“True enough,” I said.
“I’ve been here seven years and I’ve seen all kinds of people come and go,” said Reiko. “Probably too many. That’s why I can tell pretty much intuitively, just by looking at someone, this one’s going to make it and this one’s not. But with Naoko I really can’t tell. And nobody else seems to have any clue, either. Another month and she might be completely well. Then again she might stay like this for years and years, so there are really no insights I can give you. Only be honest, help each other, just generalities like that.”
“Why is it only Naoko you can’t size up?”
“Probably it’s because I like the girl. My emotions are engaged so I can’t get a clear picture. I really do like her. And, besides, she’s kind of complicated, a tangle of problems, so the trick is to unravel each thread one by one. This might take a long time, or, again, the whole knot might come undone just like that. That’s how it is. Nothing I can decide.”
She picked up the basketball again, gave it a spin, then bounced it on the ground.
“The most important thing is not to rush things,” Reiko advised me. “That is my only other advice. Don’t rush. No matter how many loose ends are tied up in this knot, you mustn’t get discouraged or lose your temper and pull at the strings with force. You have to take the time and work at it slowly, loosening each strand, one by one. Can you manage that?”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“It might take a long time, and even after that she might never get completely well. Have you thought of that?”
I nodded.
“It’s hard, waiting,” said Reiko, bouncing the basketball. “Especially for someone your age. Simply waiting and waiting and waiting for her to get better. And with no guarantee that you can expect anything. Are you up to it? Do you love Naoko that much?”
“I don’t know,” I said in all honesty. “I don’t really even know what it is to love someone, Naoko or not. But I am willing to do all I can. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. It’s like you said just now, Naoko and I have to help each other. Nothing else is going to save us.”
“You plan to go on sleeping with any girl you meet?”
“I really don’t know what to do about that,” I said. “I mean, what on earth am I supposed to do? Should I keep a vigil, masturbating the whole time? I can’t very well control myself completely, if you know what I mean.”
Reiko set the ball down on the ground and again patted me on the knee. “Listen, I’m not saying it’s wrong for you to sleep with girls. If it’s all right with you, that’s fine. What I wanted to say was, it’s no good for you to go wearing yourself down unnaturally. You follow? It’s a real waste. Nineteen, twenty’s such an important period in growing up. If you’re careless and let it get somehow twisted at this time, it’ll be tough for you later. Honestly, it’s true. So just think about it. If you want to do good by Naoko, do good by yourself.”
I said I’d keep it in mind.
“I was twenty once, a long time ago,” said Reiko. “Can you believe it?”
“Of course I can believe it.”
“Really and truly?”
“Yes, really and truly,” I said with a smile.
“I wasn’t anything like Naoko, but I was fairly cute in my own way at the time. No wrinkles like now.”
I told her I admired her wrinkles. And she thanked me.
“But, you know, from here on you mustn’t make remarks to women about how attractive you find their wrinkles. I’m quite flattered, though.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
She pulled a wallet out of her pocket and showed me a photo in the clear plastic train-pass holder. It was a color photo of a girl of about ten in ski wear, with skis on, standing on the snow and smiling.
“Not bad, eh? It’s my daughter,” said Reiko. “She sent me this photograph at the beginning of the year. She’s in…fourth grade, is it now?”
“She has your smile,” I said, returning the snapshot. Pocketing it with the wallet, she blew her nose, put a cigarette to her lips, and lit it.
“When I was young, I wanted to be a concert pianist. I was talented like you wouldn’t believe. Everyone said so. A lot of fuss was made over my training. I had superb control, was at the top of my class straight through music college, and it was even pretty much decided to send me to study abroad in Germany. Your brilliant teenager. Whatever I did went well, and if it didn’t, those around me tried to make sure that it did. But then the whole thing went haywire because of what happened one day. It was during senior year at music college. All of a sudden I just couldn’t get the little finger of my left hand to move. I couldn’t figure out why, but the fact was it wouldn’t budge. I tried massaging it, holding it under hot water, taking a couple of days off practicing, but nothing did any good. I was pale as a ghost and decided to go to the hospital. The doctors there ran all kinds of tests, but even they couldn’t figure it out. There was nothing wrong with the finger, the nerves were in good shape, and there was no reason it shouldn’t move. Which for them meant it had to be psychological. So I went to a psychologist. But even he couldn’t tell me what was wrong. Only that maybe pre-contest stress had gotten to me. So why didn’t I just lay off the piano for a while?”
Reiko took a deep draw on her cigarette and exhaled. Then she stretched her neck, moving her head from side to side a few times.
“That’s when I decided to spend some time at my grandmother’s in Izu, to rest. I gave up on the contest and told myself just to take it easy. I’d have two weeks off without touching a piano. But it was no good. Whatever I did, all I could think about was the piano. Just that and nothing else. Was I doomed to live life with a paralyzed little finger? And if so, what was I expected to do with my life? I kept going over and over the same ground in my mind. I mean piano was my whole life. I’d been playing since I was four. I lived for the piano, thought of nothing else, could hardly imagine anything else. I’d been told to spare my fingers at all costs, never did any housework, had people fuss over me, simply because I was good at piano. Just see what happens to a girl raised like that when you take the piano away! What’s left? Sproing, a screw gets loose somewhere up here. Your head gets all in a shambles and everything goes black.”
She tossed her cigarette to the ground and trod it out, then stretched her neck again.
“Thus ended my dreams of becoming a concert pianist. Two months in the hospital, until I could move my little finger a bit, at which point I returned to music college long enough to graduate. But by then something was gone. Something, I don’t know, some energy mass had dissipated from my body. Even the doctors told me my nerves were too weak to pursue a career as a concert pianist. So when I got out of college, I took on students and started teaching at home. That was really rough. Like my whole life was over then and there. Can you imagine? Me, the girl to whom all had been promised, turned around one day and had nothing. It all slipped through my fingers. No one to applaud me, no one to fuss over me, no one to praise me, just staying home day after day and teaching the neighborhood kids sonatinas and stuff. I was so miserable I was crying all the time. Talk about crestfallen! Pianists obviously less talented than I were taking second place in contests and holding recitals at some hall or other. Each piece of gossip that reached my ears had me in tears.
“On the surface, my parents treated me the same as if I’d simply contracted some infection. But they weren’t fooling me—I could tell they were heartbroken. The. precious daughter for whom they’d made every sacrifice, here she was, turned out from a mental institution. I was hardly even marriageable. Living in the same house, you can’t help but pick up on feelings like that. It was absolutely unbearable. I’d go out of the house and the neighbors would be talking about me. It put me so on edge, I ended up staying in. And then it was sproing! All over again, the screw popped, the ball of yarn came unraveled, and darkness descended. When I was twenty-four years old. This time I was in a sanatorium for seven mont
hs. Not here, but shut up with a high wall and a gate. Grim and dirty, no piano anywhere. By then I was a total loss. All I knew was that I wanted to get out, but quick. That thought and that thought alone had me in a frenzy. I was going to get well if it killed me. Seven months—a long time. It all increased my wrinkles little by little.
Reiko dragged a half-smile out of her lips.
“Not long after I got out of the hospital, I met my husband and we got married. He was one year younger than I, an engineer with an aeronautics firm, a piano student of mine. A good person. Your man of few words, but earnest and warm-hearted. After six months of lessons, he suddenly upped and asked me to marry him. Just like that, out of nowhere, one day after we’d finished the lesson and were taking tea. Can you believe it? We’d never once dated, never even held hands. I nearly panicked. And I said that I couldn’t marry him. Said I thought he was a good person and all, but there were circumstances that prevented me from marrying him. He wanted to hear what those circumstance were, so I explained the whole situation with total honesty. That I’d twice gone off the deep end and been hospitalized. I went into some detail about it all, what the causes were, why the problems occurred, how it might happen again at any time. He said he’d like to think things over a bit and I told him to take his time, no hurry or anything. But the following week he said he still wanted to marry me. That’s when I told him this. Wait three months. Let’s spend time together over the next three months. If at the end of that you still feel you want to marry me, we can talk things over again.
“For three months we dated once a week. Going to different places, discussing different things. And you know what? I actually took a strong liking to him. With him I knew that at last I was back to where I could live my own life. Being together put me at ease. I could put distasteful thoughts out of my mind. Maybe I’d failed to become a pianist, and I’d been hospitalized in a mental institution, but that didn’t mean my life was over, for who knew what wonderful things still lay in store? If only for this sense of relief, I was oh-so-grateful to him. Three months later, sure enough, he said he still wanted to marry me. I told him, ‘If you want to sleep with me, you can. I’ve never slept with anyone, but I’m very fond of you, so if you want to have me, I don’t mind in the least. But my wanting to marry you is something else entirely. Marrying me means taking on my problems, too. Which is a lot heavier than you think. You still don’t mind?’ I asked.
“He said he didn’t mind. He wasn’t looking just to sleep with me. He wanted to marry me, to share everything in life with me. And he wasn’t kidding, either. He wasn’t the type to say things he didn’t mean, nor was he one not to act on what he’d said. Good enough, I told him, let’s get married. I mean, what else was there to say? We got married four months later. Over which he got into a fight with his parents, who cut off relations with him. He was from an old country family in Shikoku and they had me investigated, found out I’d been hospitalized twice. Grounds enough for them to fight. Well, I couldn’t say I blamed them for opposing it, so we didn’t hold a wedding ceremony. We filled out the papers at the city hall and went to Hakone for a two-day honeymoon. But we were very happy in every way. As it happened, I stayed a virgin until I got married, when I was all of twenty-five. Stranger than fiction.”
Reiko sighed and picked up the basketball again.
“As long as I was with him, I thought I’d be fine,” said Reiko. “As long he was by my side, I surely wouldn’t suffer a relapse. You know, the most important thing for us who have these problems is reliability. Knowing that I could leave things up to him and if my condition took the slightest turn for the worse, if the screw started to come loose, he’d notice and carefully, patiently, fix me back up— tighten the screw, unravel the ball of yarn. Just knowing we can rely on someone is enough to keep our problems at bay. As long as there’s that sense of reliance, it’s pretty much no more sproing! I was in heaven. Life was wonderful. It was as if a cold, raging sea had retreated to find me snug in a nice warm bed. We were married two years when we had a child, and then all my time was taken up with the baby. Thanks to which I just about forgot about my own problems. It was up in the morning, do the housework, take care of the baby, make dinner for when he got home, day after day. But I was happy. It was probably the happiest time in my whole life. How many years did that last? At least until I was thirty-one. Then sproing! It happened again. I fell apart.”
Reiko lit a cigarette. The wind had died down by now, and the smoke rose straight up into the night sky and vanished. The sky, now that I noticed, was bright with countless stars.
“Something happened?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” said Reiko, “something very strange. Something that lay waiting for me like a trap. It still gives me the chills just to think about it.” She scratched her temple with her free hand. “But enough of this talk about me. Especially since you’ve come all this way to see Naoko.”
“No, really, I’m all ears,” I said. “That is if you don’t mind telling me.”
“Well, the baby entered nursery school, I took up the piano again, just for myself,” continued Reiko. “For me, not for anyone else. Bach and Mozart and Scarlatti, starting with less ambitious pieces. Of course, by then there’d been a long blank, so I’d lost a certain knack—for good, I’m afraid. My fingers just wouldn’t do my bidding like they used to. Still, I was happy. Gee, I can still play, I thought. Playing piano like that, it really hit home how much music meant to me. That and how much I’d missed it. All I can say is that it was marvelous to be able to play just for myself.
“Like I said before, I’d been playing piano since I was four, but never once for myself. It had always been to pass some exam or to impress people. Assignments. Don’t get me wrong, all that counts a great deal in mastering an instrument, but past a certain age you have to play for yourself. That, after all, is what music is about. At least that was my enlightenment at thirty-one or -two after dropping out of the elite track. I’d take the kid to nursery school, give the house a quick once-over, then sit down to a good one or two hours of playing my favorite pieces. No problems so far. Are you with me?”
I nodded.
“The trouble began one day when this woman neighbor, who I knew by sight, enough to maybe exchange greetings on the street, came to ask me whether I wouldn’t teach her daughter piano. A neighbor in a manner of speaking, because we actually lived quite far away, so I didn’t know the daughter, but according to this woman, her daughter often passed my house and was moved when she heard me playing. She’d even seen me on occasion and felt drawn to me. The girl was in her second year of junior high and had studied piano under a number of teachers already, but things never went well for various reasons, so that now she had no teacher.
“Well, I declined. There were all those blank years, and even if the girl wasn’t an absolute beginner, picking up where other teachers had left off wasn’t for me. Above all, I had my hands full with my own child. Then—of course, I didn’t tell the woman this—if a child changes teachers that often, there’s bound to be problems that would make it impossible for any teacher to do a good job. But the lady wouldn’t take no for an answer. Just this once, she said. Just teach her daughter one time, that’s all she asked. Well, it would have taken some doing to shake off such a pushy woman, but since I couldn’t very well dismiss the daughter with a flick of the wrist once I agreed, I said I wouldn’t mind meeting the girl, but that was all. Three days later the girl came all by herself. A real angel. I mean it. Such clarity to her beauty! Never before or since have I seen such a beautiful child. Hair long and black as newly ground ink, slender arms and legs, bright eyes, lips perfectly soft and tiny like they were just fresh out of the mold. The first time I saw her, I could hardly speak, she was that beautiful. With her sitting on the parlor sofa, the whole room looked like a different place, just gorgeous. I couldn’t even look straight at her for too long. It was almost blinding. I practically had to squint. Such a girl. I can still picture her as
if she were right here.”
Reiko paused and narrowed her eyes to focus on some vision of the girl.
“We talked for maybe an hour over coffee. Talked about all sorts of things. Music and school. By all appearances, she was a smart kid. She could hold her own in a conversation, had well-thought-out opinions, a near-criminal way of winning you over. Frighteningly so. But what was it that so frightened me? There was just something frightening about how that bud of a nose sprouted out from between her eyes. Still, talking with her sitting there, I’d sometimes lose all grip on rational judgment. I was just overwhelmed by her youth and beauty, which made me feel such an awkward nonentity by comparison, so that if I wanted to contradict her, I could only believe there had to be something base or twisted in my thinking.”
Reiko shook her head.
“If I’d been as beautiful and smart as that girl, I’d surely have had higher aspirations for myself. With those looks and that intelligence, how come she didn’t seek better things? With everyone treating her so special, why did she feel she needed to walk all over lesser mortals? I mean, what reason did she have?”
“Had she had some traumatic experience?”
“Well, to take things in order, the girl was a pathological liar. It was a real sickness. She’d make up stories about anything and everything. Not only that, she’d talk herself into believing them in the process, so that she’d end up reworking all the facts to match. Ordinarily you’d catch on and think, wait a minute, that’s odd, how can that be? But this girl’s mind turned over at such an amazing speed, she’d always get there a few steps ahead of you and change things around so you wouldn’t be any the wiser, despite all the lies. Most people wouldn’t imagine such a beautiful child could make up stories for nothing. And that included me, too. I listened to a whole mountain of lies over the course of six months and never once doubted, in spite of their being complete fabrications, beginning to end. What a fool I was!”
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 15