Norwegian Wood Vol 1.

by Haruki Murakami

  Eventually I got tired of walking and decided to go sit in a round-the-clock coffee shop and read my book until the trains started running. After a while, the shop started filling up with other people who had the same idea. A waiter came by saying, sorry, but would I mind sharing? No, not at all, I said. After all I was only reading. What difference did it make who was sitting across from me?

  It was two girls who came to sit at my table. Probably about the same age as I. Neither of them beauties, but nice enough girls, I guess. Regular clothes and makeup. Not exactly your let’s-go-running-around-Shinjuku-at-five-in-the-morning types. Probably something had made them miss the last train. They seemed rather relieved to have the likes of me as a table-partner. I looked presentable, had shaved the evening before, and to top it all, I was engrossed in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

  One of the girls was large in build, wore a short gray parka, white shoes, shell-shaped earrings, and carried a large imitation leather purse. The other was petite, wore glasses, a blue cardigan over a checked shirt, and a turquoise blue ring. The petite one had a habit of removing her glasses from time to time and massaging her eyes with her fingertips.

  Both girls ordered café au lait and cake, then talked in a whisper about something or other while taking their time eating and drinking. Several times the big girl bent her head forward to hear the petite one, who had her head turned to the side. Marvin Gaye and the Bee Gees were playing too loud for me to hear what they were talking about. As near as I could figure, the petite girl was troubled or angry and the big girl was trying to console her— there, there, now. I alternated between reading my book and observing the two of them.

  The petite girl repaired to the ladies’ room clutching her shoulder bag, whereupon the big one turned to me. Ahem, she cleared her throat, might she interrupt? I set down my book and looked at her.

  “Do you know of any place around here where we can still get a drink?” she asked.

  “After five in the morning?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well…yeah.”

  “Excuse me, but five-twenty is an hour when most people are trying to get off their drunk and hie themselves home.”

  “Er, I’m aware of that,” she said, abashed. “But my friend says she just has to have a drink. She’s, well, been through a lot.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to go home and drink, the two of you?”

  “But, you see, at seven in the morning I have to be on a train to Nagano.”

  “Well, then, it looks like you haven’t got much choice but to buy some sake from a vending machine and sit yourselves somewhere.”

  Then would I, she said most apologetically, would I mind tagging along with them? That was nothing for two girls to be doing alone. Now I’d seen my share of strange goings-on in nighttime Shinjuku, but this was a first, being invited to go out drinking by two girls, complete strangers, at five-twenty in the morning. It was too much trouble to decline, and hell, I wasn’t doing anything really, so we loaded up on snacks and a few rounds of one-cup sake from a machine and headed out to the west plaza of Shinjuku Station for an impromptu bash.

  I found out that they worked in a travel agency. Fresh out of junior college this year, the both of them, they’d just started working and were best friends. The petite girl had a boyfriend she’d been seeing for a good year now, but had recently discovered that he’d been sleeping with another girl, at which she was furious and depressed. That was pretty much the story. The big girl’s older brother was getting married that very day, which meant she was supposed have gone home to her folks in Nagano the previous night, but instead she had hung out with her friend all night in Shinjuku, having decided to catch a special express to Nagano first thing Sunday morning.

  “Tell me, how’d you know he was sleeping with someone else?” I thought I’d ask the petite girl.

  She took little-bird sips of her sake, plucking at the weeds by her feet. “I opened the door to his place and there they were, doing it, right before my eyes. Wasn’t any knowing or not knowing.” “When was that?”

  “The night before last.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “And the door was open?”

  “Right.”

  “Why’d you suppose he left the door unlocked?” I said.

  “How should I know something like that? Really!”

  “But can you imagine the shock? How awful it must have felt!” said the big girl.

  “I really can’t say, but you ought to at least get together and talk it out. Then the rest’d be a question of either forgiving or not.”

  “Nobody understands how I feel!” spat out the petite girl, still sipping at her sake and pinching weeds.

  A squadron of crows swooped in from the west and over the top of Odakyu Department Store. Day was breaking. What with talking and this and that, it was getting time for the big girl to catch her train, so we gave what remained of our sake to a bum in the west exit underground, bought platform tickets, and saw her off. Once her train pulled out of sight, the petite girl and I found ourselves a hotel. Neither one’s idea, really. And it wasn’t as if either she or I wanted to go to bed with the other. There just wasn’t any other way to lay things to rest.

  Checking into our room, I stripped and was first into the bath. In the tub, I had myself a beer, half out of spite. Then the girl got in, too, and the both of us just lay there soaking and drinking beer. Drink as we might, we weren’t getting drunk. Or sleepy. Her skin was white and silky, her legs nicely shaped. I complimented her on her legs and she muttered a gratuitous thanks.

  But once in bed, she was a different animal altogether, responding to each move of my hands, twisting and contorting, moaning. She dug her sharp nails into my back when I entered her, and called out another guy’s name all of sixteen times as she approached orgasm. I spent all my energy just counting the number of times in order to delay coming. Then we both just slept.

  At half-past twelve I woke to find her gone. No note, no message, no nothing. The strange drinking hours had taken their toll and my head was feeling all lopsided. I showered off my drowsiness, shaved, sat down naked in a chair and drank a fruit drink from the refrigerator. Then I set about putting the events of the previous night in order. Everything seemed unreal, sandwiched between layers of glass, but still unmistakably actual occurrences.

  There were the glasses we’d drunk beer from, right on the table, used toothbrushes by the washbasin.

  I ate a quick lunch in Shinjuku, then tried calling Kobayashi Book Shop from a telephone booth. Just a thought—maybe she’d be phone-sitting again today. Fifteen rings later, there was still no answer. I gave it one more call after another twenty minutes, but with no better luck. I caught the bus back to the dorm. In the mailbox at the entrance was an envelope. Special delivery. It was a letter from Naoko.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Thank you for the letter,” wrote Naoko. It had been forwarded “here” from her parents’ house. My letter had been no imposition at all. In fact, she’d been overjoyed. Actually, she’d been thinking it was about time she wrote me and so on.

  Having read that far, I opened my dorm room window, took off my jacket, and sat myself down on the bed. A breeze ruffled the curtains. Was that the cooing of pigeons I heard from some birdhouse nearby? I gave myself over to these seven pages from Naoko in my hands. After only the first few lines, the real world around me went faintly transparent. I closed my eyes and gathered myself. At length I took a deep breath and read on.

  “It’s been nearly four months since I came here,” continued Naoko. “Over these four months I’ve done a lot of thinking about you. And the more thinking I do, the more I’ve come to realize that I wasn’t fair to you. Couldn’t I have acted more like a responsible human being?

  “But maybe this line of thought isn’t quite normal. For one thing, girls my age would never use the word ‘fair.’ Basically, what does the average girl care whether something is fair or not? The really typical thing for girls is not whether some
thing is fair or not, but whether it’s beautiful or if it can make her happy, and that’s the heart of it. ‘Fairness’ just seems to be one of these words that males use. Even so, I can’t help feeling there is something perfectly apt about this word ‘fairness.’ Perhaps it’s because I get so caught up in these questions of what’s beautiful or what I have to do to be happy that I’d just as soon fall back on some other standard. Like fairness or honesty or universality.

  “Be that as it may, I feel I was unfair to you. I’m aware I dragged you all over the place, hurting you greatly, I’m sure. And in the process, I dealt myself some scrapes and hurt myself, too. I have no excuses and no defense. If I’ve left you scarred, the scars are on me as well, so please don’t hate me for it. I am an imperfect human being, far more imperfect than you think. All the more reason for me to beg you not to hate me. If you were to hate me, I’d fall to pieces. I’m not like you. I can’t make it inside my own shell. It may seem I can, but you really have no idea. That’s why sometimes I’m really envious of you, and maybe why I dragged you about more than was necessary.

  “Perhaps I’m overanalyzing things. Although certainly not because the treatment here is analytic. The mere fact of undergoing treatment for several months has placed me in more or less a self-analyzing position. This happened because of that, or this really means this, or the reasons behind this are such-and-such. It’s hard to tell whether all this analyzing actually simplifies things or just sub-divides.

  “All the same, I do feel I’ve got a lot better. Everyone here agrees I’ve made headway. It’s been ages since I’ve been able to sit down and calmly write a letter like this. I barely managed to squeeze out that letter to you in July (I don’t honestly remember a thing in it. How bad was it?), but now I’m quite relaxed about writing. I guess I do need the clean air, uninterrupted tranquillity, regular hours, daily exercise, and all that. It’s great being able to write someone a letter. If I feel like telling someone what I feel, I just sit myself down at a desk with paper and pen like this and I write. It’s really wonderful. Of course, when I look over what I’ve written, I’ve generally only expressed one part of what I wanted to say, but, still, that’s something. I’m happy just to be able to feel that I want to write someone something. And so here I am, writing to you.

  “Right now it’s seven-thirty in the evening, after dinner and a bath. All is calm, and outside it’s dark. Not a light anywhere. Usually the stars are quite beautiful, but tonight just happens to be cloudy. Everyone up here is very knowledgeable about the constellations. They tell me which is Virgo and which is Sagittarius. Probably they memorized them just to have something to do after the sun goes down. By the same token, everyone up here is well versed in birds and flowers and insects. Talking to them shows me how ignorant I’ve been about a lot of things, which is good to know.

  “Altogether there are about seventy people living up here. In addition to which, there are over twenty staffers (doctors, nurses, office workers, various others). It’s a big place, so it doesn’t seem like a large number. On the contrary, ‘leisurely’ would probably be the word for it. Spacious, with an abundance of nature, everyone living peacefully. So peacefully, in fact, I sometimes find myself wondering whether maybe this isn’t how things should be normally. But, of course, that could never be. We’re all living here under a kind of pretext, and that’s what keeps it like this.

  “I play tennis and basketball. The basketball teams are made up of patients (horrible word, but what’s the alternative?) and staffers together. But when things get fast and furious, I lose track of just who’s what. Which is kind of strange. But the real strange thing is that when I look around me during the game, everyone and his neighbor look equally warped.

  “One day my doctor told me that, in a sense, my intuition was right. That we weren’t there to be straightened out, but to become adjusted to being warped. That one of our problems was that we couldn’t accept being warped. For just as we each have some distinctive quirk in the way we walk, we all have quirks in our feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, quirks which would not only take considerable time and effort to correct if we set our minds to it, but it might actually warp something else if we forced the process. Of course, this was only a very simplified explanation touching but one part of our problems; yet I got the gist of what he was saying. I certainly doubt many of us can handle our own quirks that well. Which makes us hard put to locate the very real pain and suffering these quirks cause within us, hence the need to come up here for isolation. As long as we’re up here, there’s no hurting others and no being hurt by others. That’s because we all know we’re ‘warped.’ In this we’re one up on the outside world. Most people in the outside world live with no awareness of being warped. But here in this little world of ours, what are we if not warped? It’s our reason for being here, the tribal feather in our headdress. It’s also how we can live quiet lives without hurting anyone.

  “Besides exercising, we raise vegetables. Tomatoes, eggplants, watermelons, strawberries, onions, cabbages—you name it, we grow it. We even have a greenhouse. People are all such serious gardeners here. They read books, invite experts, talk morning to night about what’s the best fertilizer or how to improve the soil or who knows what. Even I’ve gotten hooked on vegetable gardening. It’s wonderful just watching fruits and vegetables getting bigger little by little each day. Have you ever grown a watermelon? Well, watermelons fill out just like little animals or something.

  “So everyday we eat nothing but freshly picked fruits and vegetables. Of course, they serve meat and fish, too, but the longer I’m up here the less I feel like eating such heavy things. Anyway, the produce here is crisp and delicious. We also go out picking wild greens and mushrooms. We have an expert (come to think of it, we’re up to here in experts!) who tells us what’s edible and what’s not. Thanks to which, I’ve gained six pounds since I got here. I now weigh just about what I should, the result of exercise and regular eating.

  “Other times I’m reading books, listening to records, knitting, and the like. We don’t have TV or radio. Instead, we have a well-stocked reading room and record library, with everything from Mahler symphonies to the Beatles. I’m always borrowing records to listen to in my room.

  “The only problem with this sanatorium is that once you’ve entered, you become hesitant, even scared, to leave. So long as we’re up here everything is peaceful and calm. We can feel perfectly natural about being warped. We think we’ve recovered. But will the outside world be as accepting of us? I have my doubts.

  “My doctor is saying that it’s about time for me to have contact with outside people. By ‘outside people,’ I mean sane people from the sane world, but somehow or other yours is the only face that comes to mind. To be honest, I don’t much want to see my parents. They get really confused about me and make me feel miserable whenever I see them. And, besides, there are a number of things I have to explain to you. I don’t really know if I can explain things well or not, but they’re very important and not of the avoidable kind.

  “Having said this, however, please don’t think me a burden. For if there’s one thing I don’t want to be, it’s a burden. I appreciate your kindness toward me and it makes me very happy. I’d like to get that across to you as honestly as I can. Very probably it’s kindness like yours I need at this time. I’m sorry if anything I write puts you off. Forgive me. As I said before, I’m far more imperfect as a human being than you seem to think.

  “Sometimes I find myself thinking what it would have been like if you and I had met under extremely ordinary circumstances. Me normal, you normal (like you have been from the beginning, anyway). Supposing Kizuki hadn’t existed. The trouble is, these ‘ifs’ are just too big. It’s all I can do to just honestly try to be fair. At least then part of my feelings may get across.

  “Unlike a regular hospital, there are no restrictions on visitors at this sanatorium. Just phone a day in advance and we can see each other whenever you like. We can eat me
als together and there’s guest accommodation. Please come whenever it’s convenient for you. I’m looking forward to seeing you. I enclose a map. I didn’t mean this to be such a long letter. Sorry.”

  I read it to the end and started rereading it from the top. Then I went down to the vending machine corner to buy a coke and reread it again. Finally I returned the seven pages to their envelope and placed it on my desk. Written on the pink envelope was my address in tiny neat characters, maybe even too neat for a girl’s hand. I sat at the desk just looking at the envelope a while. On the back flap her return address was given as “Ami Lodge.” From the French word for friend? Strange name.

  Putting the letter away in a drawer, I changed clothes and stepped outside. If I stayed anywhere near that letter, I just knew I’d be reading it over and over again ten, twenty times. Instead, I set out alone on a meandering Sunday walk through Tokyo like Naoko and I had always taken together in the past. Bringing line after line of her letter to mind, giving them the usual spin about in my consciousness, I wandered from street to street. Until the end of the day, when I returned to the dorm and placed a long-distance call to Ami Lodge. A receptionist answered and asked my business. I told her Naoko’s name and whether it might be possible for me to visit her the next afternoon. She took my name and told me to call back in thirty minutes.

  I called again after supper and the same woman answered, saying that it would be possible, so please feel free to come. I thanked her and hung up, then packed a knapsack with a change of clothes and wash things. After which I had myself some brandy and read The Magic Mountain until I started feeling drowsy. It was past one by the time I got to sleep.