Norwegian Wood (19 page)

“I’m not so good at that, either,” I said, stung by her words.

“Just kidding,” she said. “Don’t get mad. But really, though, what
are
you good at?”

“Nothing special. I have things I
like
to do.”

“For instance?”

“Hiking trips. Swimming. Reading.”

“You like to do things alone, then?”

“I guess so. I could never get excited about games you play with other people. I can’t get into them. I lose interest.”

“Then you
have
to come here in the winter. We do cross-country skiing. I’m sure you’d like that, tramping around in the snow all day, working up a good sweat.” Under the streetlamp, Reiko stared at her right hand as if she were inspecting an antique musical instrument.

“Does Naoko get like that often?” I asked.

“Every now and then,” said Reiko, now looking at her left hand. “Every once in a while she’ll get worked up and cry like that. But that’s O.K. She’s letting her feelings out. The scary thing is
not
being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That’s when you’re in big trouble.”

“Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”

“Not a thing. Don’t worry. Just speak your mind honestly. That’s the best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and somebody may get worked up the way Naoko did, but in the long run it’s the best thing. That’s what you should do if you’re serious about making Naoko well again. Like I told you in the beginning, you should think not so much about wanting to help her as wanting to recover yourself by helping her to recover. That’s the way it’s done here. So you have to be honest and say everything that
comes to mind while you’re here at least. Nobody does that in the outside world, right?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“I’ve seen all kinds of people come and go in my seven years here,” said Reiko, “maybe
too
many people. So I can usually tell by looking at a person whether they’re going to get better or not, almost by instinct. But in Naoko’s case, I’m not sure. I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to her. For all I know, she could be a-hundred-percent recovered next month, or she could go on like this for years. So I really can’t tell you what to do aside from the most generalized kind of advice: to be honest, or to help each other.”

“What makes Naoko such a hard case for you?”

“Probably because I like her so much. I think my emotions get in the way and I can’t see her clearly. I mean, I really like her. But aside from that, she has a bunch of different problems that are all tangled up, so it’s hard to unravel any one of them. It may take a very long time to undo them all, or something could trigger them to come unraveled all at once. It’s kind of like that. Which is why I can’t be sure about her.”

She picked up the basketball again, twirled it in her hands, and bounced it on the ground.

“The most important thing is not to let yourself get impatient,” Reiko said. “This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to figure it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time. Do you think you can do that?”

“I can try,” I said.

“It may take a very long time, you know, and even then she may not recover completely. Have you thought about that?”

I nodded.

“Waiting is hard,” she said, bouncing the ball. “Especially for someone your age. You just sit and wait for her to get better. Without deadlines or guarantees. Do you think you can do that? Do you love Naoko that much?”

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “Like Naoko, I’m not really sure what it means to love another person. Though she meant it a little differently. I do want to try my best, though. I have to, or else I won’t know where to go.
Like you said before, Naoko and I have to save each other. It’s the only way for either of us to be saved.”

“And are you going to go on sleeping with girls you pick up?”

“I don’t know what to do about that either,” I said. “What do you think? Should I just keep waiting and masturbating? I’m not in complete control there, either.”

Reiko set the ball on the ground and patted my knee. “Look,” she said, “I’m not telling you to stop sleeping with girls. If you’re O.K. with that, then it’s O.K. It’s your life after all, it’s something
you
have to decide. All I’m saying is you shouldn’t use yourself up in some unnatural form. Do you see what I’m getting at? It would be such a waste. The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older. It’s true. So think about it carefully. If you want to take care of Naoko, take care of yourself, too.”

I said I would think about it.

“I was twenty once myself. Once upon a time. Would you believe it?”

“I believe it. Of course.”

“Deep down?”

“Deep down,” I said with a smile.

“And I was cute, too. Not as cute as Naoko, but pretty damn cute. I didn’t have all these wrinkles.”

I said I liked her wrinkles a lot. She thanked me.

“But don’t ever tell another woman that you find her wrinkles attractive,” she added. “I like to hear it, but I’m the exception.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

She slipped a wallet from her pants pocket and handed me a photo from the card holder. It was a color snapshot of a cute girl around ten years old wearing skis and brightly colored ski clothes and standing on the snow with a sweet smile for the camera.

“Don’t you think she’s pretty? My daughter,” said Reiko. “She sent me this in January. She’s in—what?—fourth grade now.”

“She’s got your smile,” I said, returning the photo. Reiko put the wallet back into her pocket and, with a sniff, put a cigarette between her lips and lit up.

“I was going to be a concert pianist,” she said. “I had talent, and people recognized it and made a fuss over me while I was growing up. I won competitions
and had top grades in the conservatory, and I was set to study in Germany after graduation. Not a cloud on the horizon. Everything worked out perfectly, and when it didn’t there was always somebody to fix it. But then one day something happened, and it all blew apart. I was in my senior year at the conservatory and there was a fairly important competition coming up. I practiced for it constantly, but all of a sudden the little finger of my left hand stopped moving. I don’t know why, it just did. I tried massaging it, soaking it in hot water, taking off from practice for a few days: nothing worked. So then I got scared and went to the doctor’s. They tried all kinds of tests but they couldn’t come up with anything. There was nothing wrong with the finger itself, and the nerves were O.K., they said: there was no reason it should stop moving. The problem must be psychological. So I went to a psychiatrist, but he didn’t really know what was going on, either. Probably precompetition stress, he figured, and told me to get away from the piano for a while.”

Reiko inhaled deeply and let the smoke out. Then she bent her neck to the side a few times.

“So I went to recuperate at my grandmother’s place on the coast in Izu. I figured I’d forget about that particular competition and really relax, spend a couple of weeks away from the piano doing anything I wanted. But it was hopeless. Piano was all I could think about. Maybe my finger would never move again. How would I live if that happened? The same thoughts kept going round and round in my brain. And no wonder: piano had been my whole life up to that point. I had started playing when I was four and grew up thinking about the piano and nothing else. I never did housework to make sure I wouldn’t injure my fingers. People paid attention to me for that one thing: my talent at the piano. Take the piano away from a girl who’s grown up like that, and what’s left? So then,
snap!
My mind became a complete jumble. Total darkness.”

She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stamped it out, and then she bent her neck a few times again.

“That was the end of my dream of becoming a concert pianist. I spent two months in the hospital. My finger started to move shortly after I went in, so I
was
able to return to the conservatory and graduate, but something inside me had vanished. Some jewel of energy or something had disappeared—evaporated—from inside my body. The doctor said I lacked the mental strength to become a professional pianist and advised me to abandon
the idea. So after graduating I took pupils and taught them at home. But the pain I felt was excruciating. It was as if my life had ended. Here I was in my early twenties and the best part of my life had ended. Do you see how terrible that would be? I had had my hands on such potential, and I woke up one day and all of it was gone. No one would applaud me, no one would make a big fuss over me, no one would tell me how wonderful I was. I spent day after day in the house teaching neighborhood children Beyer exercises and sonatinas. I felt so miserable, I cried all the time. To think what I had missed! I would hear about people who were far less talented than I was taking second place in a competition or holding a recital in such-and-such a hall, and the tears would pour out of me.

“My parents walked around me on tiptoe, afraid of hurting me. But I knew how disappointed they were. All of a sudden the daughter they had been so proud of was a returnee from a mental hospital. They couldn’t even marry me off. When you’re living with people, you sense what they’re feeling, and I hated it. I was afraid to go out, afraid the neighbors were talking about me. So then,
snap!
It happened again—the jumble, the darkness. It happened when I was twenty-four, and this time I spent seven months in a sanatorium. Not this place: a regular insane asylum with high walls and locked gates. A filthy place without pianos. I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I knew was I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could, so I struggled desperately to get better. Seven months: a
long
seven months. That’s when my wrinkles got started.”

Reiko smiled, stretching her lips from side to side.

“I hadn’t been out of the hospital for long when I met a man and got married. He was a year younger than me, an engineer who worked in an airplane manufacturing company, and one of my pupils. A nice man. He didn’t say a lot, but he was warm and sincere. He had been taking lessons from me for six months when all of a sudden he asked me to marry him. Just like that—one day when we were having tea after his lesson. Can you believe it? We had never dated or held hands. He took me totally off guard. I told him I couldn’t get married. I said I liked him and thought he was a nice person but that, for certain reasons, I couldn’t marry him. He wanted to know what those reasons were, so I explained everything to him with complete honesty—that I had been hospitalized twice for mental breakdowns. I told him
everything
—what the cause had been, my condition,
and the possibility that it could happen again. He said he needed time to think, and I encouraged him to take all the time he needed. But when he came for his lesson a week later, he said he still wanted to marry me. I asked him to wait three months. We would see each other for three months, I said, and if he still wanted to marry me at that point, we would talk about it again.

“We dated once a week for three months. We went everywhere, and talked about everything, and I got to like him a lot. When I was with him, I felt as if my life had finally come back to me. It gave me a wonderful sense of relief to be alone with him: I could forget all those terrible things that had happened. So what if I hadn’t been able to become a concert pianist? So what if I had spent time in mental hospitals? My life hadn’t ended. Life was still full of wonderful things I hadn’t experienced. If only for having made me feel that way, I felt tremendously grateful to him. After three months went by, he asked me again to marry him. And this is what I said to him: ‘If you want to sleep with me, I don’t mind. I’ve never slept with anybody, and I’m very fond of you, so if you want to make love to me, I don’t mind at all. But marrying me is a whole different matter. If you marry me, you take on all my troubles, and they’re a lot worse than you can imagine.’

“He said he didn’t care, that he didn’t just want to sleep with me, he wanted to marry me, to share everything I had inside me. And he meant it. He was the kind of person who would only say what he really meant, and do anything he said. So I agreed to marry him. It was all I could do. We got married, let’s see, four months later, I think it was. He fought with his parents over me, and they disowned him. He was from an old family that lived in a rural part of Shikoku. They had my background investigated and found out that I had been hospitalized twice. No wonder they opposed the marriage. So, anyhow, we didn’t have a wedding ceremony. We just went to the ward office and registered our marriage and took a trip to Hakone for two nights. That was plenty for us: we were happy. And finally, I remained a virgin until the day I married. I was twenty-five years old! Can you believe it?”

Reiko sighed and picked up the basketball again.

“I figured that as long as I was with him, I would be all right,” she went on. “As long as I was with him, my troubles would stay away. That’s the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put
myself in this person’s hands, I’ll be O.K. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit—if a screw comes loose—he’ll notice right away, and with tremendous care and patience he’ll fix it, he’ll tighten the screw again, put all the jumbled threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away. No more
snap!
I was so happy! Life was so great! I felt as if someone had pulled me out of a cold, raging sea and wrapped me in a blanket and laid me in a warm bed. I had a baby two years after we were married, and then my hands were really full! I practically forgot about my sickness. I’d get up in the morning and do the housework and take care of the baby and feed my husband when he came home from work. It was the same thing day after day, but I was happy. It was probably the happiest time of my life. How many years did it last, I wonder? At least until I was thirty-one. And then, all of a sudden,
snap!
It happened again. I fell apart.”