streak, for better or worse. Take Father, for example. He doesn’t even drink, but he keeps a house full of liquor. What for? Just in case someone drops by. So don’t be polite, drink as much beer as you like.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Suddenly I remembered I’d left the narcissuses downstairs where I’d laid them aside when taking off my shoes. I slipped down to retrieve the white blossoms lying there in the gloom and carried them up to Midori, who put them in a slender glass she pulled out of a sideboard.

  “You know, I’ve always liked narcissuses,” said Midori. “Back in high school, I once sang “Seven Daffodils” for the school festival. You know the song?”

  “Of course.”

  “I was in this folk group back then. Played guitar.”

  Which had her humming the tune of “Seven Daffodils” the whole while she was arranging the food on plates.

  Midori’s cooking far exceeded my expectations. Mackerel vinaigrette, plump rolled omelets, marinated turbot, Kyoto-style, simmered eggplant, a broth with cress, mushroom rice with an ample side-helping of minced pickles and roasted sesame seeds. Her light hand with the seasonings hinted at subtle Kyoto culinary refinements and its understated flavors.

  “Incredibly good,” I said in all seriousness.

  “Tell me honestly, Watanabe, you really didn’t expect much of my cooking, did you? Not from appearances.”

  “Well, now that you mention it…” I hedged.

  “You’re from Kobe, so you like Kansai cooking, don’t you?”

  “You mean the light seasoning’s on my account?”

  “Are you kidding? However accommodating I might be, I wouldn’t take that much trouble. It’s the way we always cook in this house.”

  “Your mother or father’s from Kansai, then?”

  “Un-uh. Father’s lived around here all his life and Mother is from up north in Fukushima. Not a single relative from Kansai. Everyone in the family’s either from Tokyo or Tohoku.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you able to cook such authentic Kansai-style dishes? Somebody taught you?”

  “Sort of. It’s a long story,” she began as she ate her omelet. “Mother hated anything that called itself housework, cooking included. And what with the family business, she’d be so busy that every day it’d be something from one of the stores, say, minced meat croquettes from the meat shop, practically all the time. Horrible. I couldn’t stand it, growing up on that stuff. Really and truly hated it. Three days’ worth of curry on the stove and having to eat the same thing day after day. Then one day, in my third year of junior high school it was, I made up my mind I was going to cook real meals from then on. So I went to Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and bought the best cookbook I could lay my hands on. Brought it home and mastered everything from cover to cover. How to choose cutting boards, how to sharpen knives, how to clean fish, how to shave bonito flakes, everything. Well, it so happens that the author of the book was from Kansai, so all my cooking came out Kansai-style.”

  “You mean to say you learned all this from a book?” I asked, surprised.

  “That and from saving my money to eat out at good kaiseki cuisine places. To develop my palate. I tend to have a pretty good sense about these things. Not very strong on rational thinking, though.” “I’ve got to hand it to you, cooking this well without anyone teaching you.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” said Midori with a sigh. “I mean no one in this house has the least appreciation or interest in cooking. Say I wanted to buy a halfway decent knife or pan, nobody’d shell out the money. Even now I get my share of flak. No joke, no way. ‘You expect me to clean fish with this flimsy knife?’ I’d say. But all I get is, ‘Well then, don’t clean the fish at all.’ I just can’t win. So whatever allowance I got went on kitchen knives or pots or colanders. Can you believe it? A fifteen, sixteen-year-old girl scrimping and saving to buy colanders and whetstones and tempura frypans? Meanwhile all the other girls got to spend oodles of money on nice dresses and shoes. Pathetic, no?”

  I nodded as I sipped the broth.

  “My first year in high school I really wanted an omelet pan, the rectangular kind. So I took the money I had for a new bra and spent it on that. Which made for a good share of problems. I had only one bra to wear for three whole months. Can you believe
it? I’d wash it every night, dry it as best I could, put it back on in the morning. A real horror story if it didn’t dry out. Nothing more miserable in the world than having to wear a clammy bra, let me tell you. I’d be in tears. Especially to think it was all for one lousy omelet pan.”

  “I’d imagine so,” I said, laughing.

  “That’s why, when Mother died—no offense to her—I actually felt a little relieved. ’Cause then I got my hands on the purse-strings and could buy whatever I wanted. So now we have pretty much all the kitchen utensils you could ask for. I mean Father hasn’t a clue about managing household expenses anyway.”

  “When did your mother pass away?”

  “Two years ago,” she answered succinctly. “Cancer. Brain tumor. She’d been in the hospital for a year and a half, in real pain, until finally she just went out of her head and they had to keep her drugged. But still she hung on. They almost had to put her to sleep. It was, in a word, the worst way to die. It was unbearable for her and hard on everyone else around her. And worse still, it used up all the family savings. Tons of injections at twenty thousand yen a shot, plus all sorts of incidental expenses, one thing leading to another. And what with all the days I’d spend at the hospital watching over her, I lost so much study time I had to pass up entering college for one whole year. I could’ve kicked myself. On top of which—” she stopped in mid-sentence, reconsidered, and sighed as she set down her chopsticks. “No, this is all too grim. How’d we get onto this subject?”

  “From the brassiere,” I said.

  “Right. This is the omelet,” she said seriously. “Bear that in mind when you eat it.”

  I ate my fill. Midori herself didn’t eat that much. You get full just cooking, she said. After lunch, she cleared away the dishes, wiped the table, brought out a pack of Marlboros from somewhere and lit up. Then she picked up the glass with the narcissuses and looked at them for a while.

  “These are fine as they are,” Midori declared. “No need to switch them to a vase. This way it seems as if they’ve only just been picked at some nearby waterway and have made it as far as this glass for the time being.”

  “I picked them by the waterway in front of Otsuka Station,” I said.

  Midori giggled. “You really are a strange one, aren’t you? Able to keep a straight face and say that!”

  Midori leaned her cheek on one hand and smoked half her cigarette, then ground it out in the ashtray. She rubbed her eyes, apparently from the smoke.

  “Girls ought to put out their cigarettes with a little more style,” I said. “That was your lady lumberjack. Don’t think you have to make such an effort to put it out. Take your time and roll it out from the sides. That way you won’t crush it out of shape. What you did was pretty damn awful. One more thing, never blow smoke out through your nose, no matter what. And when dining alone with a man, this talk of wearing one bra for three months is, well, most girls wouldn’t bring it up.”

  “Afraid I am your lady lumberjack,” said Midori, scratching the side of her nose. “I’ll never be chic. I put on a show sometimes for laughs, but it doesn’t stick. Any other comments?”

  “Marlboro isn’t a girl’s cigarette.”

  “I don’t particularly mind. I mean they’re all just as bad,” she said. Then she turned the red Marlboro pack over and over in her hand. “I only began smoking a month ago. And in fact I’m not all that crazy about smoking. I just thought I’d try smoking.”

  “Why’d you think that?”

  Midori put both hands firmly together on the table and thought it over a while. “Whatever. Don’t you smoke, Watanabe?”

  “Gave up in June.”

  “Why’d you give up?”

  “Got to be a bother. The aggravation of running out of cigarettes in the middle of the night, things like that. So I just quit. Can’t take being tied down by something like that.”

  “You must just be that type who has to think things through.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s what makes me not very likable as a person. Been like that from way back.”

  “If you ask me, that’s because it’s plain to see that you don’t mind not being liked. Which tends to drive certain people crazy,” she mumbled, chin propped up in her hands. “Still I like talking with you. Your strange way of talking and all. ‘Can’t take being tied down by something like that.’ ”

  I helped Midori clear up, standing next to her, towel-drying the dishes she washed and stacking them on the kitchen counter.

  “By the way, where’s the rest of your family gone today?” I asked.

  “Mother’s in the grave. She died two years ago.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “Big Sister’s got a date with her fiance. Off on a drive somewhere I guess. Her guy works for an auto company. Big car person. Me, I’m not crazy about cars.”

  Midori went on silently washing dishes. I went on silently drying them.

  “And Father,” Midori spoke up after a bit.

  “Yes?”

  “Father went to Uruguay last June and never came back.”

  “Uruguay?” I said, startled. “What’s this with Uruguay?”

  “He up and moved to Uruguay. What a joke! Idiotic, really. An old army friend of his owns this farm in Uruguay and one day all of a sudden he starts in with this, ‘I’m heading off there,’ and he gets on a plane by himself and goes. I tried my best to stop him. I mean, what’s he going to do in a place like that? Can’t even speak the language, and above all it’s no good just running out on everything here in Tokyo. But no go. All I can think is that Mother’s death came as a big shock to Father, undid some screws up there. He loved Mother that much, he did.”

  There was no appropriate response in my repertoire. I just sat there, mouth open, looking at Midori.

  “When Mother died, do you know what Father said to Sister and me? He said, ‘I’m so upset. I’d rather you two had died than have Mother die on me like this.’ We were so shocked we couldn’t say anything. You can imagine, right? Even under the circumstances, you’d never say anything like that. Okay, I understand he’d lost the love of his life, all the bitterness and loneliness and sorrow that must’ve meant. And I pity him for that. But actually coming out and saying something like that to Sister and me, that he’d rather we’d died. That’s going too far, don’t you think?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I mean it hurt us,” said Midori with a shake of her head. “But, anyway, all our family’s a little off, somewhere. Each in his or her own way.”

  “So it would seem,” I granted.

  “Still, it’s a wonderful thing when people love each other, don’t you think? Imagine, to love your wife so much you’d tell your own daughters you’d rather they’d died instead.”

  “Well, if you put it like that…”

  “And running off to Uruguay. Tossing us aside like that.”

  I kept my mouth shut and dried the rest of the dishes. When I’d finished, Midori put everything away in the cupboard.

  “No contact from your father since?” I asked.

  “Only once, a picture postcard. Came this past March. Not that he wrote very much. It’s hot here, the fruit’s not as good as I’d expected, things like that. No damn joke, that. No way. One dumb postcard of a donkey. The man’s got some nerve, something loose upstairs, I swear. Didn’t even write whether he’d met up with that friend or acquaintance of his or anything. Toward the very end, he wrote that when he got more settled, he’d send for Sister and me. But after that, not a word. We sent off a letter, but got no reply.”

  “What if he did ask you to come to Uruguay, what would you do?”

  “I’d go have a look. I mean it’d be an adventure. Sister says she’d never go. She can’t stand unclean things and unclean places.”

  “Is Uruguay so unclean?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what she thinks. The roads all full of donkey shit, flies everywhere, toilets that won’t flush, lizards and scorpi
ons creeping all over the place. She probably saw some movie like that. Sister hates bugs, too. The only thing she likes is going for a drive around Shonan in a flashy car.” “Uh-huh.”

  “Uruguay, I mean, why not? I wouldn’t mind going there myself.”

  “So who’s looking after the store?” I asked. “Sister, and hating every minute of it. An uncle who lives in the neighborhood comes around to help out with the deliveries. And I help out whenever I have a spare moment. And hey, a bookstore’s not such hard work, after all, so we get by. If we didn’t, we’d just let the store fold.”

  “Do you feel any affection for your father?” Midori shook her head. “Not especially.”

  “Then why would you head off to Uruguay after him?”

  “I trust him.”

  “You trust him?”

  “That’s right. I may not hold much affection for him, but trust, yes, as far he’s concerned. Someone who’d toss off his house and children and work and run off to Uruguay out of sheer shock over losing his wife—sure, I trust him. Make any sense?”

  I sighed. “Kind of makes sense and kind of makes no sense at all.”

  Midori got a good laugh out of that and patted me on the back. “It’s perfectly fine with me, either way,” she said.

  That Sunday afternoon, it was one thing after the next, a strange day by any account. There was a fire right in Midori’s neighborhood. We went up on the third-story roof platform to take in the sights and somehow wound up kissing. Put like that, it all sounds very stupid, but that was the order of events.

  We were talking over coffee about things at the university when we heard fire trucks. The sirens kept getting louder and growing in number. Outside it sounded as if hordes of people were running around shouting. Midori went to the window that faced onto the street to have a look, then told me to wait right there and disappeared. The next thing I knew I could hear the thud, thud, thud, of footsteps racing upstairs.