“What’s it like, communal life? Is it fun living with someone?” Naoko asked.
“Who knows? It’s only been a month,” I said. “But so far it’s not been bad. At least there’s nothing I really can’t stand.”
She stopped at a water fountain and took a sip, pulled a white handkerchief from her pants pocket, and wiped her mouth. Then she bent to carefully retie her shoelaces.
“Say, you think I could deal with living like that?”
“You mean communal living?”
“Yeah,” said Naoko.
“Hmm, I wonder. It all depends on how you look at it. There’s all kinds of annoyances if you care to count them. Petty rules, dumb jerks throwing their weight around, roommates who exercise at six-thirty in the morning. But that’s the same everywhere, really, nothing to get worked up about. You tell yourself, ‘Here’s where I’ve got to make a go of it,’ and you live how you have to live. That’s all there is to it.”
“Maybe so,” she said, and seemed to mull it over a while. Then, overcome by something approaching amazement, she peered straight into my eyes. I hadn’t realized until then how crystal clear her eyes were. Come to think of it, I hadn’t had the chance to look at her eyes at all. It was our first time walking alone together, our first time to talk at such length.
“You thinking about entering a dorm or something?” I asked.
“Un-uh, nothing like that,” said Naoko. “I was just wondering. I mean how it’d be, living with others. And…” She bit her lip, searching for the right phrase but failed to come up with anything. She sighed and looked down. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s nothing.”
And that was the end of the conversation. Naoko strode off east again, with me close behind.
It had been almost a year since I’d last seen Naoko. And in the course of that year she’d grown distinctly thinner. The flesh had fallen away from those once-plump cheeks and her neck had grown leaner, but her loss of weight left no boney or unhealthy impression. It was an utterly natural, unobtrusive slimming. It was as if she’d discreetly hidden herself in some long, narrow space and her body had simply pared itself down to fit it. What’s more, she looked all the more beautiful for it, though I couldn’t figure out the right way to tell her that.
We hadn’t come here for any particular purpose but had just bumped into each another on the train. She’d set out for the day, maybe to see a movie, and I was on my way to Kanda to go book-browsing. Neither of us had anything especially pressing. Naoko had suggested we get off, so we left the train. And it just happened to be Yotsuya Station. Not that we had anything to discuss in the first place. I couldn’t understand why Naoko had suggested the two of us should get off. What did we have to talk about?
Leaving the station, she strode off briskly without so much as a word where to. I had no choice but to follow, always a yard behind. Of course, I could have reduced that distance if I’d wanted, but somehow it didn’t seem like the thing to do. So I walked a yard behind her, looking at her back and straight black hair fastened with a big brown hairclip, her tiny white ears peeking out at the sides. From time to time Naoko would turn around and say something to me. Some things I could answer, some not. Sometimes I couldn’t even hear what she said. Whatever, it hardly seemed to matter to her. She’d say what she had to say, then face forward and keep on walking. What the hell, I thought, anyway it’s a nice day for a walk.
But Naoko’s pace was a little too determined for your pleasant stroll. She hung a right at Iidabashi, cut over to beside the moat, crossed the intersection at Jimbocho, and headed up the hill to Ochanomizu, then kept on going all the way to Hongo. There she followed the streetcar tracks up to Komagome. No small excursion. By the time we reached Komagome the sun was already setting. A peaceful spring dusk.
“Where are we?” asked Naoko with a start.
“Komagome,” I said. “Couldn’t you tell? We’ve been walking all over the place.”
“Why’d we come here?”
“You’re the one who was leading. I only followed .”
We stopped in a noodle shop by the train station and had a quick bite. I was thirsty, so I had a beer. From the time we ordered to the time we finished eating we didn’t say one word. I was worn out from all that walking and she seemed lost in thought again. The TV news carried a report that this Sunday every pleasure spot in the city had been packed. Yeah, and we’d walked from Yotsuya to Komagome.
“You’re sure in good shape,” I ventured, once we finished our noodles.
“Surprised?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’ve trained long-distance, running the five- and ten-mile ever since middle school. That and my father’s a mountain climber and we’d go climbing on Sundays since I was small. I mean there’re hills right behind our house. So my legs just naturally got sturdy.”
“You wouldn’t think so to look at you,” I said.
“Maybe not. Everyone seems to think I’m this cute little girl. But you can’t judge people by appearances,” she said, tacking on the barest smile.
“You’ll have to excuse me, but I’m bushed.”
“Sorry, putting you through a day with me.”
“No, I’m glad we got to talk. ’Cause we never once talked up to now,” I said, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember what exactly we’d talked about.
She absentmindedly spun the ashtray on the table.
“You know, what say—and only if it’s no imposition on you, that is—what say we get together again? Of course, I know it’s not in the story to say that sort of thing.”
“Story?” I said, startled. “Not in what story?”
She blushed. Probably I’d overreacted.
“I can’t really explain,” she excused herself. She rolled both sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows, then rolled them down again. The lights turned the soft hairs on her arms to gold. “I didn’t mean to say ‘story.’ It just came out.”
Naoko planted her elbows on the table and glanced up briefly at the calendar on the wall, almost as if she expected to find a more appropriate expression there. Not locating any, she sighed, closed her eyes, and fiddled with her hairclip.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I think I get what you mean. And I wouldn’t know how to say it either.”
“I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split in two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up.”
Naoko looked up at me. “Does that make any sense?”
“That happens more or less to everyone,” I said. “Everybody goes through times when they want to say something, but they can’t and they get upset.”
Naoko seemed almost disappointed at my answer.
“That’s something else,” said Naoko, but wouldn’t explain any further.
“The answer is, I wouldn’t mind at all seeing you again.” I put the conversation back on track. “I’m never doing anything on Sundays anyway, and walking is healthy enough.”
We got on the Yamate Line and Naoko changed for the Chuo Line at Shinjuku. She was renting a small apartment out in Kokubunji.
“Tell me, do I speak a little differently than I used to?” asked Naoko on parting.
“Maybe a little,” I said. “But I couldn’t say just how. If you really want to know, for all we saw of each other before I don’t recall that we ever talked that much.”
“Maybe not,” she granted. “Can I call you next Saturday?”
“Sure thing. I’ll be waiting,” I said.
*
I first met Naoko the spring of my junior year in h
igh school. She was also a junior, attending one of those good Catholic girls’ schools. The sort of good school where if you studied too hard they all said behind your back that you had no “class.” I had a good friend named Kizuki (my only friend, in fact) and Naoko was his girlfriend. Kizuki and she had known each other almost from the time they were born. Their homes were only two hundred yards apart.
And like most childhood sweethearts, their relationship was quite open, with no compelling urge for them to be alone. The two of them were always spending time at each other’s house, eating dinner with each other’s family, playing mahjongg. I went on double dates with them lots of times. Naoko would bring some classmate of hers and the four of us would go to the zoo or the pool or the movies. But cute as the girls Naoko brought along were, the truth was they were always a little too well-bred for me. If anything, girls from public schools were much easier to talk to. I could never tell what went on in the cute little heads of those girls Naoko brought. Probably they couldn’t make much of me, either.
So after a while Kizuki gave up inviting me on double dates, and the three of us—Kizuki, Naoko, and me—would just go somewhere and talk. Maybe it’s strange, but finally that worked out simplest and best. Enter a fourth and things got just a little clumsy. But with three, it was me in the guest seat, Kizuki as the able-bodied host of the talk show, and Naoko as his assistant. Kizuki was always the center of things and he carried it off very well. True, he did have a cynical streak, which made others think him stuck-up, but fundamentally he was one kind and fair-minded guy. As a threesome, he always took pains to talk as much to me as to Naoko, to tell us both jokes and make sure that no one was bored. If either of us fell silent for too long, he’d turn on the conversation and draw some talk out of us. Just to watch him, you’d wonder how he could keep it up, but probably it was nothing for him. He just had the ability to weigh the situation moment by moment and respond accordingly. Added to which, he had an uncommon talent for eliciting kernels of interesting conversation from even the dullest talker. Just talking to him made me feel I was an interesting person leading an interesting life.
Still, he was not your most sociable creature. He didn’t hang around with anybody but me at school. I could never understand why someone so sharp, with such a gift for gab, didn’t get out in wider circles instead of wasting himself on a gang of three. How could he possibly be content with just us? And what could he have been thinking of to choose us in the first place? Me, I was your regular read-books-and-listen-to-records type, with nothing special to make Kizuki single me out. Nonetheless we got along famously as a team. Kizuki’s father, by the way, was a dentist, well known both for his skill and his high prices.
First thing after we met, Kizuki had asked me, “What say we go on a double date this Sunday? My girl goes to a girls’ school and she’ll bring along something cute.” Sure, I told him. And so I met Naoko.
Me and Kizuki and Naoko saw lots of times together, but whenever he left the room and the two of us were alone, Naoko and I could never find much to say. What were we supposed to talk about? If the truth be known, we didn’t have a thing in common. It was all I could do to down a glass of water or fiddle with the things on the table and wait for Kizuki to return. All in all, I was more of a listener, and Naoko wasn’t much for talking either. So we’d only find ourselves uncomfortable. Not mismatched exactly, just plain not talkative.
Only once, maybe two weeks after Kizuki’s funeral, did I meet up with Naoko. At a coffee shop, on some small errand, after taking care of which there was nothing to discuss. I did manage to dig up a couple of topics to throw her way, but the talk always snagged. And maybe there was something a little stiff about her words, some little bitterness. I seemed to sense that Naoko was mad at me, though I couldn’t figure out why. We went our separate ways and never saw each other until one year later, when we bumped into each other on the Chuo Line.
Maybe what Naoko was mad about was the fact that I, not she, had been the last to see Kizuki. Which may not be a very nice thing to say, but I can appreciate how she must have felt. I would have traded places if I could, but it was over and done with. File under “Never to Be.”
One pleasant May noontime, we’d just had lunch when Kizuki suggested we cut class and go shoot some billiards. Not being too keen on that afternoon’s classes myself, we skipped school and headed down the hill to the harbor, where we entered a pool hall and racked up four rounds. When I walked off with the first game, he suddenly got very serious and played the remaining three games to win. I paid for the games. A bet was a bet. He didn’t crack one joke the whole time we played. Most unusual. When we’d finished, we had a smoke.
“You’re awful serious today,” I chided.
“Today I didn’t feel like losing,” said Kizuki with a self-satisfied laugh.
That night, he died in his garage. Hooked up a rubber hose to the exhaust of his N-360, taped up the cracks in the windows, revved the engine. How long it took before he was dead, I don’t know. When his folks came home from visiting an ailing relative and opened the garage door to put the other car in, he was already cold. Car radio playing, gas station receipt under the windshield wiper. No last letter, no plausible motive.
I was called to the police station for questioning as the last person to see him alive. There’d been no hint whatsoever he was contemplating such a thing, I told the detective. He’d appeared the same as ever. The police didn’t seem to think too much of either me or Kizuki. To them, there was nothing strange about a kid who’d cut class to shoot billiards committing suicide. The papers ran a short obit and the case was closed. The red N-360 was disposed of. A white flower decorated his desk in class for some time thereafter.
For the ten months between Kizuki’s death and my graduation from high school, I couldn’t gauge where I stood with the rest of the world. I got close to one girl and slept with her, but it didn’t last six months. Nor did she make any particular claims on me. I picked a private university in Tokyo where I’d be sure to get in with no great effort, took the exams, and passed. No big deal. The girl begged me not to go to Tokyo, but I just had to leave Kobe. That and I wanted to start all over again somewhere I didn’t know anybody.
“You’ve had me, so now it doesn’t matter what becomes of me, right?” she sobbed.
“You know that’s not it,” I said. I just wanted to get out of that place, but she couldn’t be expected to understand that. So we split up. Riding the “bullet train” up to Tokyo, I recalled all the wonderful and nice things about her and I regretted the terrible thing I’d done, but there was no undoing it. I decided to forget about her.
On arriving in Tokyo and commencing dorm life, I hadn’t a clue what to do. Only not to take things too seriously and not to let things get too close. I made up my mind to wipe my slate clean of green felt billiard tables and red N-360s and white flowers on desks. Of fingers of smoke rising from crematorium smokestacks and the clunky paperweights they have in police interrogation rooms—of everything. It promised to be easygoing for a while. But however much I cleared away, I was left with great lumps of void, of empty space. Then as time went on, these lumps began to assume a simple form, a form I can transpose into words.
Death exists not as the opposite of life but as a part of it.
Pretty ordinary when you put it into words, though for me at the time, this wasn’t words but a lump inside me. Inside the paperweights, inside those four red and white balls on the billiard table, death existed. And we, the living, breathed it into our lungs every day like a fine dust.
Up until that point I had always conceived of death as something utterly separate and independent of life. One day we shall surely fall into death’s grip, but until the day death comes to claim us, it is we who have death in our grip. Which had seemed the quintessential logical stance. Life on this side, death on the other. Me over here, not over there.
Yet the night of Kizuki’s death marked a dividing line, and henceforth I could no longer
conceive of death (or life) in such simple terms. Death was not the antithesis of life but was already a part of my original makeup, and I couldn’t put this truth out of my mind however much I tried. Because the death that claimed Kizuki that night in the May of his seventeenth year also claimed me at the same time.
So the spring of my eighteenth year was spent with that lump of empty space lodged inside me. But at the same time I was struggling not to let it get to me. I didn’t want to take it all too seriously because I sensed, however indistinctly, that getting serious was not necessarily synonymous with getting to the truth. Yet death is a serious matter. And so I endlessly pursued that time-honored, circuitous course through the antipodes of an irreconcilable dichotomy. To think of it now, those surely were strange days. There, in the very midst of life, anything and everything revolved around death.
CHAPTER 3
Naoko called the following Saturday and we made a date for Sunday. I guess you could call it a date. For lack of a better word.
We walked the same streets as before, stopped off for coffee somewhere, walked some more, had dinner, said goodbye, and went our separate ways. And like before, she only dribbled out the occasional remark, which I’m sure didn’t seem strange to her, nor did I pay much mind. When we felt like it, we talked about each other’s school and daily life, but again in unconnected fragments. We didn’t say a word about the past. Generally speaking, we just walked. The good thing about Tokyo is its size. No matter how far you walk, you never come to the end.
We got together almost every week and walked, she taking the lead, I a little behind. Naoko wore a whole slew of different hairclips, always exposing her right ear. That’s about all I can remember of her at the time because I only saw her from the back. Naoko had a habit of fiddling with her hairclip when embarrassed. That and wiping her mouth with her handkerchief, especially when working up to say something. The more I saw of her, the more I found these little quirks of hers endearing.
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 3