Norwegian Wood (41 page)

At those times I would write to Naoko. In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a movie I’d seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me. I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one. I wrote any number of letters like this, but from Naoko or Reiko I heard nothing.

At the restaurant where I worked I got to know another student my age named Itoh. It took quite a while before this gentle, quiet student from the oil painting department of an arts college would engage me in conversation, but eventually we started going to a nearby bar after work and talking about all kinds of things. He also liked to read and listen to music, and so we’d usually talk about books and records we liked. He was a slim, good-looking
guy with much shorter hair and far cleaner clothes than the typical arts student. He never had a lot to say, but he had his definite tastes and opinions. He liked French novels, especially those of Georges Bataille and Boris Vian. For music, he preferred Mozart and Ravel. And, like me, he was looking for a friend with whom he could talk about such things.

Itoh once invited me to his apartment. It was not quite as hard to get to as mine: a strange, one-floored apartment house behind Inokashira Park. His room was stuffed with painting supplies and canvas. I asked to see his work, but he said he was too embarrassed to show me anything. We drank some Chivas Regal that he had quietly removed from his father’s place, broiled some smelts on his charcoal stove, and listened to Robert Casadesus playing a Mozart piano concerto.

Itoh was from Nagasaki. He had a girlfriend he would sleep with whenever he went home, he said, but things weren’t going too well with her lately.

“You know what girls are like,” he said. “They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing. Now when I see her, usually after we do it, she starts asking me, ‘What are you going to do after you graduate?’”

“Well, what
are
you going to do after you graduate?” I asked him.

Munching on a mouthful of smelt, he shook his head. “What
can
I do? I’m in oil painting! Start worrying about stuff like that, and
nobody’s
going to major in oil painting! You don’t do it to feed yourself. So she’s like, why don’t I come back to Nagasaki and become an art teacher? She’s planning to be an English teacher.”

“You’re not so crazy about her anymore, are you?”

“That about sums it up,” Itoh admitted. “And who the hell wants to be an art teacher? I’m not gonna spend my whole fuckin’ life teaching middle-school monkeys how to draw!”

“That’s beside the point,” I said. “Don’t you think you ought to break up with her? For both your sakes.”

“Sure I do. But I don’t know how to say it to her. She’s planning to spend her life with me. How the hell can I say, ‘Hey, we ought to split up. I don’t like you anymore’?”

We drank our Chivas straight, without ice, and when we ran out of
smelts we cut up some cucumbers and celery and dipped them in miso. When my teeth crunched down on my cucumber slices, I thought of Midori’s father, which reminded me how flat and tasteless my life had become without Midori and put me into a foul mood. Without my being aware of it, she had become a huge presence inside me.

“Got a girlfriend?” Itoh asked me.

“I do,” I said, then, after a pause, added, “but I can’t be with her right now.”

“But you understand each other’s feelings, right?”

“I like to think so. Otherwise, what’s the point?” I said with a chuckle.

Itoh talked in hushed tones about the greatness of Mozart. He knew Mozart inside out, the way a country boy knows his mountain trails. His father loved the music and had had him listening to it ever since he was tiny. I didn’t know so much about classical music, but listening to this Mozart concerto with Itoh’s smart and heartfelt commentary (“There—that part,” “How about
that?”)
, I felt myself calming down for the first time in ages. We stared at the crescent moon hanging over Inokashira Park and drank our Chivas Regal to the last drop. Fantastic whiskey.

Itoh said I could spend the night there, but I told him I had something to do, thanked him for the whiskey, and left his apartment before nine. On the way back to my place I called Midori from a public phone. She actually answered, much to my surprise.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

“I know, I know. But I don’t want our relationship to end like this. You’re one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When
am
I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least.”

“When
I
feel like talking to
you,”
she said.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, and hung up.

A
LETTER CAME
from Reiko in the middle of May.

I wrote a huge number of letters that spring: one a week to Naoko, several to Reiko, and several more to Midori. I wrote letters in the classroom, I wrote letters at my desk at home with Seagull in my lap, I wrote letters at empty tables during my breaks at the Italian restaurant. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

To Midori I wrote, “April and May were painful, lonely months for me
because I couldn’t talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this. I know it’s too late to be saying this to you, but your new hairstyle looks great on you. Really cute. I’m working in an Italian restaurant now, and the cook taught me a great way to make spaghetti. I’d like to make it for you soon.”

I
WENT TO SCHOOL
every day, worked in the restaurant two or three times a week, talked with Itoh about books and music, read a few Boris Vian novels he lent me, wrote letters, played with Seagull, made spaghetti, worked in the garden, masturbated thinking of Naoko, and went to lots of movies.

By the time Midori started talking to me, it was almost the middle of June. We hadn’t said a word to each other for two months. After the end of one lecture, she sat down in the seat next to mine, propped her chin in her hand, and sat there, saying nothing. Beyond the window, it was raining—a real rainy-season rain, pouring straight down without any wind, soaking every single thing beneath. Long after the other students had filed out of the classroom, Midori went on sitting next to me without a word. Then she took a Marlboro from the pocket of her jeans jacket, put it between her lips, and handed me her matches. I struck a match and lit her cigarette. Midori pursed her lips and blew a gentle cloud of tobacco in my face.

“Like my hairstyle?” she asked.

“It’s great.”

“How great?”

“Great enough to knock down all the trees in all the forests of the world.”

“You really think so?”

“I really think so.”

She kept her eyes on mine for a while, then held her right hand out to me. I took it. She looked even more relieved than I felt. She tapped her ashes onto the floor and rose to her feet.

“Let’s go eat. I’m starved,” she said.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“To the Takashimaya department store restaurant in Nihonbashi.”

“Why
there
of all places?”

“I like to go there sometimes, that’s all.”

And so we took the subway to Nihonbashi. Maybe because it had been raining all morning, the place was practically empty. The smell of rain filled the big, cavernous department store, and all the employees had that what-do-we-do-now? kind of look. Midori and I went to the basement restaurant and, after a close inspection of the plastic food in the window, both decided to have an old-fashioned cold lunch assortment with rice and pickles and grilled fish and tempura and teriyaki chicken. Inside, it was far from crowded despite the noon hour.

“Man, how long has it been since the last time I had lunch in a department-store restaurant?” I wondered aloud, drinking green tea from one of those slick white cups you can only find in a department-store restaurant.

“I like to do stuff like this,” said Midori. “I don’t know, it makes me feel like I’m doing something special. Probably reminds me of when I was a kid. My parents almost never took me to department stores.”

“And I get the sneaking suspicion that’s all mine
ever
did. My mother was crazy about department stores.”

“Luckee!”

“What are you talking about? I don’t particularly like going to department stores.”

“No, I mean, you were lucky they cared enough about you to take you places.”

“Well, I was an only child,” I said.

“When I was little I used to dream about going to a department-store restaurant all by myself when I grew up and eating anything I liked. But what an empty dream! What’s the fun of cramming your mouth full of rice all alone in a place like this? The food’s not all that great, and it’s just big and crowded and stuffy and noisy. Still, every once in a while I think about coming here.”

“I’ve been really lonely these past two months,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. You told me in your letters,” Midori said, her voice flat. “Anyhow, let’s eat. That’s all I can think about now.”

We finished all the little fried and broiled and pickled items in the separate compartments of our fancy lacquered half-moon lunch boxes, drank our clear soup from lacquered bowls, and our green tea from those white cups. Midori followed lunch with a cigarette. When she was done smoking,
she stood up without a word and took her umbrella. I also stood up and took my umbrella.

“Where do you want to go now?” I asked.

“The roof, of course. That’s the next stop when you’ve had lunch in a department-store restaurant.”

There was no one on the roof in the rain, no clerk in the pet supplies department, and the shutters were closed in the kiosks and the kids’ rides’ ticket booth. We put up our umbrellas and wandered among the soaking wet wooden horses and garden chairs and stalls. It seemed incredible to me that there could be anyplace so devoid of people in the middle of Tokyo. Midori said she wanted to look through a telescope, so I put in a coin and held her umbrella over her while she squinted through the eyepiece.

In one corner of the roof was the covered games area with a row of kids’ rides. Midori and I sat next to each other on some kind of platform and looked at the rain.

“So talk,” Midori said. “You’ve got something you want to say to me, I know.”

“I’m not trying to make excuses,” I said, “but I was really depressed that time. My brain was all fogged over. Nothing was registering with me. But one thing became crystal clear to me when I couldn’t see you anymore. I realized that the only way I had been able to survive until then was having you in my life. When I lost you, the pain and loneliness really got to me.”

“Don’t you have any idea how painful and lonely it’s been for
me
without
you
these past two months?”

This took me completely off guard. “No,” I said. “It never occurred to me. I thought you were mad at me and didn’t want to see me.”

“How can you be such an idiot? Of
course
I wanted to see you! I
told
you how much I like you! When I like somebody I really like them. It doesn’t turn on and off for me just like that. Don’t you realize at least
that
much about me?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“That’s
why I was so mad at you! I wanted to give you a good kick in the pants. I mean, we hadn’t seen each other that whole time, and you were so spaced out thinking about this other girl you didn’t even
look
at me! How could I
not
get mad at you? But aside from all that, I had been feeling for a long time that it would be better for me if I kept away from you for a while. To get things clear in my head.”