Norwegian Wood (28 page)

“Are you free this Sunday?” Midori asked.

“I think I told you before, I’m always free on Sunday. Until I go to work at six.”

“O.K., then,
this
Sunday, will you hang out with me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll pick you up at your dorm Sunday morning. I’m not sure exactly what time, though. Is that O.K.?”

“Fine,” I said. “No problem.”

“Now, let me ask you: do you have any idea what I would like to do right now?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Well, first of all, I want to lie down on a big, wide, fluffy bed. I want to get all comfy and drunk and not have any donkey shit anywhere nearby, and I want to have you lying down next to me. And then, little by little, you take my clothes off.
Sooo
tenderly. The way a mother takes a little child’s clothing off.
Sooo
softly.”

“Hmmm …”

“And I’m just spacing out and feeling really nice until, all of a sudden, I realize what’s happening and I yell at you, ‘Stop it, Watanabe!’ And then I say, ‘I really like you, Watanabe, but I’m seeing someone else. I can’t do this. I’m very proper about these things, believe it or not, so please stop.’ But you don’t stop.”

“But I
would
stop,” I said.

“I know that. Never mind, this is just my fantasy,” said Midori. “So then you show it to me. Your thing. Sticking way up. I immediately cover my eyes, of course, but I can’t help seeing it for a split second. And I say, ‘Stop it! Don’t
do
that! I don’t want anything so big and hard!’”

“It’s not so big. Just ordinary.”

“Never mind, this is a fantasy. So then you put on this really sad face, and I feel sorry for you and try to comfort you. ‘There there, poor thing.’”

“And you’re telling me that’s what you want to do now?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh, brother.”

———

W
E LEFT THE BAR
after five rounds of vodka and tonic. When I tried to pay, Midori slapped my hand and paid with a brand-new ten-thousand-yen bill she took from her purse.

“It’s O.K.,” she said. “I just got paid, and
I
invited
you
. Of course, if you’re a card-carrying fascist and you refuse to let a woman buy you a drink …”

“No no, I’m O.K.”

“And I didn’t let you put it in, either.”

“Because it’s so big and hard,” I said.

“Right,” said Midori. “Because it’s so big and hard.”

A little drunk, Midori missed one step, and we almost fell back down the stairs. The layer of clouds that had darkened the sky before was gone now, and the late-afternoon sun poured its gentle light on the city streets. Midori and I strolled those streets for a time. Midori said she wanted to climb a tree, but unfortunately there were no climbable trees in Shinjuku, and the Shinjuku Imperial Gardens were closing.

“Too bad,” said Midori. “I love to climb trees.”

We continued walking and window-shopping, and soon the street scene seemed realer to me than it had before.

“I’m glad I ran into you,” I said. “I think I’m a little more adapted to the world now.”

Midori stopped short and peered at me. “It’s true,” she said. “Your eyes are much more in focus than they were. See? Hanging out with me does you good.”

“No doubt about it,” I said.

At five-thirty Midori said she had to go home and make dinner. I said I would take a bus back to my dorm, and I saw her as far as the station.

“Know what I want to do now?” Midori asked me as she was leaving.

“I have absolutely no idea what you could be thinking,” I said.

“I want you and me to be captured by pirates. Then they strip us and press us together face to face all naked and wind these ropes around us.”

“Why would they do a thing like that?”

“Perverted pirates,” she said.

“You’re
the perverted one,” I said.

“So then they lock us in the hold and say. ‘In one hour, we’re gonna throw you into the sea, so have a good time until then.’”

“And …?”

“And so we enjoy ourselves for an hour, rolling all over the place and twisting our bodies.”

“And that’s the main thing you want to do now?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh, brother,” I said, shaking my head.

M
IDORI CAME TO PICK ME UP
at nine-thirty on Sunday morning. I had just awakened and hadn’t washed my face yet. Somebody pounded on my door and yelled, “Hey, Watanabe, it’s a woman!” I went down to the lobby to find Midori wearing an incredibly short jeans skirt and sitting there with her legs crossed, yawning. Every guy passing through on his way to breakfast slowed down to stare at her long, slim legs. She did have really nice legs.

“Am I too early?” she asked. “I bet you just woke up.”

“Can you give me fifteen minutes? I’ll wash my face and shave.”

“I don’t mind waiting, but all these guys are staring at my legs.”

“What’d you expect, coming into a men’s dorm in such a short skirt? Of course they’re gonna stare at you.”

“Oh, well, it’s O.K. I’m wearing really cute panties today—all pink and frilly and lacy.”

“That just makes it worse,” I said with a sigh. I went back to my room and washed and shaved as fast as I could, put on a blue button-down shirt and a gray tweed sports coat, then went back down and hurried Midori out through the dorm gate. I was in a cold sweat.

“Tell me, Watanabe,” Midori said, looking up at the dorm buildings, “do all the guys in here masturbate, rub-a-dub-dub?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Do guys think about girls when they do that?”

“I guess so. I kinda doubt that anybody thinks about the stock market or verb conjugations or the Suez Canal when they masturbate. Nah, I’m pretty sure just about everybody thinks about girls.”

“The Suez Canal?”

“For example, I mean.”

“So I guess they think about
particular
girls, right?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking your boyfriend about that?” I said. “Why should I have to explain stuff like that to you on a Sunday morning?”

“I was just curious,” she said. “Besides, he’d get mad if I asked him
about stuff like that. He’d say girls aren’t supposed to ask all those questions.”

“A perfectly normal point of view, I’d say.”

“But I want to know. This is pure curiosity. Do guys think about particular girls when they masturbate?”

I gave up trying to avoid the question. “Well,
I
do, at least. I don’t know about anybody else.”

“Have you ever thought about
me
when you were doing it? Tell me the truth. I won’t get mad.”

“No, I haven’t, to tell you the truth,” I answered honestly.

“Why not? Aren’t I attractive enough?”

“Oh, you’re plenty attractive, all right. You’re cute, and sexy outfits look good on you.”

“So why don’t you think about me?”

“Well, first of all, I think of you as a friend, so I don’t want to get you involved in my sexual fantasies, and second—”

“You’ve got somebody else you’re supposed to be thinking about.”

“That’s about the size of it,” I said.

“You have good manners even when it comes to something like this,” Midori said. “That’s what I like about you. Still, couldn’t you allow me just one brief appearance? I want to be in one of your sexual fantasies or daydreams or whatever you call them. I’m asking you because we’re friends. Who else can I ask for something like that? I can’t just walk up to anyone and say, ‘When you masturbate tonight, will you please think of me for a second?’ It’s
because
I think of you as a friend that I’m asking. And I want you to tell me later what it was like. You know, what you did and stuff.”

I let out a sigh.

“You can’t put it in, though. ‘Cause we’re just friends. Right? As long as you don’t put it in, you can do anything you like, think anything you want.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done it with so many restrictions before,” I said.

“Will you just think about me?”

“All right, I’ll think about you.”

“You know, Watanabe, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression—that I’m a nymphomanic or frustrated or a tease or anything. I’m just
interested
in that stuff. I want to
know
about it. I grew up surrounded by nothing but girls in a girls’ school, you know that. I want to find out what guys are thinking and how their bodies are put together. And not just from pullout sections in the women’s magazines but in actual
case studies.”

“Case studies?” I groaned.

“But my boyfriend doesn’t like it when I want to know things or try things. He gets mad, calls me a nympho or crazy. He won’t even let me give him a blow job. Now, that’s one thing I’m dying to study.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do
you
hate getting blow jobs?”

“No, not really, I don’t hate it.”

“Would you say you
like
it?”

“Yeah, I’d say that. But can we talk about this next time? Here it is, a really nice Sunday morning, and I don’t want to ruin it talking about masturbation and blow jobs. Let’s talk about something else. Is your boyfriend in the same university with us?”

“Nope, he goes to another one, of course. We met in high school during a club activity. I was in a girls’ school, and he was in a boys’ school, and you know how they do those things, joint concerts and stuff. We got serious after graduation, though. Hey, Watanabe.”

“What?”

“You only have to do it once. Just think about me, O.K.?”

“O.K., I’ll give it a try, next time,” I said, throwing in the towel.

W
E TOOK A COMMUTER TRAIN
to Ochanomizu. When we transferred at Shinjuku I bought a thin sandwich at a stand in the station to take the place of the breakfast I hadn’t eaten. The coffee I had with it tasted like boiled printer’s ink. The Sunday morning trains were filled with couples and with families on outings. A group of boys with baseball bats and matching uniforms scampered around inside the car. Several of the girls on the train had short skirts on, but none as short as Midori’s. Midori would yank on hers every now and then to bring it lower. Some of the men stared at her thighs, which made me feel uneasy, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Know what I’d like to do right now?” Midori whispered to me when we had been riding for some ten minutes.

“No idea,” I said. “But please, don’t talk about that stuff here. Somebody’ll hear you.”

“Too bad. This one’s kind of wild,” Midori said with obvious disappointment.

“Anyhow, why are we going to Ochanomizu?”

“Just come along, you’ll see.”

With all the cram schools around Ochanomizu Station, on Sunday the area was full of junior high and high school kids on their way to practice exams or classes. Midori plunged through the crowds clutching her shoulder-bag strap with one hand and my hand with the other.

Without warning, she asked me, “Hey, Watanabe, can you explain the difference between the English subjunctive present and the subjunctive past?”

“I think I can,” I said.

“Let me ask you, then, what purpose does stuff like that serve in daily life?”

“None at all,” I said. “It may not serve any concrete purpose, but it
does
give you some kind of training to help you grasp things in general more systematically.”

Midori took a moment to give that some serious thought. “You’re amazing,” she said. “That never occurred to me before. I always thought of things like the subjunctive case and differential calculus and chemical symbols as totally useless. A pain in the neck. So I’ve always ignored them. Now I have to wonder if my whole life has been a mistake.”

“You’ve ignored them?”

“Yeah. Like, for me, they didn’t exist. I don’t have the slightest idea what ‘sine’ and ‘cosine’ mean.”

“That’s incredible! How’d you graduate from high school? How’d you get into college?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Midori. “You don’t have to know anything to pass college entrance exams! All you need is a little intuition—and I have great intuition. ‘Choose the correct answer from the following three.’ I know immediately which one is right.”

“My intuition’s not as good as yours, so I have to learn systematic thinking to some extent. Like the way a crow collects chunks of glass in a hollow tree.”

“Does it serve some purpose?”

“I wonder. It probably makes it easier to do some kinds of things.”

“What kinds of things? Give me an example.”

“Metaphysical thought, say. Mastering several languages.”

“What good does that do?”

“It depends on the person who does it. It serves a purpose for some, and not for others. But mainly it’s training. Whether it serves a purpose or not is another question. Like I said.”

“Hmmm,” said Midori, seemingly impressed. She led me by the hand down the hill. “You know, Watanabe, you’re really good at explaining things to people.”

“I wonder,” I said.

“It’s true. I’ve asked hundreds of people what good the English subjunctive is, and not one of them gave me a good, clear answer like yours. Not even English teachers. They either got confused or angry or laughed it off. Nobody gave me a decent answer before. If somebody like you had been around when I asked my question, and given me a proper explanation, even I might have been interested in the subjunctive. Damn!”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“Have you ever read
Das Kapital
?”

“Yup. Not the whole thing, of course, but parts, like most people.”

“Did you understand it?”

“I understood some parts, not others. You have to acquire the necessary intellectual apparatus to read a book like
Das Kapital
. I think I understand the general idea of Marxism, though.”

“Do you think a college freshman who hasn’t read books like that can understand
Das Kapital
just by reading it?”

“That’s pretty nearly impossible, I’d say.”

“You know, when I entered the university, I joined a folk music club. I just wanted to sing songs. But the members were a pack of phonies. I get chills just thinking about them. The first thing they tell you when you enter the club is you have to read Marx. ‘Prepare page so-and-so to such-and-such for next time.’ Somebody lectured on how folk songs have to be deeply involved with society and the radical movement. So, what the hell, I went home and tried as hard as I could to read it, but I didn’t understand a thing. It was worse than the subjunctive. I gave up after three pages. So I went to the next week’s meeting like a good little scout and said I had read it but that I couldn’t understand it. From that point on they treated me like an idiot. I had no critical awareness of the class struggle, they said, I was a social cripple. I mean, this was serious. And all because I
said I couldn’t understand a piece of writing. Don’t you think they were terrible?”