Norwegian Wood (32 page)

When I had finished the letter, I walked a couple of blocks to a mailbox, then went to a nearby bakery where I bought an egg sandwich and a Coke. These I had for lunch while I watched a Little League game from a bench in a local playground. The deepening of autumn had brought an increased blueness and depth to the sky. I glanced up to find two vapor trails heading off to the west in perfect parallel like streetcar tracks. A foul ball came rolling my way, and when I threw it back to them the young players doffed their caps with a polite “Thank you, sir.” As in most Little League games, there were lots of walks and stolen bases.

After noon I went back to my room to read but couldn’t concentrate on my book. Instead I found myself staring at the ceiling and thinking about Midori. I wondered if her father had really been trying to ask me to look after her when he was gone, but I had no way of telling what had been on his mind. He had probably confused me with somebody else. In any case, he had died on a Friday morning when a cold rain was falling, and now it was impossible to know the truth. I imagined that, in death, he had shriveled up smaller than ever. And then they had burned him in an oven until he was nothing but ashes. And what had he left behind? A nothing-much bookstore in a nothing-much neighborhood and two daughters, at least one of whom was more than a little strange. What kind of life was that? I wondered. Lying in that hospital bed with his cut-open head and his muddled brain, what had been on his mind as he looked at me?

Thinking thoughts like this about Midori’s father put me in such a miserable mood that I had to bring the laundry down from the roof before it
was really dry and head off to Shinjuku to kill time walking the streets. The Sunday crowds gave me some relief. The Kinokuniya bookstore was as jam-packed as a rush-hour train. I bought a copy of Faulkner’s
Light in August
and went to the noisiest jazz café I could think of, reading my new book while listening to Ornette Coleman and Bud Powell and drinking hot, thick, foul-tasting coffee. At five-thirty I closed my book, went outside, and ate a light supper. How many Sundays—how many hundreds of Sundays like this—lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn’t wind my spring.

H
ALFWAY THROUGH THAT WEEK
I
MANAGED TO CUT MY PALM OPEN
on a piece of broken glass. I hadn’t noticed that one of the glass partitions in a record shelf was cracked. I could hardly believe how much blood gushed out of me, turning the floor at my feet bright red. The store manager found a bunch of towels and tied them tightly over the wound. Then he made a telephone call to locate an all-night emergency room. He was a pretty useless guy most of the time, but this he did with great dispatch. The hospital was nearby, fortunately, but by the time I got there the towels were soaked in red, and the blood they couldn’t soak up had been dripping on the asphalt. People scurried out of the way for me. They seemed to think I had been injured in a fight. I felt no pain to speak of, but the blood wouldn’t stop.

The doctor was cool as he removed the blood-soaked towels, stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet on my wrist, disinfected the wound and sewed it up, telling me to come again the next day. Back at the record shop, the manager told me to go home: he would put me down as having worked. I took a bus to the dorm and went straight to Nagasawa’s room. With my nerves on edge over the cut, I wanted to talk to somebody, and I felt I hadn’t seen Nagasawa for a long time.

I found him in his room, drinking a can of beer and watching a Spanish lesson on TV. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked when he saw my bandage. I said I had cut myself but that it was nothing much. He asked if I wanted a beer, and I said no thanks.

“Just wait. This’ll be over in a minute,” said Nagasawa, and he went on practicing his Spanish pronunciation. I boiled some water and made myself a cup of tea with a tea bag. A Spanish woman recited example sentences:
“I have never seen such terrible rain! Many bridges were washed away in Barcelona.” Nagasawa read the text aloud in Spanish. “What awful sentences!” he said. “This kind of shit is all they ever give you.”

When the program ended, Nagasawa turned off the TV and took another beer from his small refrigerator.

“Are you sure I’m not in the way?” I asked.

“Hell, no. I was bored out of my mind. Sure you don’t want a beer?”

“No, I really don’t,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, they posted the exam results the other day. I passed!”

“The Foreign Ministry exam?”

“That’s it. Officially, it’s called the ‘Foreign Affairs Public Service Personnel First Class Service Examination.’ What a joke!”

“Congratulations!” I said, and gave him my left hand to shake.

“Thanks.”

“Of course, I’m not surprised you passed.”

“No, neither am I.” Nagasawa laughed. “But it’s nice to have it official.”

“Think you’ll go to a foreign country once you get in?”

“Nah, first they give you a year of training. Then they send you overseas for a while.”

I sipped my tea, and he drank his beer with obvious enjoyment.

“I’ll give you this refrigerator when I get out of here,” said Nagasawa. “You’d like to have it, wouldn’t you? It’s great for beer.”

“Sure, I’d like to have it, but won’t you need it? You’ll be living in an apartment or something.”

“Don’t be stupid! When I get out of this place, I’m buying myself a big refrigerator. I’m gonna live the high life! Four years in a shit hole like this is long enough. I don’t want to have to
look
at anything I used in this place. You name it, I’ll give it to you—the TV, the Thermos bottle, the radio …”

“I’ll take anything you want to give me,” I said. I picked up the Spanish textbook on his desk and stared at it. “You’re starting Spanish?”

“Yeah. The more languages you know the better. And I’ve got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it’s practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.”

“Ah, the reflective life!” I said with a sarcastic edge.

“Anyhow, let’s go out to eat sometime soon.”

“You mean cruising for women?”

“No, a real dinner. You, me, and Hatsumi at a good restaurant. To celebrate my new job. My old man’s paying, so we’ll go someplace really expensive.”

“Shouldn’t it just be you and Hatsumi?”

“No, it’d be better with you there. I’d be more comfortable, and so would Hatsumi.”

Oh no, it was Kizuki, Naoko, and me all over again.

“I’ll spend the night at Hatsumi’s afterward, so join us just for the meal.”

“O.K., if you both really want me to,” I said. “But, anyhow, what are you planning to do about Hatsumi? When you’re through with your training, you’ll be assigned overseas, and you probably won’t come back for years. What’s going to happen to her?”

“That’s her problem, not mine.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Feet on his desk, Nagasawa took a swig of beer and yawned.

“Look, I’m not planning to get married. I’ve made that perfectly clear to Hatsumi. If she wants to marry somebody, she should go ahead and do it. I won’t stop her. If she wants to wait for me, let her wait. That’s what I mean.”

“I’ve gotta hand it to you,” I said.

“You think I’m a shit, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Look, the world is an inherently unfair place. I didn’t write the rules. It’s always been that way. I have never once deceived Hatsumi. She knows I’m a shit and that she can leave me anytime she decides she can’t take it. I told her that straight out.”

Nagasawa finished his beer and lit a cigarette.

“Isn’t there anything about life that frightens you?” I asked.

“Hey, I’m not a total idiot,” said Nagasawa. “Of
course
life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the premise for everything else, though. I’m going to give it a hundred percent and go as far as I can. I’ll take what I want and leave what I don’t want. That’s how I intend to live my life, and if things go bad, I’ll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.”

“Sounds like a pretty self-centered way to live,” I said.

“Maybe so, but I’m not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m working ten times harder than you are.”

“That’s probably true,” I said.

“I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don’t these bastards
do
something? I wonder. They don’t do a damn thing, and then they bitch.”

Amazed at the harshness of his tone, I looked at Nagasawa. “The way I see it, people
are
working hard. They’re working their fingers to the bone. Or am I looking at things wrong?”

“That’s not hard work. It’s just manual labor,” Nagasawa said with finality. “The ‘hard work’ I’m talking about is more self-directed and purposeful.”

“You mean, like studying Spanish when the job season ends and everybody else is taking it easy?”

“That’s it. I’m going to have Spanish mastered by next spring. I’ve got English and German and French down pat, and I’m most of the way there with Italian. You think things like that happen without hard work?”

Nagasawa puffed on his cigarette while I thought about Midori’s father. There was one man who had probably never even thought about starting Spanish lessons on TV. He had probably never thought about the difference between hard work and manual labor, either. He was probably too busy to think about such things—busy with work, and busy bringing home a daughter who had run away to Fukushima.

“So, about that dinner of ours,” said Nagasawa. “Would this Saturday be O.K. for you?”

“Fine,” I said.

N
AGASAWA PICKED A FANCY
French restaurant in a quiet backstreet of Azabu. He gave his name at the door and the two of us were shown to a secluded private room. Some fifteen prints hung on the walls of the small chamber. While we waited for Hatsumi to arrive, Nagasawa and I sipped a delicious wine and chatted about the novels of Joseph Conrad. He wore an expensive-looking gray suit. I had on an ordinary blue blazer.

Hatsumi arrived fifteen minutes later. She was carefully made up and wore gold earrings, a beautiful deep blue dress, and tasteful red pumps.
When I complimented her on the color of the dress, she told me it was called midnight blue.

“What an elegant restaurant!” said Hatsumi.

“My old man always eats here when he comes to Tokyo,” said Nagasawa. “I came here with him once. I’m not crazy about these snooty places.”

“It doesn’t hurt to eat in a place like this once in a while,” said Hatsumi. Turning to me, she asked. “Don’t you agree?”

“I guess so. As long as I’m not paying.”

“My old man usually brings his woman here,” said Nagasawa. “He’s got one in Tokyo, you know.”

“Really?” asked Hatsumi.

I took a sip of wine, as if I had never heard anything.