Norwegian Wood (20 page)

Reiko lit a cigarette. The wind had died down. The smoke rose straight up and disappeared into the darkness of night. Just then I realized that the sky was filled with stars.

“Something happened?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “something very strange, as if a trap had been set for me. Even now, it gives me a chill just to think about it.” Reiko rubbed a temple with her free hand. “I’m sorry, though, making you listen to all this talk about me. You came here to see Naoko, not listen to my story.”

“I’d really like to hear it, though,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear the rest.”

“Well,” Reiko began, “when our daughter entered kindergarten, I started playing again, little by little. Not for anyone else, but for myself. I started with short pieces by Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti. After such a long blank period, of course, my feel for the music didn’t come back right away. And my fingers wouldn’t move the way they used to. But I was thrilled to be playing the piano again. With my hands on the keys, I realized how much I had loved music—and how much I had hungered for it. To be able to perform music for yourself is a wonderful thing.

“As I said before, I had been playing from the time I was four years old, but it occurred to me that I had never once played for myself. I had always been trying to pass a test or practice an assignment or impress somebody. Those are all important things, of course, if you are going to master an instrument. But after a certain age you have to start performing
for yourself. That’s what music
is
. I had to drop out of the elite course and pass my thirty-first birthday before I was finally able to see that. I would send my child off to kindergarten and hurry through the housework, then take an hour or two playing music I liked. So far so good, right?”

I nodded in affirmation.

“Then one day I had a visit from one of the ladies of the neighborhood, someone I at least knew well enough to say hello to on the street, asking me to give her daughter piano lessons. I didn’t know about the daughter—though we lived in the same general ‘neighborhood’ our houses were still pretty far apart—but according to the woman, her daughter used to pass my house and loved to hear me play. She had seen me at some point, too, and now she was pestering her mother to get me to teach her. She was in her second year of middle school and had taken lessons from a number of people, but things had not gone well for one reason or another and now she had no teacher.

“I turned her down. I had had that blank of several years, and while it might have made sense for me to take on an absolute beginner, it would have been impossible for me to pick up with someone who had had lessons for a number of years. Besides, I was too busy taking care of my own child. And though I didn’t say this to the woman, nobody can deal with the kind of child who changes teachers constantly. So then the woman asked me to at least do her daughter the favor of meeting her once. This was a fairly pushy lady and I could see she was not going to let me off the hook easily, so I agreed to meet the girl—but
just meet
her. Three days later the girl came to the house by herself. She was an absolute angel, with a kind of pure, sweet, transparent beauty. I had never—and have never—seen such a beautiful little girl. She had long, shiny hair as black as freshly ground India ink, slim, graceful arms and legs, bright eyes, and a soft little mouth that looked as if someone had just made it. I couldn’t speak when I first saw her, she was so beautiful. Sitting on my couch, she turned my living room into a gorgeous parlor. It hurt to look straight at her: I had to squint. So, anyhow, that’s what she was like. I can still picture her clearly.”

Reiko narrowed her eyes as if she were actually picturing the girl.

“Over coffee we talked for a whole hour—talked about all kinds of things: music, her school, just everything. I could see right off she was a
smart one. She knew how to hold a conversation: she had clear, sharp opinions and a natural gift for captivating the other person. Frighteningly so. Exactly what it was that made her frightening, I couldn’t tell at the time. It just struck me how frighteningly intelligent she was. But in her presence I lost any normal powers of judgment I might have had. She was so young and beautiful, I felt overwhelmed to the point of seeing myself as an inferior specimen, a clumsy excuse for a human being who could only have negative thoughts about her because of my own warped and filthy mind.”

Reiko shook her head several times.

“If I were as pretty and smart as she was, I’d have been a more normal human being. What more could you want if you were that smart and that beautiful? Why would you have to torment and walk all over your weaker inferiors if everybody loved you so much? What reason could there possibly be for acting that way?”

“Did she do something terrible to you?”

“Well, let me just say the girl was a pathological liar. She was sick, pure and simple. She made up everything. And while she was making up her stories, she would come to believe them. And then she would change things around her to fit her story. She had such a quick mind, she could always keep a step ahead of you and take care of things that would ordinarily strike you as odd, so it would never cross your mind that she was lying. First of all, no one would ever suspect that such a pretty little girl would lie about the most ordinary things.
I
certainly didn’t. She told me tons of lies for six months before I had the slightest inkling that anything was wrong. She lied about
everything
, and I never suspected. I know it sounds crazy.”

“What did she lie about?”

“When I say everything, I mean
everything.”
Reiko gave a sarcastic laugh. “When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one.
Mythomania
is the word for it. When the usual mythomaniac tells lies, they’re usually the innocent kind, and most people notice. But not with that girl. To protect herself, she’d tell hurtful lies without batting an eyelash. She’d use everything she could get her hands on. And she would lie either more or less, depending on who she was talking to. To her mother or close friends who would know right away, she hardly ever lied, or if she had to tell one, she’d be really, really careful to tell lies that wouldn’t come out. Or if they did come out, she’d find an
excuse or apologize in that clingy voice of hers with tears pouring out of her beautiful eyes. No one could stay mad at her then.

“I still don’t know why she chose me. Was I another victim to her, or a source of salvation? I just don’t know. Of course, it hardly matters now. Now that everything is over. Now that I’m like this.”

A short silence followed.

“She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me on the street a few times, too, and begun to worship me. She actually used that word:
worship
. It made me turn bright red. I mean, to be ‘worshiped’ by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don’t think it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course, and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me, something that was missing in her, I would guess. Which must have been what got her interested in me to begin with. I believe that now, looking back. And I’m not boasting.”

“No, I think I know what you mean.”

“She had brought some music with her and asked if she could play for me. So I let her. It was a Bach Invention. Her performance was … interesting. Or should I say strange? It just wasn’t ordinary. Of course it wasn’t polished. She hadn’t been going to a professional school, and what lessons she had taken had been an on-and-off kind of thing; she was very much self-taught. Her sound was untrained. She’d have been rejected immediately if this had been a music school audition. But she made it work. Ninety percent was just terrible, but the other ten percent was there—she made it sing: it was music. And this was a Bach Invention! So I got interested in her. I wanted to know what she was all about.

“Needless to say, the world is full of kids who can play Bach way better than she could. Twenty times better. But most of their performances would have nothing to them. They’d be hollow, empty. This girl’s technique was bad, but she had that little bit of something that could draw people—or draw me, at least—into her performance. So I decided it might be worthwhile to teach her. Of course, retraining her at that point to where she could become a pro was out of the question. But I felt it might be possible to make her into the kind of happy pianist I was then—and still am—someone who could enjoy making music for herself. This turned out to be an empty hope, though. She was not the kind of person who quietly goes
about doing things for herself. This was a child who would make detailed calculations to use every means at her disposal to impress other people. She knew exactly what she had to do to make people admire and praise her. And she knew exactly what kind of performance it would take to draw me in. She had calculated everything, I’m sure, and put everything she had into practicing the most important passages over and over again for my benefit. I can see her doing it.

“Still, even now, after all this came clear to me, I believe it was a wonderful performance, and I would feel the same chills down my spine if I could hear it again. Knowing all I know about her flaws, her cunning and lies, I would still feel it. I’m telling you, there are such things in this world.”

Reiko cleared her throat with a dry rasp and broke off her story.

“So, did you take her as a pupil?” I asked.

“Sure I did. One lesson a week. Saturday mornings. Saturday was a day off at her school. She never missed a lesson, she was never late, she was an ideal pupil. She always practiced for her lessons. After every lesson, we’d have some cake and chat.”

At that point, Reiko looked at her watch as if suddenly remembering something.

“Don’t you think we should be getting back to the room? I’m a little worried about Naoko. I’m sure
you
haven’t forgotten about her now, have you?”

“Of course not.” I laughed. “It’s just that I was drawn into your story.”

“If you’d like to hear the rest, I’ll tell it to you tomorrow. It’s a long story—too long for one sitting.”

“You’re a regular Scheherazade.”

“I know,” she said, joining her laughter with mine. “You’ll never get back to Tokyo.”

We retraced our steps through the path in the woods and returned to the apartment. The candles had been extinguished and the living room lights were out. The bedroom door was open and the lamp on the night table was on, its pale light spilling into the living room. Naoko sat alone on the sofa in the gloom. She had changed into a loose-fitting blue nightgown, its collar pulled tight around her neck, her legs folded under her on the sofa. Reiko approached her and rested a hand on the crown of her head.

“Are you all right now?”

“I’m fine. Sorry,” answered Naoko in a tiny voice. Then she turned toward me and repeated her apology. “I must have scared you.”

“A little,” I said with a smile.

“Come here,” she said. When I sat down next to her, Naoko, her legs still folded, leaned toward me until her face was nearly touching my ear, as if she was going to share a secret with me. Then she planted a soft kiss by my ear. “Sorry,” she said once more, this time directly into my ear, her voice subdued. Then she moved away from me.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I get so confused, I don’t know what’s happening.”

“That happens to me all the time,” I said.

Naoko smiled and looked at me.

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to hear more about you. About your life here. What you do every day. The people you meet.”

Naoko talked about her daily routine in this place, speaking in short but crystal-clear phrases. Wake up at six in the morning. Breakfast in the apartment. Clean out the birdhouse. Then usually farm work. She took care of the vegetables. Before or after lunch, she would have either an hour-long session with her doctor or a group discussion. In the afternoon she could choose from among courses that might interest her, outside work, or sports. She had taken several courses: French, knitting, piano, ancient history.

“Reiko is teaching me piano,” she said. “She also teaches guitar. We all take turns as pupils or teachers. Somebody with fluent French teaches French, one person who used to be in social studies teaches history, another good at knitting teaches knitting: that’s a pretty impressive school right there. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything I can teach anyone.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

“I put a lot more energy into my studies here than I ever did in college. I work hard and enjoy it—a lot.”

“What do you do after supper?”

“Talk with Reiko, read, listen to records, go to other peoples’ apartments and play games, stuff like that.”

“I do guitar practice and write my autobiography,” said Reiko.

“Autobiography?”

“Just kidding.” Reiko laughed. “We go to bed around ten o’clock. Pretty healthy lifestyle, wouldn’t you say? We sleep like babies.”

I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before nine. “I guess you’ll be getting sleepy soon.”

“That’s O.K. We can stay up late today,” said Naoko. “I haven’t seen you in such a long time, I want to talk more. So talk.”

“When I was alone before, all of a sudden I started thinking about the old days,” I said. “Do you remember when Kizuki and I came to visit you at the hospital? The one on the seashore. I think it was the second year of high school.”

“When I had the chest operation,” Naoko said with a smile. “Sure, I remember. You and Kizuki came on a motorcycle. You brought me a box of chocolates and they were all melted together. They were so hard to eat! I don’t know, it seems like such a long time ago.”

“Yeah, really. I think you were writing a poem then, a long one.”

“All girls write poems at that age,” Naoko tittered. “What reminded you of that all of a sudden?”

“I wonder. The smell of the sea wind, the oleanders: before I knew it, they just popped into my head. Did Kizuki come to see you at the hospital a lot?”