“Of course not, nothing like that,” I said. “But everyone’s so quiet I couldn’t help but wonder.”
“It’s quiet here so everyone just naturally takes to speaking quietly,” said Naoko, placing a fish bone on the edge of her plate and wiping her mouth with her napkin. “There’s simply no need to raise your voice here. Nothing you have to convince anybody of, no reason to draw attention to yourself.”
“Well, I guess,” I said. Still, I somehow missed the boisterousness of ordinary meals. As often as I had been put out of sorts by noisy mealtimes, I just couldn’t get used to sitting there eating my fish amidst such a strange hush. The dining hall seemed more like an industrial fair for some special machinery. Of profound interest to persons in that particular field, who all converged on this place to exchange information intelligible only to fellow experts.
After the meal we returned to the room, and Reiko and Naoko announced that they’d be off to the Sector C bathhouse and that I should feel free to use the shower in the bathroom if I wished. I told them I would, and after they’d left I took off my clothes, showered, and shampooed. Then, while going over my hair with a hair drier, I took down a Bill Evans record from the shelf and put it on, only later to realize that it was the very same record I’d played at Naoko’s place on her birthday. That night she’d cried and I’d slept with her. A mere six months back, yet it seemed so long ago, probably because I’d gone over it and over it in my mind so many times I’d distorted all sense of time.
The moon was so bright I turned out the light and stretched out on the sofa listening to Bill Evans’s piano. Moonlight beamed in through the window, elongating the shadows of things in the room, casting pale ink washes across the walls. I took my flat metal flask of brandy out of my knapsack and took a swig, then slowly swallowed. The warmth traveled down my throat to my stomach, then radiated outward to every part of my body. Another swig and I recapped the flask and returned it to my knapsack. The moonlight seemed to sway in time with the music.
Reiko and Naoko came back from their bath twenty minutes later.
“You startled us, turning off the light. All we could see from outside was a dark room,” said Reiko. “We thought you’d collected your things and split for Tokyo.”
“No way. It’s been a while since I saw such a bright moon, so I just thought I’d have a look with the lights off.”
“Isn’t it wonderful, though?” said Naoko. “Say, Reiko, do we have any candles left from the blackout?”
“In a drawer in the kitchen, probably.”
Naoko went to the kitchen, opened a drawer, and came back with a large white candle. I lit it and dripped some wax in the ashtray to stand it up. Whereupon Reiko lit a cigarette from it. All was as still as ever. With us three sitting around a single candle in the hush, it was as if we’d been cut off and left stranded in some far corner of the world. Chill moonlight shadows layered over flickering candle shadows on the white walls in a dance of mingled shapes. Naoko and I sat next to each other on the sofa, with Reiko across from us in the rocking chair.
“How about some wine?” Reiko asked me.
“Is drinking allowed here?” I asked, slightly surprised.
“Actually, it’s not,” said Reiko, abashed, scratching her ear. “But they’re pretty lenient. If it’s wine or beer, at least, in moderate quantities. I even have a staff member buy the stuff for me.”
“Sometimes we go on a binge, the two of us,” said Naoko mischievously.
“I’m all for it,” said I.
Reiko took a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, uncorked it, and brought over three glasses. It was fresh and crisp, with a light “home vintage” taste. When the record ended, Reiko pulled a guitar case out from under the bed and lovingly coaxed the strings into tune before leisurely striking up a Bach fugue. Her fingers missed occasionally, but all in all it was a heartfelt rendition—warm and intimate and filled with the joy of performing.
“I began guitar after coming here as there wasn’t a piano about. I taught myself, but my fingers just aren’t cut out for the guitar, so I can’t seem to get very good. Still, I like the instrument. It’s light, simple, straightforward, like a warm little room, nice and cozy.”
She struck up another short Bach piece, part of some suite. Gazing at the candle flame and sipping wine, we were all ears for Reiko’s playing. A slow soothing spell fell over us, and when she’d finished Naoko asked her to play a Beatles number or two.
“Request time,” Reiko told me with a wink. “From the day Naoko arrived, she’s had me play Beatles numbers every day, like some poor musician slave.”
That said, she still played an impressive “Michelle.”
“Wonderful song. One of my real favorites,” said Reiko, taking a sip of wine and a puff of her cigarette. “Like rain gently falling over a vast plain.”
Then it was “Nowhere Man,” then “Julia.” Occasionally Reiko closed her eyes and rocked her head back and forth as she played. Then she followed up with more wine and another cigarette.
“Play ‘Norwegian Wood,’ ” said Naoko.
Whereupon Reiko went to the kitchen and brought out a traditional Japanese “beckoning cat” coin bank, into which Naoko put a hundred-yen coin from her purse.
“What’s this now?” I asked.
“We have this arrangement. Whenever I request ‘Norwegian Wood,’ I have to put in a hundred yen,” explained Naoko. “It’s my very most absolute favorite, that’s why.”
“I use the money for my cigarettes.”
Reiko stretched her fingers to loosen them, then set at “Norwegian Wood.” She played with real feeling, but not oversentimentally. I dug a hundred-yen coin out of my pocket and banked it.
“Thanks,” said Reiko with a smile.
“Sometimes I get all lonesome when I hear that song. I don’t know why, but I get to feeling like I’m lost in a deep dark forest,” said Naoko. “All alone in the cold and dark. That’s why she doesn’t play it unless I request it.”
“I always say it sounds like something from Casablanca,” said Reiko.
This prompted Reiko to play a few bossa nova numbers. Which in turn prompted me to look over at Naoko. Just as she had written in her letter, she seemed much healthier than before, tanned and fitter thanks to the regimen of exercise and outdoor work. Only her lake-limpid eyes and shy little lips remained unchanged. Overall, her beauty looked well on the way to maturing. The sharp edge that had formerly obscured her beauty—a chill, blade-keen edge that cut people to the quick—that overlay had retreated and in its place a gentle caressing calm had now drifted up into view. I was struck by the change in her. And to think it had only been six months. I found myself as much attracted to her new beauty as before, possibly more, yet it was not without regret that I noted the passing of her former self. For gone was that pubescent-girl quality, that fragile-yet-irrepressible loveliness, gone never to return.
Naoko said she wanted to hear about my life of late. I talked about school and I talked about Nagasawa. It was the first time I’d ever mentioned Nagasawa to her. It was next to impossible to put across with any accuracy his humanism, the Nagasawa ideology, his distorted morality, though ultimately Naoko did manage to get a general idea of what I was trying to say. I put a lid on my going about girl-hunting with him and simply made him my one odd best friend at the dorm. Reiko kept at her guitar the whole time, going back over the fugue for practice, all the while slipping in her regular wine and cigarette breaks.
“A strange character by the sound of him,” said Naoko.
“A strange man indeed,” said I.
“And you really like him?”
“I can’t say for sure,” I said. “But I guess you’d have to say I liked him, although he doesn’t exactly fall within your range of either likable or dislikable. And what’s more, that wouldn’t matter in the least to him. In that sense he’s utterly honest. He doesn’t play up to people. In fact he’s a real stoic.”
“Odd thi
ng, calling someone who sleeps around so much ‘stoic,’ ” said Naoko with a laugh. “How many women did you say?”
“He’s probably hitting eighty,” I said. “But, for him, the more women he sleeps with, the less each sexual act means. Which, of course, is what the guy is after.”
“And that’s stoic?” queried Naoko.
“For him it is.”
Naoko gave a moment’s thought to what I’d said. “I’d say the guy’s more screwed up than I am,” she said.
“That’s what I think, too,” I said. “But he’s entirely systematized his warped mind into a consistent logic. He’s a terribly clever fellow. If he were put in here, you know, he’d be out and off within two days. He’s up on this, that, and the other thing, and he can pull everything together. He’s that kind of guy. And that kind of guy pulls a lot of weight with people.”
“I’m sure I’m just stupid,” said Naoko. “I still haven’t figured out this place. I haven’t figured out myself.”
“You’re not stupid. That’s normal. There’s lots I haven’t figured out about myself either. It’s like that with most people.”
Naoko pulled both legs up onto the sofa and rested her chin on her knees. “So tell me more about yourself. Toru,” she said.
“I’m just an ordinary person. From an ordinary family, raised ordinary, with ordinary looks, ordinary grades, ordinary thoughts,” I said.
“Didn’t your Scott Fitzgerald write somewhere not to trust anyone who thinks he’s ordinary? In a book I borrowed from you,” teased Naoko.
“To be sure,” I said. “My ordinariness is nothing I consciously decided, though, it’s just something I know. Out to find something extraordinary in me?”
“Oh, come on now!” scolded Naoko. “Don’t you even know that much? If I wasn’t, why would I have slept with you? Do you really imagine I’d sleep with anyone, you included, just because I was drunk?”
“Of course not,” I said.
Naoko just stared at the tip of her foot and said nothing. I didn’t know what to say, so I drank some wine.
“And you, Toru, how many women have you slept with?” asked Naoko coyly.
“Eight or nine,” I answered in all honesty.
Reiko stopped practicing and laid the guitar down on her lap. “You’re not even twenty! What kind of a life have you been leading?”
Naoko made no comment but simply looked at me with those limpid eyes of hers. I briefed Reiko on the first girl I slept with and how I broke up with her, saying that somehow or other I’d just been unable to love her. Then I let it be known how at Nagasawa’s invitation I’d slept with one girl after another I didn’t know the least thing about. “I don’t mean to make excuses, but it was tough,” I told Naoko. “Seeing you almost every week, talking, knowing all the while that your heart was given solely over to Kizuki. Just knowing that made things tough. That’s probably why I slept with strangers.”
Naoko shook her head repeatedly, then looked up at me. “Remember you asked me why I’d never slept with Kizuki? Do you still want to know?”
“I guess it’s something I probably should know,” I said.
“I think so, too,” Naoko said. “The dead never come alive again, but we have to go on living.”
I nodded. Reiko was practicing a difficult passage over and over again.
“I myself was perfectly willing to sleep with him,” said Naoko, letting her hair down and toying with the butterfly-shaped clip. “And, of course, he wanted to sleep with me. So we tried any number of times, but it never worked. I didn’t have any idea why it didn’t. I still don’t. After all, I was in love with him, and I didn’t have any big hang-up about virginity or anything. Anything he wanted, I’d gladly have done for him. Still, it didn’t work.”
Naoko put her hair up again with the clip.
“I wasn’t wet at all,” said Naoko quietly. “I didn’t open, not at all. So it was just painful. Dry and painful. We tried all different ways, but none worked. Even lubricating didn’t help. It still hurt. So all along I was doing Kizuki by hand or mouth—you get what I mean?”
I nodded.
Naoko stared out the window at the moon. It seemed even bigger and brighter than before. “You know, I would much rather have kept all this inside, but what’s the use? There’s no way I couldn’t tell you. It’s nothing I could even decide for myself. I mean I was really wet when I slept with you, wasn’t I?”
“Umm,” I agreed.
“That evening on my twentieth birthday, I was wet from the moment I saw you. And the whole time I was just hoping you’d lay me. Hoping you’d hold me and strip me naked and touch me all over and put it into me. The first time in my life I ever thought anything like that. I mean, why? Why should that have happened? After I’d been so much in love with Kizuki.”
“Meaning in spite of not being in love with me.” “I’m sorry,” said Naoko. “I don’t mean to hurt you, but please understand. My relationship with Kizuki was something truly special. We’d been playmates since we were three. We were always together, talking about everything, perfectly in tune with each other. That’s how we grew up. We first kissed in sixth grade. It was really wonderful. When I got my first period, I ran crying to him. We had that kind of relationship. So when he died, I was lost. How was I supposed to go on relating to others? Just what did it mean to love someone?”
She reached for her wineglass on the table but didn’t get a good hold and it slipped to the floor. Wine splashed on the carpet. I leaned down, picked up the glass, and put it back on the table. I asked Naoko if she’d like more wine, to which she said nothing. Then she burst out crying. She was bent over, trembling and burying her face in her hands. Like the night I slept with her, her breathing came in uneasy spasms as she choked on her own tears. Reiko put down her guitar and stepped over to pat Naoko gently on the back. Then, putting her hands on Naoko’s shoulders, she let Naoko bury her face in her bosom just like a baby.
“Say, Watanabe,” Reiko said to me. “If you don’t mind, can I ask you to take a stroll for maybe twenty minutes? We should have things under control by then.”
I nodded and stood up, pulling a sweater on over my shirt. “Sorry,” I told Reiko.
“That’s okay. It’s not your fault. Don’t be too concerned. By the time you get back, everything’ll be okay,” she said with a wink.
I took a path through the woods that shone unreal with moonlight, letting my steps lead me where they would. Sounds took on strange echoes in the moonlight. My own footfalls walked the ocean floor, rebounding sharply from unexpected directions. From time to time, a short, crisp snap would come from behind. The woods were heavy with the stillness of nocturnal animals holding their breath until I passed.
Once out of the woods I sat down on a small slope and looked toward Naoko’s building. Her room was easy to find. All I had to do was look for a faint glow glimmering in an unlit window. Resting there motionless, I fixed my eyes upon that tiny light. It reminded me of the last flickerings of a nearly consumed soul. I wanted to cup my hands over that light and keep it safe. Just as Jay Gatsby had kept watch each night over that tiny light on the far shore, I gazed on that feeble light, transfixed.
When I returned to the building after thirty minutes, I could hear Reiko practicing her guitar from the entrance. I quietly climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. I stepped in, but there was no sign of Naoko, only Reiko sitting on the carpet strumming her guitar. She pointed to the bedroom door. Naoko’s in there. Laying down the guitar, she took a seat on the sofa and told me to sit next to her. Then she divided the last of the wine between two glasses.
“She’s all right,” said Reiko, patting me on the knee. “She only needs to lie down a bit by herself and she’ll be fine. She just got a little worked up, that’s all. Why don’t we take a little walk outside in the meantime?”
“Sure,” I said.
Reiko and I strolled along a path beneath the lamps over to the tennis court and basketball blacktop and s
at down on a bench. She brought out a basketball from beneath the bench and spun it in her hands. Did I play tennis? she asked me. Very badly, I told her.
“And basketball?”
“Not my best.”
“Well, then, what are you good at?” teased Reiko, squeezing a smile from the corners of her eyes, “other than sleeping with girls?”
“I really don’t have a specialty,” I admitted, a little hurt.
“Don’t get mad. I only meant it as a joke. But tell me what sorts of things you are good at.”
“I’m not so good at anything. But there are things I like.”
“Such as?”
“Taking hiking trips. Swimming. Reading.”
“You like solitary activities?”
“I guess so,” I said. “From way back I was never much interested in playing games with others. I can never seem to really get into stuff like that. I just get by.”
“Well, then, come here in winter. We all do cross-country skiing then. I’m sure you’d enjoy it, trudging over the snow all day, working up a good sweat,” said Reiko. Then she stared at her right hand in the lamp light as if inspecting an old musical instrument.
“Does Naoko often become like this?” I asked. “Mmm, sometimes,” said Reiko, looking this time at her left hand. “Occasionally she gets like this. She gets worked up, starts crying. Which is fine. She gets her emotions out that way. What’s really scary is when emotions won’t come out. Then they start to build up inside and petrify. All kinds of emotions harden in the body and just die there. That’s when things get difficult.”
“Tell me, did I say anything wrong just now?” “Not at all. You didn’t say anything wrong, so don’t worry. It’s good that you spoke frankly. That’s the best thing. In the long run, no matter how much you hurt each other or get someone worked up like just now, it’s the best way. If you seriously want Naoko to recover, it’s what you should do. Like I told you first thing, the idea is not to try to help her, but to make her want to pick herself up and recover by letting herself recover. That’s the way here. Which is to say you also have to speak honestly about things while you’re here. Because out in the world, nobody speaks honestly about anything, right?”
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 14