Without her sunglasses Midori looked more sleepy-eyed than the last time. She fidgeted with the thin silver bracelet on her left wrist and scratched at the corner of her eye with her little finger.
“Sleepy?” I asked.
“A little. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. Busy with things and…you know. But I’m all right, don’t worry,” she said. “Sorry about last time. That morning there was something really important I just couldn’t get out of, so there was nothing I could do. I thought of phoning, but I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant and I didn’t have your number. Did you wait long?”
“It’s no big deal. I’m your individual with too much time on his hands.”
“Really? So much?”
“Enough for me to want to give you some so you get some sleep.”
Midori propped up her chin on her hands and looked at me with a smile. “You’re very considerate.”
“Not considerate, just idle,” I said. “Incidentally, that day I tried ringing you up at your house, but the person there said you’d gone to the hospital. Was something the matter?”
“My house?” she said, raising her eyebrows slightly. “How did you know my phone number?”
“I looked it up at the Students’ Union, of course. Anyone can do that.”
She gave a couple of nods, clever, clever, then fiddled with her bracelet again. “Now why didn’t I think of that? I could have looked up your number, too. Still, about the hospital, let’s talk about that next time, okay? I don’t want to say anything just now. Sorry.”
“Never mind. I guess I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.”
“Un-uh, nothing like that. I’m just very tired. Tired as a rain-beaten monkey.”
“Shouldn’t you go home and get some sleep?” I suggested.
“I don’t want to sleep yet. Let’s walk a bit,” said Midori.
She led me to her old high school, a short stroll from Yotsuya Station.
Passing the station, those interminable walks with Naoko sprang to mind. Now that I thought of it, everything had started here. If I hadn’t run into Naoko that Sunday in May on the Chuo Line, my life would have been a whole lot different. Then the very next instant it occurred to me, no, things might still have happened pretty much as they did. We doubtlessly had been ordained to meet, and even if we hadn’t met then and there, we would have at some other point. Not that I had any real grounds for thinking that. It was just a feeling.
Midori and I sat down on a park bench across from the high school. The walls were covered with ivy and pigeons perched on the balconies. The school building had a lot of character. There was a large oak in the yard and a column of white smoke rose straight up beside it, filtering the late summer light.
“Watanabe, do you know what that smoke is?” Midori asked unexpectedly.
I told her I didn’t.
“They’re burning napkins.”
“Oh?” I said. I couldn’t figure out what else to say.
“Sanitary napkins, tampons, you know the kind,” said Midori with a giggle. “There’re containers in the toilet stalls where everyone discards them, since it’s a girl’s school. So there’s this caretaker whose job it is to collect them and burn them in the incinerator. And that’s the smoke.”
“Knowing that makes the sight of it seem somehow awesome,” I said.
“Uh-huh. I always thought so whenever I saw the smoke from my classroom window. Awesome. What with junior high and high school combined, our school must have had close to a thousand girls. Well, make that nine hundred—there are girls who haven’t started yet. Now figure that one in five of them will be having her period, that’s about one hundred and eighty girls. One hundred and eighty girls’ sanitary napkins discarded each day in the waste containers.”
“Well, I guess so. Not knowing about detailed calculations.”
“It’s a sizable amount, you know, one hundred and eighty girls’ worth. What must it feel like to gather and burn all that?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” I said. How would I know something like that? The two of us viewed the white smoke a while longer.
“Actually, I didn’t want to go to this school,” said Midori, with a slight shake of her head. “I wanted to go to an ordinary public school where ordinary people go. That way I could have enjoyed growing up. But no, I got sent here on account of my parents’ status consciousness. I mean, you get good grades in elementary school and they lay this whole trip on you, right? The teacher says that with this child’s grades she could easily get in here. So they made me go here. I spent six years in the place, but I never liked it. And the only thing I could think of the whole time was, I wanna get out, I wanna get out. Do you realize I got an award for perfect attendance, no absences, no tardies? And in spite of how I hated the school! Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It was because I loathed the place. That’s why I didn’t miss one day. I wasn’t about to let it beat me. If I lost out once, it would have been all over. I was afraid that if I lost out once, the bottom would slide out from under everything. I once crawled to school with a hundred-and-two-degree temperature. The teacher even asked me, hey, Kobayashi, you not feeling well? But I lied and said I was fine and stuck it out. For that I got a perfect attendance award and a French dictionary. That alone was enough to make me take German in university. Damned if I wanted to have a debt of gratitude to that school hanging around my neck. No joke, no way.”
“What was it about the school you hated?”
“You liked school?”
“Didn’t like it or dislike it. I went to an ordinary public high school, but it didn’t strike me in any way.”
“That school,” she began, scratching the corner of her eye with her little finger, “is where all the elite girls go. Nearly a thousand girls with good grades from good families. Nothing but rich girls. The cream. It’s just the place you had to go. Tuition’s high, contributions required all the time, school trips to Kyoto where they rent out an entire first-class inn and serve you kaiseki cuisine on lacquer trays, special courses in table manners once a year at the Hotel Okura dining room, not your ordinary anything. Do you know that out of the hundred and sixty girls in my year, I was the only one living in Toshima? I once checked the registry. And what kind of places do you think everyone else was from? Unbelievable, let me tell you: Sanbancho, Moto-Azabu, Denenchofu, Seijo—nothing but. Only one girl, she was from Kashiwa, out in Chiba, so I thought I’d get to know her. A nice girl. She invited me home once, with this sorry-it’s-so-far-away and all, and me, I said, that’s okay, and went out there. Blew me away. Well, first of all, the grounds alone would take you fifteen minutes to walk around. Amazing garden, two dogs the size of compact cars wolfing down chunks of solid beef. You wouldn’t believe it. And that girl felt, oh, so disadvantaged about living in Chiba. She was the kind who, if it looked like she was going to be late for school, would be dropped off nearby in a Mercedes-Benz. Chauffeur and everything, wearing a chauffeur’s cap and white gloves, like right out of the “Green Hornet.” But still the girl was embarrassed about her background. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
I shook my head.
“From Otsuka in Toshima, look through the whole school and there’d only be me. On top of which, my parents’ listing in the profession column was “book retailing.” Thanks to which everybody in class made a big fuss over me like I was some rare species. Like, how wonderful it must be, reading whatever books you like as often as you like. No joke, no way. Everyone imagined some major bookstore like Kinokuniya. You mention bookstore to that crowd and that’s the only thing they can possibly imagine. But the real thing, they had no idea, really pathetic. Kobayashi Book Shop. Sorry little Kobayashi Book Shop. Slide open the door, rattle, rattle, and you’re face to face with magazine racks. The most reliable sellers, women’s magazines, the kind with those special sealed inserts—“New Sex Techniques: Forty-eight Diagrams”—for neighborhood
housewives to buy and pore over at the kitchen table. Just a little something for when the master of the house comes home. Explicit? You have no idea! What do they think they’re teaching our happy homemakers? Then there’s comics. Big sellers, too, let me tell you. The Magazine, Sunday, Jump. And, of course, your weeklies. Well, you get the idea. Mostly magazines, a few paperbacks, but nothing great. Mysteries, historical novels, popular romances, that’s all that sells. That and how-to books. Guide to Go , Bonsai Hobbyist’s Bible, Wedding Reception Speechmaking, Everything You Need to Know About Sex, You Can Quit Smoking Today, et cetera, et cetera. We even sell stationery goods. A line-up of ballpoint pens and pencils and notebooks by the cash register. That’s it. No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe’s Homo Sexualis, no Catcher in the Rye. That’s your Kobayashi Book Shop. I mean, who in their right mind’s going be envious of that? Would you be?”
“I can picture the place.”
“Well, it’s that kind of store. The locals all come to buy books or we deliver. Lots of long-time customers. It’s enough to feed a family of four. No mortgages or debts. Managed to send two daughters to college. But nothing more. No leeway to do anything special in our family. So what was I doing going to that school? It could only make me miserable. My parents griping to me whenever it came contribution time, getting all bent out of shape worrying that I wouldn’t have enough money if I went out with classmates to a fancy place to eat. Who wants to live a life like that? Was your family rich?”
“Us? We’re a regular workaday family. Not especially rich, not especially poor. Probably scraping a bit to send me to a private university, I imagine, but even that couldn’t be all that difficult, me being an only child. I don’t get much in the way of an allowance from home, so I’ve got a part-time job. A real run-of-the-mill house, small yard, Toyota Corolla.”
“What kind of part-time job?”
“Three nights a week I work at a record shop in Shinjuku. An easy job. All I have to do is sit there and mind the store.”
“Hmph,” said Midori. “And I’d made you out to be someone who’d never been hard up for money. No special reason, just going on appearances.”
“I’ve never been especially hard up for money. Not that I have money coming out of my ears or anything, but pretty much in the same boat as everybody else.”
“Going to that school like I did, it seemed like everybody around me was rich,” she said, turning the palms of both hands face up on her lap. “That was the problem.”
“Well, then, you’ll just have to see how the other half lives.”
“Tell me, what do you think’s the greatest advantage of being rich?”
“Can’t say I know.”
“That you can say you haven’t got any money. Say I get a classmate to go out and do something with me, but I only get this ‘No go, I haven’t got any money today.’ Now turn the tables. I wouldn’t be able to say that, because if I said, ‘I haven’t got any money today,’ I really wouldn’t have any money. Pitiful, let me tell you. Just like a really beautiful girl can afford to say, ‘I can’t go out because I look horrible today.’ Let your plain-looking girl just try that line and see how far it gets her. She’d only make herself a laughing-stock. Well, that was my world. For six years up to last year.” “You’ll get over it,” I said.
“Believe me I’d like to, the sooner the better. I was so relieved just to enter university. To be surrounded by ordinary people.”
She turned the corners of her mouth up into a sliver of a smile and ran a hand over her short hair. “You got a part-time job?”
“Yeah, writing texts for maps. When you buy a map, there’s this booklet that goes with it, right? Data on towns, population, famous places, all that kind of stuff. Here you’ll find a hiking trail, this is the legend about this place, such-and-such flowers’ll be in bloom when, these birds nesting. Writing all that’s my job. Nothing to it. Done before you can say. If I go to Hibiya Library and spend the day researching, I can write a whole volume. Put a few tricks under your belt and more work comes your way than you can handle,”
“What kind of tricks?”
“What I’m saying is all you have to do is write in a little something here and there that nobody else would think of. That alone’s enough to make the rep at the map company think, That kid can write!’ They really go for it. For instance, you keep in mind that here a village was submerged when that dam was built, but the migratory birds still remember the place, so if you go there during the season you can see them circling over the lake. Things like that. Inject a little anecdote and they love it. It’s that little emotional something. Your typical part-timer wouldn’t make the extra effort, hardly ever. That’s why I can make good money just writing texts.”
“You really must have a knack for coming up with those anecdotes, though.”
“I guess,” said Midori, bending her neck slightly. “You go looking for them, you find them. And if you don’t, you make up something harmless.”
“Quite,” said I, duly impressed.
“Peace,” said Midori.
She was curious to hear about the dorm where I lived, so I ran up the usual Rising Sun and Kamikaze anecdotes. My Kamikaze had Midori in stitches. Kamikaze seemed destined to amuse people the world over. Midori said it all sounded so interesting, she wanted to take a look at the dorm just once. There’s nothing much to look at, I told her.
“All you’ve got in a men’s dorm is hundreds of guys sitting around in filthy rooms drinking and masturbating.”
“Is that what you do, Watanabe?”
“Not a man alive who doesn’t,” I explained. “Girls have their periods, guys masturbate. Everyone and anyone.”
“Even guys with girlfriends? That is, with sex partners?”
“It’s not a question of that. There’s a Keio student in the room next to mine who masturbates before he goes out on a date. Says it calms him down.”
“That’s beyond me, having gone to girls’ schools all along.”
“And it’s not written in women’s magazine inserts, either.”
“You would say that,” said Midori with a laugh. “But tell me, Watanabe, are you doing anything this Sunday? You free?”
“Free any Sunday. I mean until I go to my job at six o’clock.”
“How’d you like to come out? To the Kobayashi Book Shop. The store’ll be closed, but I have to hang around until evening. There’s an important phone call I have to be there to receive. Won’t you come for lunch? I’ll cook something.”
“A real treat,” I said.
Midori tore a page out of her notebook and drew a detailed map to her house, marking a huge X in red ballpoint pen at the location.
“You can’t miss it. There’s a large sign, ‘Kobayashi Book Shop,’ in big characters. Can you come around twelve? I’ll have the food ready.”
I said thanks and pocketed the map. Then I said I really had to be getting back to campus for my two o’clock German class. Midori said she had to go somewhere and hopped on a train at Yotsuya.
Sunday morning I got up at nine and shaved, did some laundry and hung it out to dry. It was a glorious day, full of the first freshness of autumn. Dragonflies darted about the courtyard with net-thrashing neighborhood kids in hot pursuit. Without a puff of wind the Rising Sun hung limp. I put on a carefully ironed shirt and walked to the station. The Sunday morning college town streets were deserted and dead, with most of the shops shut tight. The slightest sounds, which would never have been heard on a weekday, seemed magnified. A girl plodding along the pavement in wooden clogs, a bunch of kids throwing rocks at a row of empty cans lined up beside a streetcar shed. I found one flower shop open, so I bought a few narcissuses. An odd purchase I admit, narcissuses in autumn, but I’ve always had a liking for the flower.
The Sunday morning streetcar was passengerless except for a group of three old ladies, who sized up me and my narcissuses. One lady smiled at me. I smiled back and took a seat at the back to watch the old houses swing pas
t. At times the streetcar practically scraped the eaves. Here a glimpse of ten potted tomato plants on a platform for hanging laundry, where a cat lay sunning itself, there children blowing soap bubbles in a back yard. Somewhere an Ayumi Ishida tune was playing. The smell of curry drifted by as the streetcar threaded an intimate course through backstreet neighborhoods. A few more passengers boarded at stops en route, scarcely noticed by the old ladies, who huddled together, tirelessly chatting away.
I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori’s map down a singularly unremarkable main street. None of the shops along the way seemed to enjoy much turnover. All the stores were old and dark inside. The characters on some signs were not even legible any more. I could tell from the age and style of the buildings that this area hadn’t been bombed in the war. That’s why these shops were still there. Additions and partial repairs only made the buildings seem more dilapidated.
Most people had left the area to escape the cars and smog and noise and high rents, leaving behind only run-down apartments and company housing and businesses that proved difficult to uproot, or else locals who stubbornly stuck to their longtime residences and refused to move. A haze hung over the place, probably from car exhaust, making everything seem vaguely dingy.
A ten-minute walk down desolation row, I came to a corner gas station, where the map had me turn right into a small shopping street, and midway down that I made out the Kobayashi Book Shop sign. Not a very big bookstore, granted, but not quite as small as I’d imagined from Midori’s description. Your ordinary everyday neighborhood bookstore. The kind of bookstore I’d run to as a boy to buy that latest, anxiously awaited kiddy-zine the day it hit the stands. Somehow, just standing in front of the Kobayashi Book Shop made me feel nostalgic. Surely every town must have a bookstore like this.
The store shutters were all the way down, displaying the painted advertisement Weekly Bunshun—On Sale Every Thursday. It was still fifteen minutes before twelve, but I didn’t feel very much like killing time puttering about the street, narcissuses in hand, so I pressed the bell beside the shutter and took a couple of steps back to wait. Fifteen seconds later and no response, I was debating whether to ring again or not, when there came the sound of a window sliding open above. I looked up and there was Midori poking her head out and waving.
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 8