Norwegian Wood

by Haruki Murakami

  “Fine,” said Naoko, tittering. “Do what you like.”

  The night air was cool. Reiko wore a pale blue cardigan over her shirt and walked with her hands shoved in the pockets of her jeans. Looking up at the sky, she sniffed the breeze like a dog. “Smells like rain,” she said. I tried sniffing, too, but couldn’t smell anything. True, there were lots of clouds in the sky obscuring the moon.

  “If you stay here long enough, you can pretty much tell the weather by the smell of the air,” said Reiko.

  We entered the wooded area where the staff houses stood. Reiko told me to wait a minute and walked over to the front door of one house, where she rang the bell. A woman came to the door—no doubt the lady of the house—and stood there chatting and chuckling with Reiko. Then she ducked inside and came back with a large plastic bag. Reiko thanked her and said goodnight before returning to the spot where I was standing.

  “Look,” she said, opening the bag.

  The bag held a huge pile of grapes in clusters.

  “Do you like grapes?”

  “I sure do.”

  She handed me the topmost bunch. “It’s O.K. to eat them. They’re washed.”

  We walked along eating grapes and spitting the skins and seeds on the ground. The fruit was fresh and delicious.

  “I give their boy piano lessons once in a while, and they give me different stuff. The wine we had was from them. I sometimes ask them to do a little shopping for me in town.”

  “I’d like to hear the rest of the story you were telling me yesterday,” I said.

  “Fine,” said Reiko. “But if we keep coming home late, Naoko might start getting suspicious.”

  “I’m willing to risk it.”

  “O.K., then. I want a roof, though. It’s a little chilly tonight.”

  She turned left as we approached the tennis courts. We went down a narrow stairway and came out to a spot where several storehouses stood like a block of row houses. Reiko opened the door of the nearest one, stepped in, and turned on the lights. “Come in,” she said. “It’s a nothing kind of place, though.”

  The storehouse contained neat rows of cross-country skis, boots, and poles, and on the floor were piled snow removal equipment and bags of rock salt.

  “I used to come here all the time for guitar practice—when I wanted to be alone. Nice and cozy, isn’t it?”

  Reiko sat on the bags of rock salt and invited me to sit next to her. I did as I was told.

  “Not much ventilation here, but mind if I smoke?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” I said.

  “This is one habit I can’t seem to break,” she said with a frown, but she lit up with obvious enjoyment. Not many people enjoy tobacco as much as Reiko did. I ate my grapes, carefully peeling them one at a time and tossing the skins and seeds into a tin that served as a wastebasket.

  “Now, let’s see, how far did we get last night?” Reiko asked.

  “It was a dark and stormy night, and you were climbing the steep cliff to grab the bird’s nest.”

  “You’re amazing, the way you can joke around with such a straight face,” said Reiko. “Let’s see, I think I had gotten to where I was giving piano lessons to the girl every Saturday morning.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Assuming you can divide everybody in the world into two groups—those who are good at teaching things to people, and those who are not—I pretty much belong to the first group,” said Reiko. “I never thought so when I was young, and I guess I didn’t want to think of myself that way, but I realized it was true when I had attained a degree of self-knowledge after I had reached a certain age. I’m good at teaching people things. Really good.”

  “I’ll bet you are.”

  “I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match. I got this clear in my own mind, I’d say, after I started teaching the girl. I had taught a few others when I was younger, strictly as a sideline, without seeing this about myself. It was only after I started teaching her that I started thinking of myself that way. Hey—I’m good at teaching people. That’s how well the lessons went.

  “As I said yesterday, the girl was nothing special when it came to technique, and there was no question of her becoming a professional musician, so I could take it easy. Plus she was going to the kind of girls’ school where anybody with half-decent grades automatically got into college, which meant she didn’t have to kill herself studying, and her mother was all for taking it easy with the lessons, too. So I didn’t push her to do anything. I knew the first time I met her that she was the kind of girl you couldn’t push to do anything, that she was the kind of child who would be all sweetness and say, ‘Yes, yes,’ and absolutely refuse to do anything she didn’t want to do. So the first thing I did was let her play a piece the way she wanted to—one hundred percent her own way. Then I would play the same piece all different ways for her, and the two of us would discuss which way was better or which way she liked better. Then I’d have her play the piece again, and her performance would be ten times better than the first time through. She would see for herself what worked best and bring those features into her own playing.”

  Reiko paused for a moment, looking at the glowing end of her cigarette. I went on eating my grapes without a word.

  “I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, ‘If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she’d be so much further along!’ But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think they’re amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. You think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required for character building. It’s a tragedy. I myself had tendencies like that, but fortunately I had a very tough teacher, so I kept them in check.

  “Anyhow, it was a joy to teach her. Like driving down the highway in a high-powered sports car that responds to the slightest touch—maybe responds too quickly, sometimes. The trick to teaching children like that is not to praise them too much. They’re so used to praise it doesn’t mean anything to them. You’ve got to dole it out wisely. And you can’t force anything on them. You have to let them choose for themselves. And you don’t let them rush ahead from one thing to the next: you make them stop and think. But that’s about it. If you do those things, you’ll get good results.”

  Reiko dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and stamped it out. Then she took a deep breath as if to calm her emotions.

  “When her lessons ended, we’d have tea and chat. Sometimes I’d show her certain jazz piano styles—like, this is Bud Powell, or this is Thelonious Monk. But mostly she talked. And what a talker she was! She could draw you right in.
As I told you yesterday, I think most of what she said was made up, but it was interesting. She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that’s what she was so good at—stirring people’s emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power. She tried to use it as skillfully and effectively as possible. She could make you feel whatever she wanted—angry or sad or sympathetic or disappointed or happy. She would manipulate people’s emotions for no other reason than to test her own powers. Of course, I only realized this later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.”

  Reiko shook her head and ate a few grapes.

  “It was a sickness,” she said. “The girl was sick. She was like the rotten apple that ruins all the other apples. And no one could cure her. She’ll have that sickness until the day she dies. In that sense, she was a sad little creature. I would have pitied her, too, if I hadn’t been one of her victims. I would have seen her as a victim.”

  Reiko ate a few more grapes. She seemed to be thinking of how best to go on with her story.

  “Well, anyhow, I enjoyed her for a good six months. Sometimes I’d find something she said a little surprising or odd. Or she’d be talking and I’d have this rush of horror to realize that the intensity of her hatred for some person went way beyond reason, or it would occur to me that she was just way too clever, and I’d wonder what she was really thinking. But, after all, everybody has their flaws, right? And finally, what business was it of mine to question her personality or character? I was just her piano teacher. All I had to care about was whether she practiced or not. And besides, the truth of the matter is that I liked her. I liked her a lot.

  “Still, I was careful not to tell her anything too personal about myself. I just had this instinctive sense I’d better avoid talking about such things. She asked me hundreds of questions—she was dying to know more about me—but I told her only the most harmless kind of stuff, like things about my girlhood or where I’d gone to school, stuff like that. She said she wanted to know more about me, but I told her there was nothing to tell: I’d had a boring life, I had an ordinary husband, an ordinary child, and a ton of housework. ‘But I like you so much,’ she’d say, and look me right in the eye in this clingy sort of way. It sent a thrill through me when she did that—a nice thrill. But even so, I never told her more than I had to.

  “And then one day—a day in May, I think it was—in the middle of her lesson, she said she felt sick. I saw she was pale and sweating and asked if she wanted to go home, but she said she thought she’d feel better if she could just lie down a while. So I took her—almost carried her—to the bedroom. We had such a small sofa, the bed was the only place she could lie down. She apologized for being a bother, but I assured her it was no bother and asked if she wanted anything to drink. She said no, she just wanted me to stay near her a while, which I said I’d be glad to do.

  “A few minutes later she asked me to rub her back. She sounded as if she was really suffering, and she was sweating like crazy, so I started to give her a good massage. Then she apologized and asked me if I’d mind taking off her bra, it was hurting her. So, I don’t know, I did it. She was wearing a skintight blouse, and I had to unbutton that and reach behind and undo the bra hooks. She had big breasts for a thirteen-year-old. Twice as big as mine. And she wasn’t wearing any starter bra but a real adult model, an expensive one. Of course I’m not paying all that much attention at the time, and like an idiot I just keep on rubbing her back. She keeps apologizing in this pitiful voice like she’s really sorry, and I keep telling her it’s O.K., it’s O.K.”

  Reiko tapped the ashes from her next cigarette to the floor. By then I had stopped eating grapes and was giving all my attention to her story.

  “After a while she starts sobbing. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘It’s obviously not nothing,’ I say. ‘Tell me the truth. What’s bothering you?’ So she says, ‘I just get like this sometimes. I don’t know what to do. I’m so lonely and sad, and I can’t talk to anybody, and nobody cares about me. And it hurts so much, I just get like this. I can’t sleep at night, and I don’t feel like eating, and coming here for my lesson is the only thing I have to look forward to.’ So I say, ‘You can talk to me. Tell me why this happens to you.’ Things are not going well at home, she says. She can’t love her parents, and they don’t love her. Her father is seeing another woman and hardly ever comes home, and that makes her mother half crazy and she takes it out on the girl; she beats her almost every day and she hates to go home. So now the girl is really wailing, and her eyes are full of tears, those beautiful eyes of hers. The sight is enough to make a god blubber. So I tell her, if it’s so terrible to go home, she can come to my place anytime she likes. When she hears that, the girl throws her arms around me and says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, but if I didn’t have you I wouldn’t know what to do. Please don’t turn your back on me. If you did that, I’d have nowhere to go.’

  “So, I don’t know, I hold her head against me and I’m caressing her and saying, ‘There there,’ and she’s got her arms around me and she’s stroking my back, and soon I’m starting to feel very strange, my whole body is kind of hot. I mean, here’s this picture-perfect beautiful girl and I’m on the bed with her, and we’re hugging, and her hands are caressing my back in this incredibly sensual way that my own husband couldn’t begin to match, and I feel all the screws coming loose in my body every time she touches me, and before I know it she’s got my blouse and bra off and she’s stroking my breasts. So that’s when it finally hits me that she’s an absolute dyed-in-the-wool lesbian. This had happened to me once before, in high school, one of the upperclass girls. So then I tell her to stop.

  “‘Oh, please,’ she says, ‘just a little more. I’m so lonely. I’m so lonely, please believe me, you’re the only one I have, oh please, don’t turn your back on me,’ and she takes my hand and puts it on her breast—her very nicely shaped breast, and, sure, I’m a woman, but this electric something goes through me when my hand makes contact. I have no idea what to do. I just keep repeating no no no no no like an idiot. I’m like paralyzed, I can’t move. I had managed O.K. to push the girl away in high school, but now I can’t do a thing. My body won’t take orders. She’s holding my right hand against her with her left hand, and she’s kissing and licking my nipples, and her right hand is caressing my back and side and bottom. So here I am in the bedroom with the curtains closed and a thirteen-year-old girl has me practically naked—she’s been taking my clothes off somehow all along—and touching me all over and I’m writhing with the pleasure of it. Looking back on it now, it seems incredible. I mean, it’s crazy, don’t you think? But at the time it was like she had cast a spell on me.”

  Reiko paused to take a puff on her cigarette.

  “You know, this is the first time I’ve ever told a man about this,” she said, looking at me. “I’m telling it to you because I think I ought to, but I’m finding it awfully embarrassing.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “This went on for a while, and then her right hand started to move down, and she touched me through my panties. By then, I was absolutely soaking wet. I’m ashamed to say it, but I’ve never been so wet before or since. I had always thought of myself as kind of indifferent to sex, so I was astounded to be getting so worked up. So then she puts these slim, soft fingers of hers inside my panties, and … well, you know, I can’t bring myself to put it into words. I mean, it was totally different from when a man puts his clumsy hands on you there. It was amazing. Really. Like feathers or down. I thought all the fuses in my head were going to pop. Still, somewhere in my fogged-over brain, the thought occurred to me that I had to put a stop to this. If I let it happen once, I’d never stop, and if I had to carry around a secret like that inside me, my head was going to get completely messed up again. I thought about my daughter, too. What if she saw me like this? She was supposed to
be at my parents’ house until three on Saturdays, but what if something happened and she came home unexpectedly? This helped me to gather my strength and raise myself on the bed. ‘Stop it now, please stop!’ I shouted.

  “But she wouldn’t stop. Instead, she yanked my panties down and started using her tongue. I had rarely let even my husband do that, I found it so embarrassing, but now I had a thirteen-year-old girl licking me all over down there. I just gave up. All I could do was cry. And it was absolutely paradise.

  “‘Stop it!’ I yelled one more time, and smacked her on the side of the face. As hard as I could. Finally, she stopped and raised herself up and looked into my eyes. The two of us were stark naked, on our knees, in bed, staring at each other. She was thirteen, I was thirty-one, but, I don’t know, looking at that body of hers, I felt totally overwhelmed. The image is still vivid in my mind. I could hardly believe I was looking at the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, and I still can’t believe it. By comparison, what I had for a body was enough to make you cry. Believe me.”

  There was nothing I could say, and so I said nothing.

  “‘What’s wrong?’ she says to me. ‘You like it this way, don’t you? I knew you would the first time I met you. I know you like it. It’s way better than doing it with a man—isn’t it? Look how wet you got. I can make you feel even better if you’ll let me. It’s true. I can make you feel like your body’s melting away. You want me to do it, don’t you?’ And she was right. Doing this with her was much better than doing it with my husband. And I did want her to do it even more! But I couldn’t let it happen, ‘Let’s do this once a week,’ she said. ‘Just once a week. Nobody will find out. It’ll be our little secret.’

  “But I got out of bed and put on my robe and told her to leave and never come back. She just looked at me. Her eyes were absolutely flat. I had never seen them that way before. It was as if they had been painted on cardboard. They had no depth. After she stared at me for a while, she gathered up her clothing without a word and, as slowly as she could, as if she was making a show of it, she put on each piece, one at a time. Then she went back into the room where the piano was and took a brush from her bag. She brushed her hair and wiped the blood from her lips with a handkerchief, put on her shoes, and went out. As she was leaving, she said, ‘You’re a lesbian, you know. It’s true. You may try to hide it, but you’ll be a lesbian until the day you die.’