Norwegian Wood (24 page)

Naoko shook her head.

“For three days after that I couldn’t talk. I just lay in bed like a dead person,
eyes wide open and staring into space. I didn’t know what was happening.” Naoko pressed against my arm. “I told you in my letter, didn’t I? I’m a far more flawed human being than you realize. My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots. And that’s why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don’t wait for me. Sleep with other girls if you want to. Don’t let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don’t want to do. I don’t want to interfere with your life. I don’t want to interfere with anybody’s life. Like I said before, I want you to come to see me every once in a while, and always remember me. That’s all I want.”

“It’s
not
all
I
want, though,” I said.

“You’re wasting your life being involved with me.”

“I’m not wasting anything.”

“But I might never recover. Will you wait for me forever? Can you wait ten years, twenty years?”

“You’re letting yourself be scared by too many things,” I said. “The dark, bad dreams, the power of the dead. You have to forget them. I’m sure you’ll get well if you do.”

“If I can,” said Naoko, shaking her head.

“If you can get out of this place, will you live with me?” I asked. “Then I can protect you from the dark and from bad dreams. Then you’d have me instead of Reiko to hold you when things got difficult.”

Naoko pressed still more firmly against me. “That would be wonderful,” she said.

W
E GOT BACK TO THE COFFEEHOUSE
a little before three. Reiko was reading a book and listening to Brahms’s second piano concerto on the radio. There was something wonderful about Brahms playing at the edge of a grassy meadow without a sign of people as far as the eye could see. Reiko was whistling along with the cello passage opening the third movement.

“Backhaus and Böhm,” she said. “I wore this record out once, a long time ago. Literally. I wore the grooves out listening to every note. I sucked the music right out of it.”

Naoko and I ordered coffee.

“Do a lot of talking?” asked Reiko.

“Tons,” said Naoko.

“Tell me all about his, uh, you know, later.”

“We didn’t do any of that,” said Naoko, reddening.

“Really?” Reiko asked me. “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Bo-o-o-ring!” she said with a bored look on her face.

“True,” I said, sipping my coffee.

T
HE SCENE IN THE DINING HALL
was the same as it had been the day before—the mood, the voices, the faces. Only the menu had changed. The balding man in white who, yesterday, had been talking about the secretion of gastric juices under weightless conditions joined the three of us at our table and talked for a long time about the correlation of brain size to intelligence. As we ate our soybean hamburger steaks, we heard all about the volume of Bismarck’s brain and Napoleon’s. He pushed his plate aside and used a ballpoint pen and notepaper to draw sketches of brains. He would start to draw, declare, “No, that’s not quite it,” and start a new one. This happened any number of times. When he was through, he carefully put the remaining notepaper away in a pocket of his white jacket and slipped the pen into his breast pocket. He had a total of three pens in that pocket, along with pencils and a ruler. When he was through eating, he repeated what he had told me the day before, “The winters here are nice. Make sure you come back when it’s winter,” and left the dining hall.

“Is that guy a doctor or a patient?” I asked Reiko.

“Which do you think?”

“I really can’t tell. In either case, he doesn’t seem all that normal.”

“He’s a doctor,” said Naoko. “Doctor Miyata.”

“Yeah,” said Reiko, “but I bet he’s the craziest one here.”

“Mr. Omura, the gatekeeper, is pretty crazy, too,” answered Naoko.

“True,” said Reiko, nodding as she stabbed her broccoli. “He does these wild calisthenics every morning, screaming nonsense at the top of his lungs. And before you came, Naoko, there was a girl in the business office, Miss Kinoshita, who tried to kill herself. And last year they fired a male nurse, Tokushima, who had a terrible drinking problem.”

“Sounds like patients and staff could trade places,” I said.

“Right on,” said Reiko, waving her fork in the air. “I guess you’re finally starting to figure out how things work here.”

“I guess.”

“What makes us most normal,” said Reiko, “is knowing that we’re not normal.”

B
ACK IN THE ROOM
, Naoko and I played cards while Reiko practiced Bach on her guitar.

“What time are you leaving tomorrow?” Reiko asked me, taking a break and lighting a cigarette.

“Right after breakfast,” I said. “The bus comes after nine. That way I can get back in time for tomorrow night’s work.”

“Too bad. It’d be nice if you could stay longer.”

“If I hung around too long, I might end up living here,” I said, laughing.

“Maybe so,” Reiko said. Then, to Naoko, she said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to go get some grapes at Oka’s. I totally forgot.”

“Want me to go with you?” asked Naoko.

“How about letting me borrow your young Mr. Watanabe here?”

“Fine,” said Naoko.

“Good. Let’s just the two of us go for another nighttime stroll,” said Reiko, taking my hand. “We were almost there yesterday. Let’s go all the way tonight.”

“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.”