REIKO AND I LEFT THE MAIN BUILDING, crossed a hill, and passed by a pool, some tennis courts, and a basketball court. Two men—one thin and middle-aged, the other young and fat—were on a tennis court. Both used their racquets well, but to me the game they were playing could not have been tennis. It seemed as if the two of them had a special interest in the bounce of tennis balls and were doing research in that area. They slammed the ball back and forth with a strange kind of concentration. Both were drenched in sweat. The young man, at the end of the court closer to us, noticed Reiko and came over. They exchanged a few words, smiling. Beside the court, a man with no expression on his face was using a large mower to cut the grass.
Moving on, we came to a patch of woods where some fifteen or twenty neat little cottages stood at some distance from one another. The same kind of yellow bike the gatekeeper had been riding was parked at the entrance of almost every house. “Staff members and their families live here,” said Reiko.
“We have just about everything we need without going to the city,” she said as we walked along. “Where food is concerned, as I said before, we’re practically self-sufficient. We get eggs from our own chicken coop. We have books and records and exercise facilities, our own convenience store, and every week barbers and beauticians come to visit. We even have movies on weekends. Anything special we need we can ask a staff member to buy for us in town. Clothing we order from catalogues. Living here is no problem.”
“But you can’t go into town?”
“No, that we can’t do. Of course if there’s something special, like we have to go to the dentist, or something, that’s another matter, but as a rule we can’t go into town. Each person is completely free to leave this place, but once you’ve left you can’t come back. You burn your bridges. You can’t go off for a couple of days in town and expect to come back. It only stands to reason, though. Everybody would be coming and going.”
Beyond the trees we came to a gentle slope. At irregular intervals along the slope stood a row of two-story wooden houses that had something strange about them. What made them look strange it’s hard to say, but that was the first thing I felt when I saw them. My reaction was a lot like what we feel from attempts to paint unreality in a pleasant way. It occurred to me that this was what you might get if Walt Disney did an animated version of a Munch painting. All the houses were exactly the same shape and color, nearly cubical, in perfect left-to-right symmetry, with big front doors and lots of windows. The road twisted its way among them like the artificial practice course of a driving school. Well-manicured flowering shrubbery stood in front of each house. There was no sign of people, and curtains covered all the windows.
“This is called Area C. The women live here. Us! There are ten houses, each containing four units, two people per unit. That’s eighty people all together, but at the moment there are only thirty-two of us.”
“Quiet, isn’t it?”
“Well, there’s nobody here now,” Reiko said. “I’ve been given special permission to move around freely like this, but everybody else is off pursuing their individual schedules. Some are exercising, some are gardening, some are in group therapy, some are out gathering wild plants. Each person makes up his or her own schedule. Let’s see, what’s Naoko doing now? I think she was supposed to be working on new paint and wallpaper. I forget. There are a few jobs like that that go till five.”
Reiko walked into the building marked “C-7,” climbed the stairs at the far end of the hallway, and opened the door on the right, which was unlocked. She showed me around the apartment, a pleasant, if plain, four-room unit: living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. It had no extra furniture or unnecessary decoration, but neither was the place severe. There was nothing special about it, but being there was kind of like being with Reiko: you could relax and let the tension leave your body. The living room had a sofa, a table, and a rocking chair. Another table stood in the kitchen. Both tables had large ashtrays on them. The bedroom had two beds, two desks, and a closet. A small night table stood between the beds with a reading lamp atop it and a paperback turned facedown. The kitchen had a small electric range that matched the refrigerator and was equipped for simple cooking.
“No bathtub, just a shower, but it’s pretty impressive, wouldn’t you say? Bath and laundry facilities are communal.”
“It’s almost too impressive. My dorm room has a ceiling and a window.”
“Ah, but you haven’t seen the winters here,” said Reiko, touching my back to guide me to the sofa and sitting down next to me. “They’re long and harsh. Nothing but snow and snow and more snow everywhere you look. It gets damp and chills you to the bone. We spend the winter shoveling snow. Mostly you stay inside where it’s warm and listen to music or talk or knit. If you didn’t have this much space, you’d suffocate. You’ll see if you come here in the winter.”
Reiko gave a deep sigh as if picturing the winter, and she folded her hands on her knees.
“This will be your bed,” she said, patting the sofa. “We’ll sleep in the bedroom, and you’ll sleep here. You should be O.K., don’t you think?”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“So, that does it,” said Reiko. “We’ll be back around five. Naoko and I both have things to do until then. Do you mind staying here alone?”
“Not at all. I’ll study my German.”
When Reiko left, I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. I lay there steeping myself in the silence when, out of nowhere, I thought of the time Kizuki and I took a motorcycle trip. That had been autumn, too, I realized. Autumn how many years ago? Yes, four years ago. I recalled the smell of Kizuki’s leather jacket and the racket made by that red Yamaha 125cc bike. We went to a spot far down the coast, and came back the same evening, exhausted. Nothing special happened on that trip, but I remembered it well. The sharp autumn wind moaned in my ears, and looking up at the sky, my hands clutching Kizuki’s jacket, I felt as if I might be swept into outer space.
I lay there for a long time, letting my mind wander from one memory to another. For some strange reason, lying down in this room seemed to bring back old memories that I had rarely if ever recalled before. Some of them were pleasant, but others carried a trace of sadness.
How long did this go on? I was so immersed in that torrent of memory (and it was a torrent, like a spring gushing out of the rocks) that I failed to notice Naoko quietly open the door and come in. I opened my eyes, and there she was. I raised my head and looked into her eyes for a time. She was sitting on the arm of the sofa, looking at me. At first I thought she might be an image spun into existence by my own memories. But it was the real Naoko.
“Sleeping?” she whispered.
“No,” I said, “just thinking.” I sat up and asked, “How are you?”
“I’m good,” she said with a little smile like a pale, distant scene. “I don’t have much time, though. I’m not supposed to be here now. I just got away for a minute, and I have to go back right away. Don’t you hate my hair?”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s cute.” Her hair was in a simple, schoolgirl style, one side held in place with a barrette the way she used to have it in the old days. It suited Naoko very well, as if she had always worn her hair that way. She looked like one of the beautiful little girls you see in woodblock prints from the middle ages.
“It’s such a pain, I have Reiko cut it for me. Do you really think it’s cute?”
“Really.”
“My mother hates it.” She opened the barrette, let the hair hang down, smoothed it with her fingers, and closed the barrette again. The barrette was shaped like a butterfly.
“I wanted to be sure to see you alone before the three of us get together. Not that I had anything special to say. I just wanted to see your face and get used to having you here. Otherwise, I’d have trouble getting to know you again. I’m so bad with people.”
“Well?” I asked. “Is it working?”
“A little,” she said, touching her barrette again. “But
time’s up. I’ve got to go.”
I nodded.
“Toru,” she began, “I really want to thank you for coming to see me. It makes me very happy. But if being here is any kind of burden to you, you shouldn’t hesitate to tell me so. This is a special place, and it has a special system, and some people can’t get into it. So if you feel like that, please be honest and let me know. I won’t be crushed. We’re honest with each other here. We tell each other all kinds of things with complete honesty.”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “I’ll be honest.”
Naoko sat down and leaned against me on the sofa. When I put my arm around her, she rested her head on my shoulder and pressed her face to my neck. She stayed like that for a time, almost as if she were taking my temperature. Holding her, I felt warm in the chest. After a short while, she stood up without saying a word and went out through the door as quietly as she had come in.
With Naoko gone, I went to sleep on the sofa. I hadn’t intended to do so, but I fell into the kind of deep sleep I had not had for a long time, filled with a sense of Naoko’s presence. In the kitchen were the dishes Naoko ate from, in the bathroom was the toothbrush Naoko used, and in the bedroom was the bed in which Naoko slept. Sleeping soundly in this apartment of hers, I wrung the fatigue from every cell of my body, drop by drop. I dreamed of a butterfly dancing in the half-light.
When I awoke again, the hands of my watch were pointing to 4:35. The light had changed, the wind had died, the shapes of the clouds were different. I had sweated in my sleep, so I dried my face with a small towel from my knapsack and put on a fresh undershirt. Going to the kitchen, I took a drink of water and stood there looking through the window over the sink. This window faced a window of the next building, on the inside of which hung several paper cutouts—a bird, a cloud, a cow, a cat, all done in skillful silhouette and joined together. As before, there was no sign of people present, and there were no sounds of any kind. I felt as if I were living alone in an extremely well-cared-for ruin.
PEOPLE STARTED COMING BACK to Area C a little after five o’clock. Looking out the kitchen window, I saw three women passing by just below. All wore hats that prevented me from telling their ages, but judging from the voices I heard, they were not very young. Shortly after they had disappeared around a corner, four more women appeared from the same direction and, like the first group, they disappeared around the same corner. An evening mood hung over everything. From the living room window I could see trees and the line of hills. Above the ridge floated a border of pale sunlight.
Naoko and Reiko came back together at five-thirty. Naoko and I exchanged proper greetings as if meeting for the first time. She seemed truly embarrassed. Reiko noticed the book I had been reading and asked what it was. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, I told her.
“How could you bring a book like that to a place like this?” she demanded to know. She was right, of course.
Reiko then made coffee for the three of us. I told Naoko about Storm Trooper’s sudden disappearance and about the last day I saw him, when he gave me the firefly. “I’m so sorry he’s gone,” she said. “I wanted to hear more stories about him.” Reiko asked who this Storm Trooper person was, so I told her about his antics and got a big laugh from her. The world was at peace and filled with laughter as long as stories of Storm Trooper were being told.
At six we went to the dining hall in the main building for supper. Naoko and I had fried fish with green salad, boiled vegetables, rice, and miso soup. Reiko limited herself to pasta salad and coffee, followed by another cigarette.
“You don’t need to eat so much as you get older,” she said by way of explanation.
Some twenty other people were there in the dining hall. A few new ones arrived as we ate, but meanwhile a few others left. Aside from the variety in people’s ages, the scene looked pretty much like that of the dining hall in my dormitory. Where it differed was the uniform volume at which people conversed. There were no loud voices and no whispers, no one laughing out loud or crying out in shock, no one yelling to another person with exaggerated gestures, nothing but quiet conversations, all carried on at the same level. People were eating in groups of three to five. Each group had a single speaker, to whom the others would listen with nods and grunts of interest, and when that person was done speaking, the next would take up the conversation. I could not tell what they were saying, but the way they said it reminded me of the strange tennis game I had seen at noon. I wondered if Naoko spoke like this when she was with them and, strangely enough, I felt a twinge of loneliness mixed with jealousy.
At the table behind me, a balding man in white with the authentic air of a doctor was holding forth to a nervous-looking young man in glasses and a squirrel-faced woman of middle age on the effects of weightlessness on the secretion of gastric juices. The two listened with an occasional “My goodness” or “No kidding,” but the longer I listened to the balding man’s style of speaking, the less certain I became that, even in his white coat, he really was a doctor.
No one in the dining hall paid me any special attention. No one stared or even seemed to notice I was there. My presence must have been an entirely natural event.
Just once, though, the man in white spun around and asked me, “How long will you be staying?”
“Two nights,” I said. “I’ll be leaving on Wednesday.”
“It’s nice here at this time of year, isn’t it? But come again in winter. It’s really nice when everything’s white.”
“Naoko may be out of here by the time snow comes,” said Reiko to the man.
“True, but still, the winter’s really nice,” he repeated with a somber expression. I felt increasingly unsure as to whether or not he was a doctor.
“What do you people talk about?” I asked Reiko, who seemed not quite to get my meaning.
“What do we talk about? Just ordinary things. What happened today, or books we’ve read, or tomorrow’s weather, you know. Don’t tell me you’re wondering if people jump to their feet and shout stuff like ‘It’ll rain tomorrow if a polar bear eats the stars tonight!’”
“No, no, of course not,” I said. “I was just wondering what all these quiet conversations were about.”
“It’s a quiet place, so people talk quietly,” said Naoko. She made a neat pile of fish bones at the edge of her plate and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief. “There’s no need to raise your voice here. You don’t have to convince anybody of anything, and you don’t have to attract anyone’s attention.”
“I guess not,” I said, but as I ate my meal in these quiet surroundings, I was surprised to find myself missing the buzz of people. I wanted to hear people laughing and shouting for no reason and saying overblown things. That was just the kind of noise I had grown sick of in recent months, but sitting here and eating fish in this unnaturally quiet room, I couldn’t relax. The dining hall had all the atmosphere of a specialized-machine-tool trade fair. People with a strong interest in a limited field came together in a limited spot and exchanged information understood only by themselves.
BACK IN THE ROOM AFTER SUPPER, Naoko and Reiko announced that they would be going to the Area C communal bath and that if I didn’t mind just a shower, I could use the one in their bathroom. I would do that, I said, and after they were gone I got undressed, showered, and washed my hair. I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko’s room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often—too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.
The moon was so bright, I turned the lights off and stretched out on the sofa to listen to Bill Evans’s piano. Streaming in through the window, the moonlight cast long shadows and splashed the walls with a touch of diluted India ink. I took a thin metal fla
sk from my knapsack, let my mouth fill with the brandy it contained, let the warmth move slowly down my throat to my stomach, and from there felt it spreading to every corner of my body. After one more sip, I closed the flask and returned it to my knapsack. Now the moonlight seemed to be swaying with the music.
Twenty minutes later, Naoko and Reiko came back from the bath.
“Oh! It was so dark here, we thought you packed your bags and went back to Tokyo,” exclaimed Reiko.
“No way,” I said. “I hadn’t seen such a bright moon for years. I wanted to look at it with the lights off.”
“It’s lovely, though,” said Naoko. “Reiko, do we still have those candles from the last power outage?”
“Probably, in a kitchen drawer.”
Naoko brought a large white candle from the kitchen. I lit it, dripped a little wax into a plate, and stood it up. Reiko used the flame to light a cigarette. As the three of us sat facing the candle amid these hushed surroundings, it began to seem as if we were the only ones left on some far edge of the world. The still shadows of the moonlight and the swaying shadows of the candlelight met and melded on the white walls of the apartment. Naoko and I sat next to each other on the sofa, and Reiko settled into the rocking chair facing us.
“How about some wine?” Reiko asked me.
“You’re allowed to drink?” I asked with some surprise.
“Well, not really,” said Reiko, scratching an earlobe with a hint of embarrassment. “But they pretty much let it go. If it’s just wine or beer and you don’t drink too much. I’ve got a friend on the staff who buys me a little now and then.”
“We have our drinking parties,” said Naoko with a mischievous air. “Just the two of us.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
Reiko took a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, opened it with a corkscrew, and brought three glasses. The wine had a clear, delicious flavor that seemed almost homemade. When the record ended, Reiko brought a guitar out from under her bed, and after tuning it with a look of fondness for the instrument, she began to play a slow Bach fugue. She missed her fingering every now and then, but it was real Bach, with real feeling—warm, intimate, and filled with the joy of performance.
Norwegian Wood (Vintage International) Page 13