Norwegian Wood (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

  “Yeah, all the other guys thought so, too. But he got mad and said I shouldn’t be talking about such dirty things. Such a wet blanket!”

  “Wow.”

  “He’s a wonderful guy, but he can be really narrow-minded when it comes to stuff like that,” said Midori. “Like, he gets mad if I wear anything but white underwear. Don’t you think that’s narrow-minded?”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but it’s just a matter of taste.” It seemed incredible to me that a guy like that would want a girlfriend like Midori, but I kept the thought to myself.

  “So, what have you been doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Same as always,” I said, but then I recalled my attempt to masturbate while thinking of Midori as I had promised to do. I told her about it in a low voice that wouldn’t carry to the others around us.

  Midori’s eyes lit up and she snapped her fingers. “How’d it go? Was it good?”

  “Nah, I got embarrassed halfway through and quit.”

  “You mean you lost your erection?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Damn,” she said, shooting a look of annoyance at me. “You can’t let yourself get embarrassed. Think about something really sexy. It’s O.K., I’m giving you permission. Hey, I know what! Next time I’ll get on the phone with you: ‘Oh, oh, that’s great … Oh, I feel it … Stop, I’m gonna come … Oh, don’t do that!’ I’ll say stuff like that to you while you’re doing it.”

  “The dormitory phone is in the lobby by the front door, with people coming in and out all the time,” I explained. “The dorm head would kill me with his bare hands if he saw me jerking off in a place like that.”

  “Oh, too bad.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll try again by myself one of these days.”

  “Give it your best,” said Midori.

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  “I wonder if it’s me,” she said. “Maybe I’m just not sexy. Innately.”

  “That’s not it,” I assured her. “It’s more a question of attitude.”

  “You know,” she said, “I have this tremendously sensitive back. The soft touch of fingers all over … mmmmm.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Hey, why don’t we go now and see a dirty movie?” Midori suggested. “A real, filthy S and M one.”

  We went from the bar to an eel shop, and from there to one of Shinjuku’s most run-down theaters for an adult triple feature. It was the only place we could find in the paper that was showing S&M stuff. Inside, the theater had some kind of undefinable smell. Our timing was good: the S&M feature was just starting as we took our seats. It was the story of a secretary and her high-school-age sister being kidnapped by a bunch of men and subjected to sadistic torture. The men get the older one to do all kinds of awful things by threatening to rape the younger sister, but soon the older sister is transformed into a raging masochist, and the younger one goes crazy from having to watch all the contortions they put her through. It was such a gloomy, repetitive film, I got a little bored after a while.

  “If I were the younger sister, I wouldn’t go crazy so easily,” said Midori. “I’d keep watching.”

  “I’m sure you would,” I said.

  “And anyway, don’t you think her nipples are too dark for a high school girl—a virgin?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Midori’s eyes were glued to the screen. I was impressed: anyone watching a movie with such fierce intensity was getting more than her money’s worth. She kept reporting her thoughts to me: “Omigod, will you look at that,” or “Three guys at once! They’re going to tear her open!” or “I’d like to try that on somebody, Watanabe.” I was enjoying Midori a lot more than the movie.

  When the lights went up during intermission, I realized there were no other women in the theater. One young guy sitting near us—probably a student—took a look at Midori and changed his seat to the far side.

  “Tell me, Watanabe, do you get hard watching this kind of stuff?”

  “Well, sure, sometimes,” I said. “That’s why they make these movies.”

  “So what you’re saying is, every time one of those scenes starts, every guy in the theater has his thing standing at attention? Thirty or forty of them standing up all at once? It’s so weird if you stop and think about it, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, now that you mention it.”

  The second feature was a fairly normal sex flick, which meant it was even more boring than the first. It had lots of oral sex scenes, and every time they started doing fellatio or cunnilingus or sixty-nine the soundtrack would fill the theater with loud sucking or slurping sound effects. Listening to them, I felt strangely moved to think that I was living out my life on this odd planet of ours.

  “Who comes up with these sounds, I wonder,” I said to Midori.

  “I think they’re great!” she said.

  There was also a sound for a penis moving back and forth in a vagina. I had never realized that such sounds even existed. The man was into a lot of heavy breathing, and the woman came up with the usual sort of expressions—“good” or “more”—as she writhed under him. You could also hear the bed creaking. These scenes just went on and on. Midori seemed to be enjoying them at first, but even she got bored after a while and suggested we leave. We went outside and took a few deep breaths. This was the first time in my life the outside air of Shinjuku felt healthy to me.

  “That was fun,” said Midori. “Let’s try it again sometime.”

  “They just keep doing the same things,” I said.

  “Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things.”

  She had a point there.

  We found another bar and ordered drinks. I had more whiskey, and Midori drank three or four cocktails of some indefinable sort. Outside again, Midori said she wanted to climb a tree.

  “There aren’t any trees around here,” I said. “And even if there were, you’re too wobbly to do any climbing.”

  “You’re always so damn sensible, you ruin everything. I’m drunk ’cause I wanna be drunk. What’s wrong with that? And even if I am drunk, I can still climb a tree. Hell, I’m gonna climb all the way to the top of a great, big, tall tree and I’m gonna pee all over everybody!”

  “You wouldn’t happen to be needing to go to the bathroom by any chance?”

  “Yup.”

  I took Midori to a pay toilet in Shinjuku Station, put a coin in the slot and got her inside, then bought an evening paper at a nearby stand and read it while I waited for her to come out. But she didn’t come out. I started getting worried after fifteen minutes and was ready to go check on her when she finally emerged looking kind of pale.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I fell asleep on the toilet.”

  “Are you O.K.?” I asked, putting my coat over her shoulders.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “I’ll take you home. You just have to get home, take a nice, long bath and go to bed. You’re exhausted.”

  “I am not going home. What’s the point? Nobody’s there. I don’t want to sleep all by myself in a place like that.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Go to some love hotel around here and sleep with your arms around me all night. Like a log. Tomorrow morning we’ll have breakfast somewhere and go to school together.”

  “You were planning this all along, weren’t you? That’s why you called me up.”

  “Of course.”

  “You should have called your boyfriend, not me. That’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s what boyfriends are for.”

  “But I want to be with you.”

  “You can’t be with me,” I said. “First of all, I have to be back in the dorm by midnight. Otherwise, I’ll break curfew. The one time I did that I had hell to pay. And second, if I go to bed with a girl, I’m going to want to do it with her, and I sure as hell don’t want to lie there struggling to restrain myself. I�
�m not kidding, I might end up forcing you.”

  “You mean you’d hit me and tie me up and rape me from behind?”

  “Hey, look, I’m serious.”

  “But I’m so lonely! I want to be with someone! I know I’m doing terrible things to you, making demands and not giving you anything in return, saying whatever pops into my head, dragging you out of your room and forcing you to take me everywhere, but you’re the only one I can do stuff like that to! I have never been able to have my own way with anybody, not once in the twenty years I’ve been alive. My father, my mother, they never paid the slightest attention to me, and my boyfriend, well, he’s just not that kind of guy. He gets mad if I try to have my own way. So we end up fighting. You’re the only one I can say these things to. And now I’m really really really tired and I want to fall asleep listening to someone tell me how much they like me and how pretty I am and stuff. That’s all I want. And when I wake up, I’ll be full of energy and I’ll never bother you with these kinds of selfish demands again. I swear. I’ll be a good girl.”

  “I hear you, believe me, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Oh, please! Otherwise, I’m going to sit right down here on the ground and cry my head off all night long. And I’ll sleep with the first guy that talks to me.”

  That did it. I called the dorm and asked for Nagasawa. When he got on the phone I asked him if he would make it look as if I had come back for the evening. I was with a girl, I explained.

  “Fine,” he said. “It’s a worthy cause, I’ll be glad to help you out. I’ll just turn over your name tag to the ‘in’ side. Don’t worry. Take all the time you need. You can come in through my window in the morning.”

  “Thanks. I owe you one,” I said, and hung up.

  “All set?” Midori asked.

  “Pretty much,” I said with a sigh.

  “Great, let’s go to a disco, it’s so early.”

  “Wait a minute, I thought you were tired.”

  “For something like this, I’m just fine.”

  “Oh, brother,” I said.

  AND SHE WAS RIGHT. We went to a disco, and her energy started coming back little by little as we danced. She drank two whiskey and cokes, stayed on the dance floor until her forehead was drenched in sweat.

  “This is so much fun!” she exclaimed when we took a break at a table. “I haven’t danced like this in ages. I don’t know, when you move your body, it’s kind of like your spirit gets liberated.”

  “Your spirit is always liberated, I’d say.”

  “No way,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “Anyhow, now that I’m feeling better, I’m starved! Let’s go for pizza.”

  I took her to a pizza house I knew and ordered draught beer and an anchovy pizza. I wasn’t very hungry and ate only four of the twelve slices. Midori finished the rest.

  “You sure made a fast recovery,” I said. “Not too long ago you were pale and wobbly.”

  “It’s ’cause my selfish demands got through to somebody,” she answered. “It unclogged me. Wow, this pizza is great!”

  “Tell me, though. Is there really nobody at home?”

  “It’s true. My sister’s staying at her friend’s place. Now, that girl’s got a real case of the creeps. She can’t sleep alone in the house if I’m not there.”

  “Let’s forget this love-hotel crap, then. Going to a place like that just makes you feel cheap. Let’s go to your house. You must have enough bedding for me?”

  Midori thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “O.K., we’ll spend the night at my place.”

  We took the Yamanote Line to Otsuka, and soon we were raising the metal shutter that sealed off the front of the Kobayashi Bookstore. A paper sign on the shutter read “Temporarily Closed.” The smell of old paper filled the dark shop, as if the shutter had not been opened for a long time. Half the shelves were empty, and most of the magazines had been tied in bundles for returns. That hollow, chilly feeling I had experienced on my first visit had only deepened. The place looked like a hulk abandoned on the shore.

  “You’re not planning to open the shop again?” I asked.

  “Nah, we’re gonna sell it,” Midori said. “We’ll divide the money and live on our own for a while without anybody’s ‘protection.’ My sister’s getting married next year, and I’ve got three more years of school. We ought to make enough to see us through that much at least. I’ll keep my parttime job, too. Once the place is sold, I’ll live with my sister in an apartment for a while.”

  “You think somebody’ll want to buy it?”

  “Probably. I know somebody who wants to open a yarn shop. She’s been asking me recently if I want to sell. Poor Papa, though. He worked so hard to get this place, and he was paying off the loan he took out little by little, and in the end he hardly had anything left. It all melted away, like foam on a river.”

  “He had you, though,” I said.

  “Me?!” Midori said with a laugh. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s cold down here.”

  Upstairs, she sat me at the kitchen table and went to warm the bathwater. While she busied herself with that, I put a kettle on to boil and made tea. Waiting for the bath to heat up, we sat across from each other at the kitchen table and drank the tea. Chin in hand, she took a long, hard look at me. There were no sounds other than the ticking of the clock and the hum of the refrigerator motor, turning on and off as the thermostat kicked in and out. The clock showed that midnight was fast approaching.

  “Y’know, Watanabe, study it hard enough, and you’ve got a pretty interesting face.”

  “Think so?” I asked, somewhat hurt.

  “A nice face goes a long way with me,” she said. “And yours … well, the more I look at it, the more I get to thinking, ‘He’ll do.’”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Every once in a while, I think about myself, ‘What the hell, I’ll do.’”

  “Hey, I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m not very good at putting my feelings into words. That’s why people misunderstand me. All I’m trying to say is I like you. Have I told you that before?”

  “You have,” I said.

  “I mean, I’m not the only one who has trouble figuring out what men are all about. But I’m working at it, a little at a time.”

  Midori brought over a box of Marlboros and lit one up. “When you start at zero, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot! You want to burn a stick of incense for my father?”

  I followed Midori to the room with the Buddhist altar, lit a stick of incense in front of her father’s photo, and brought my hands together.

  “Know what I did the other day?” Midori asked. “I got all naked in front of my father’s picture. Took off every stitch of clothing and let him have a good, long look. Kind of in a yoga position. Like, ‘Here, Daddy, these are my tits, and this is my cunt.’”

  “Why in the hell would you do something like that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I just wanted to show him. I mean, half of me comes from his sperm, right? Why shouldn’t I show him? ‘Here’s the daughter you made.’ I was a little drunk at the time. I suppose that had something to do with it.”

  “I suppose.”

  “My sister walked in and fell over. There I was in front of my father’s memorial portrait all naked with my legs spread. I guess anybody’d be kinda surprised.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I explained why I was doing it and said, ‘So take off your clothes and sit down next to me and show him, too, Momo’ (her name’s Momo), but she wouldn’t do it. She went away shocked. She’s got this really conservative streak.”

  “In other words, she’s relatively normal, you mean,” I said.

  “Tell me, Watanabe, what did you think of my father?”

  “I’m not good with people I’ve just met, but it didn’t bother me being alone with him. I felt pretty comfortable with him. We talk
ed about all kinds of stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Euripides,” I said.

  Midori laughed out loud. “You’re so weird! Nobody talks about Euripides with a dying person they’ve just met!”

  “Well, nobody sits in front of her father’s memorial portrait with her legs spread, either!”

  Midori chuckled and gave the altar bell a ring. “G’night, Daddy. We’re going to have some fun now, so don’t worry and get some sleep. You’re not suffering anymore, right? You’re dead, right? I’m sure you’re not suffering. If you are, you’d better complain to the gods. Tell ’em it’s just too cruel. I hope you meet Mommy and the two of you really do it. I saw your wee-wee when I helped you pee. It was pretty impressive! So give it everything you’ve got. G’night.”

  WE TOOK TURNS in the bathtub and changed into pajamas. I borrowed a nearly new pair of her father’s. They were a little small but better than nothing. Midori spread out a mattress for me on the floor of the altar room.

  “You’re not scared sleeping in front of the altar?” she asked.

  “Not at all. I haven’t done anything bad,” I said with a smile.

  “But you’re gonna stay with me and hold me until I fall asleep, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  Practically falling over the edge of Midori’s little bed, I held her in my arms. Nose against my chest, Midori set her hands on my hips. My right arm curled around her back while I tried to keep from falling off by hanging on to the bed frame with my left hand. This was not exactly a situation conducive to sexual excitement. My nose was resting on her head and the short-cut hairs there would give it a tickle every now and then.

  “C’mon, say something to me,” Midori said with her face buried in my chest.

  “Whaddya want me to say?”

  “Anything. Something to make me feel good.”

  “You’re really cute,” I said.

  “Midori,” she said. “Say my name.”

  “You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself.

  “Whaddya mean really cute?”

  “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.”

  Midori lifted her face and looked at me. “You have this special way with words.”