Norwegian Wood (39 page)

But then I started thinking how I would have felt if the tables had been turned and Midori had moved somewhere without telling me where or getting in touch with me for three weeks. I would have been hurt—hurt badly, no doubt. No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for—and to do it so unconsciously.

As soon as I got home from work, I sat at my new desk and wrote to Midori. I told her how I felt as honestly as I could. I apologized, without explanations or excuses, for having been so careless and insensitive. “I miss you,” I wrote. “I want to see you as soon as possible. I want you to see my new house. Please write to me,” I said, and sent the letter special delivery.

The answer never came.

This was the beginning of one weird spring. I spent my whole break waiting for letters. I couldn’t take a trip, I couldn’t go home to see my parents, I couldn’t even take a part-time job because there was no telling when a letter might arrive from Naoko saying she wanted me to come see her on such-and-such a date. Afternoons I would spend in the nearby shopping district in Kichijoji, watching double features or reading in a jazz coffeehouse. I saw no one and talked to almost no one. And once a week I would write to Naoko. I never suggested to her that I was hoping for an answer. I didn’t want to pressure her in any way. I would tell her about my painting work, about Seagull, about the peach blossoms in the garden, about the nice old lady who sold tofu, about the nasty old lady in the local eatery, about the meals I was making for myself. But still, she never wrote.

Whenever I got sick of reading or listening to records, I would do a little work in the garden. From my landlord I borrowed a rake and broom
and pruning shears and spent time pulling weeds and trimming bushes. It didn’t take much to make the yard look good. Once the owner invited me to join him for a cup of tea, so we sat on the veranda of the main house drinking green tea and munching on rice crackers and sharing small talk. After retirement, he had taken a job with an insurance company, he said, but he had left that, too, after a couple of years, and now he was taking it easy. The house and land had been in the family for a long time, his children were grown and independent, and he could manage a comfortable old age without working. Which is why he and his wife were always traveling together.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Traveling is no fun. I’d much rather be working.”

He let the yard grow wild, he said, because there were no decent gardeners in the area and because he had developed allergies that made it impossible for him to do the work himself. Cutting grass made him sneeze.

When we had finished our tea, he showed me a storage shed and told me I could use anything I found inside, more or less by way of thanks for my gardening. “We don’t have any use for any of this stuff,” he said, “so feel free.”

And in fact the place was crammed with all kinds of stuff—an old wooden bathtub, a kid’s swimming pool, baseball bats. I found an old bike, a handy-size dining table with two chairs, a mirror, and a guitar. “I’d like to borrow these if you don’t mind,” I said.

“Feel free,” he said again.

I spent a day working on the bike: cleaning the rust off, oiling the bearings, pumping up the tires, adjusting the gears, and taking it to a bike repair shop to have a new gear cable installed. It looked like a different bike by the time I was finished. I cleaned a thick layer of dust off the table and gave the piece a new coat of varnish. I replaced the strings of the guitar and glued a section of the body that was coming apart. I took a wire brush to the rust on the tuning pegs and adjusted those. It wasn’t much of a guitar, but at least I got it to stay in tune. I hadn’t had a guitar in my hands since high school, I realized. I sat on the porch and picked my way through The Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” as well as I could. I was amazed to find I still remembered most of the chords.

Next I took a few scraps of lumber and made myself a mailbox. I painted it red, wrote my name on it, and set it out in front of my door. Up until April 3, the only piece of mail that found its way to my box was something that had been forwarded from the dorm: a notice from the reunion committee of my high school class. A class reunion was the last thing I wanted to have anything to do with. That was the class I had been in with Kizuki. I threw the thing into the trash.

I found a letter in the box on the afternoon of April 4. “Reiko Ishida,” it said on the back. I made a nice, clean cut across the seal with my scissors and went out to the porch to read it. I had a feeling this was not going to be good news, and I was right.

First Reiko apologized for making me wait so long for an answer. Naoko had been struggling to write me a letter, she said, but she could never seem to write one through to the end.

The letter was dated March 31. After I had finished reading it, I stayed on the porch and let my eyes wander out to the garden, full now with the freshness of spring. An old cherry tree stood there, its blossoms nearing the height of their glory. A soft breeze blew, and the light of day lent its strangely blurred, smoky colors to everything. Seagull wandered over from somewhere, and after scratching at the boards of the veranda for a while, she stretched out next to me and went to sleep.

I knew I should be doing some serious thinking, but I had no idea how to go about it. And, to tell the truth, thinking was the last thing I wanted to do. The time would come soon enough when I had no choice in the matter, and when that time came I would take a good long time to think things over. Not now, though. Not now.

I spent the day watching the garden, propped against a pillar and stroking Seagull. I felt completely drained. The afternoon deepened, twilight
approached, and bluish shadows enveloped the garden. Seagull disappeared, but I went on staring at the cherry blossoms. In the spring gloom, they looked like flesh that had burst through the skin over festering wounds. The garden filled up with the sweet, heavy stench of rotting flesh. And that’s when I thought of Naoko’s flesh. Naoko’s beautiful flesh lay before me in the darkness, countless buds bursting through her skin, green and trembling in an almost imperceptible breeze. Why did such a beautiful body have to be so sick? I wondered. Why didn’t they just leave Naoko alone?

I went inside and closed my curtains, but even indoors there was no escape from the smell of spring. It filled everything from the ground up. But the only thing the smell brought to mind for me now was that putrefying stench. Shut in behind my curtains, I felt a violent loathing for spring. I hated what the spring had in store for me; I hated the dull, throbbing ache it aroused inside me. I had never hated anything in my life with such intensity.

I spent three straight days after that all but walking on the bottom of the sea. I could hardly hear what people said to me, and they had just as much trouble catching anything I had to say. My whole body felt enveloped in some kind of membrane, cutting off any direct contact between me and the outside world. I couldn’t touch “them,” and “they” couldn’t touch me. I was utterly helpless, and as long as I remained in that state, “they” were unable to reach out to me.

I sat leaning against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. When I felt hungry I would nibble anything within reach, take a drink of water, and when the sadness of it got to me, I’d knock myself out with whiskey. I didn’t bathe, I didn’t shave. This is how the three days went by.

A letter came from Midori on April 6. She invited me to meet her on campus and have lunch on the tenth when we had to register for classes. “I put off writing to you as long as I could, which makes us even, so let’s make up. I have to admit it, I miss you.” I read the letter again and again, four times altogether, and still I couldn’t tell what she was trying to say to me. What could it possibly mean? My brain was so fogged over, I couldn’t find the connection from one sentence to the next. How would meeting her on registration day make us “even”? Why did she want to have “lunch” with me? I was really losing it. My mind had gone slack, like the soggy roots of a subterranean plant. But somehow I knew I had to snap out
of it. And then those words of Nagasawa’s came to mind: “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”

“O.K., Nagasawa. Right, on,” I heard myself thinking. I let out a sigh and got to my feet.

I did my laundry for the first time in weeks, went to the public bath and shaved, cleaned my place up, shopped for food and cooked myself a decent meal for a change, fed the starving Seagull, drank only beer, and did thirty minutes of exercise. Shaving, I discovered in the mirror that I was becoming emaciated. My eyes were popping. I could hardly recognize myself.

I went out the next morning on a longish bike ride, and after finishing lunch at home, I read Reiko’s letter one more time. Then I did some serious thinking about what I ought to do next. The main reason I had taken Reiko’s letter so hard was that it had upset my optimistic belief that Naoko was getting better. Naoko herself had told me, “My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots.” And Reiko had warned me there was no telling what might happen. Still, I had seen Naoko twice, and had been given the impression that she was on the mend. I had assumed that the only problem was whether she could regain the courage to return to the real world, and that if she managed to, the two of us could join forces to make a go of it.

Reiko’s letter smashed the illusory castle that I had built on that fragile hypothesis, leaving only a flattened surface devoid of feeling. I would have to do something to regain my footing. It would probably take a long time for Naoko to recover. And even then, she would probably be more debilitated and would have lost even more of her self-confidence than ever. I would have to adapt myself to this new situation. As strong as I might become, though, it would not solve all the problems. I knew that much. But there was nothing else I could do: just keep my own spirits up and wait for her to recover.

Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for
me
. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult. Because that’s what I have to do. I always used to think I’d like to stay seventeen or eighteen if I could. But not anymore. I’m
not a teenager anymore. I’ve got a sense of responsibility now. I’m not the same guy I was when we used to hang out together. I’m twenty now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.

“S
HIT
, W
ATANABE
, what happened to
you?”
Midori asked. “You’re all skin and bones!”

“That bad, huh?”

“Too much you-know-what with that married girlfriend of yours, I bet.”