I swallowed some saliva to stave off my thirst, but even that was remarkably loud in the hush of the night. As if on cue, Naoko stood straight up, the fabric of her gown scarcely rustling as she came around to kneel on the floor by my pillow and gaze into my eyes. I looked into her eyes, too, but saw no hidden message there. Her eyes were unnaturally clear, portals into a world beyond, where there was nothing to be seen, no matter how much I peered. Our faces were a mere ten inches apart, yet seemed distanced by light years.
When I reached out to touch her, Naoko pulled herself back. Her lips quivered. Then she raised both hands and slowly began to unbutton her gown. There were seven buttons in all. I followed her slim, graceful fingers through this whole dream sequence as they traveled down the front of her gown from one button to the next. And when the seventh button was at last unfastened, Naoko peeled the gown down to her waist like an insect shedding its skin. She was completely naked underneath. All she wore was the butterfly hairclip. Stripping off her gown, she looked at me from where she kneeled. There in the soft moonglow her body looked painfully bare like the flesh of a newborn child. Moving her body slightly—the scantest trace of a motion—sent a tremble through her moonlit parts and a play of shifting forms over her recesses. The round swellings of her breasts, the tiny nipples, the indentation of her navel, the grainy shadows cast by her pelvis and pubic hair, all shaping and reshaping like ripples sweeping easily over the surface of a lake.
Such physical perfection! was all I could think. When had Naoko’s body attained such fullness? This was not the body I had known that spring night. What had become of it?
That night, when I’d slowly and tenderly removed Naoko’s clothes amidst her tears, I’d somehow been more aware of imperfections. The breasts seemed hard, the nipples jutted out wrong, the hips were strangely askew. Of course, Naoko was a beautiful girl, with an attractive body, and it had excited me sexually and swept me along with a surging force. Yet even so, as I held and caressed and kissed that body, I could not help but sense a certain strange imbalance, an awkwardness about it. I’d wanted to tell her as we embraced, that, yes, I was in coitus with her, yes, I was inside her. Yet this really was nothing. This was only a play of bodies, wholly negligible, perishable. A dialogue we could only exchange through the touching of our imperfect physical forms. This was how we shared our imperfection. Naturally, it was nothing I could explain so as to make sense. It was all I could do to suppress my words and let my body do what it would. And as I embraced, I could feel the abrasive, insoluble remnants of something foreign inside her. The sensation was both endearing and stimulating. It gave me an awesome, hard erection.
Nonetheless, this was a different Naoko before me now. Her body must have undergone diverse transformations until at last this perfect body was brought forth in the moonlight. For one thing, the girlish fleshiness of her body at the time of Kizuki’s death had been trimmed away and supplanted with more ripened flesh. Naoko’s body was so beautifully perfected that it did not even arouse sexual desire in me. I merely gazed on her lithe waist, her roundly polished breasts, the peaceful rise and fall of her abdomen, and the soft shading of dark pubic hair beneath.
It couldn’t have been less than five or six minutes that she bared herself to my eyes. Presently she drew her gown around herself again and proceeded to refasten the buttons in order from the top down. No sooner had she done all the buttons than she jumped up, silently opened the bedroom door, and disappeared inside.
For the longest time I lay there motionless in bed. Then, having second thoughts, I got up, located my watch where it had fallen to the floor, and turned my eyes moonward. It was three-forty. I downed glass after glass of water at the kitchen sink before lying back down on the sofa bed, but was not visited with sleep until dawn had washed away the moonlight from every last corner of the room. And just as I was on the cusp of sleeping and not sleeping, Reiko came along and slapped my cheek, shouting, “Morning, morning.”
While Reiko tidied the sofa bed, Naoko stood in the kitchen preparing breakfast. “Rise and shine,” she said, and I responded likewise. There she was, humming to herself, boiling a kettle of water and slicing bread, not a hint that she’d shown herself naked to me the night before.
“Say, why are your eyes so red?” asked Naoko as she made coffee.
“I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t seem to get back to sleep.”
“We weren’t snoring, were we?” asked Reiko.
“No, you weren’t,” I said.
“I’m glad,” said Naoko.
“He’s just being polite,” discounted Reiko, fighting back a yawn.
At first I couldn’t tell whether Naoko was simply putting on a nothing-happened act for Reiko or if she was just shy, but even when Reiko stepped out of the room for a moment there was absolutely no detectable change in her manner, and her eyes sparkled as clearly as ever.
“Sleep well?” I asked Naoko.
“Yeah, blacked out,” replied Naoko matter-of-factly. A simple, unornamented clip perched in her hair.
My mood kept up unbroken all through breakfast. Buttering my toast and peeling my boiled egg, I sought some kind of sign in Naoko’s face across from me.
“What is it, Toru? Why are you looking at me so much this morning?” queried Naoko.
“He’s in love with someone, I think,” said Reiko.
“You in love with someone?” Naoko asked me.
Maybe so, I admitted, joining in the fun. At which point I settled back to watch the two women joking back and forth, deciding not to pursue the subject of last night any further and finishing off my toast and coffee.
After breakfast the two of them said they were off to feed the birds in the coop and I opted to tag along. Changing into their work jeans and shirts and white rubber boots, they led me to an enclosure in a little park behind the tennis courts where they kept all kinds of birds, from chickens to pigeons, and even a peacock and a parrot. Around it were banks of flowers, and various plants and benches. Two men, in-patients apparently, were sweeping leaves from the paths. Both looked to be between forty and fifty. Reiko and Naoko went over and greeted them, then Reiko made some funny remark that had them laughing. The cosmos was in bloom in the flowerbeds and the other plants were neatly trimmed. When the birds saw Reiko, they began chattering and darting about their cages in excitement.
The women fetched bags of bird feed and a hose from the shed adjacent to the coop. Naoko attached the hose to a nearby faucet, turned on the water and began to wash down the coop, making sure that none of the birds got out, while Reiko scrubbed the floor with a deck brush. The water splashed and sparkled in the sun as the peacock trotted this way and that, trying to keep its feathers dry. A turkey thrust out its neck and glared at me like a crotchety old man. The parrot, distraught, flapped its wings from atop a branch, and when Reiko meowed like a cat, it huddled into a corner of the coop, only to come back a minute later with cackles of, “Thank you! Cra-zee! Shit-head!”
“I don’t know who teaches it those things,” said Naoko with a sigh.
“Don’t look at me. I don’t teach it such language,” said Reiko, making the cat sound again to shut the parrot up.
“This fellow once had a run-in with a cat, so he’s scared to death of the critters,” said Reiko, laughing.
The cleaning chores over, the two of them proceeded to fill the feed boxes. The turkey came splashing through the puddles on the coop floor, burrowed its head into the feed box, and became absorbed in eating, completely oblivious to a whack on the behind from Naoko.
“You do this every morning?” I asked Naoko.
“That’s right. Just like all the new girls. It’s easy work. Want to see the rabbits?”
I did. Behind the bird coop was the rabbit hutch, where ten or so rabbits lay snoozing in the hay. She swept up their droppings with a broom, put food in their box, then picked up a baby rabbit and snuggled it against her cheek.
“Cute, no?” bubbled Naoko, givin
g me the rabbit to hold. A tiny, cowering ball of warmth with twitching ears.
“Don’t be afraid. He won’t hurt you,” said Naoko, stroking the rabbit’s head with her fingers, then looking over at me and smiling. Her smile was radiant, unclouded by the least complication, making it impossible for me not to smile myself. So what had gotten into Naoko the night before? That had been the real Naoko and no figment of my imagination—she had undressed before my very eyes, had she not?
Reiko whistled a snappy rendition of “Proud Mary” as she gathered up the waste, shoveled it into plastic bags, and tied them up. I helped carry the tools and feed bags back to the shed.
“Morning’s my favorite time of day,” volunteered Naoko. “It’s like getting a fresh start on everything. It even makes me kind of sad when noon rolls around. And evening’s the worst of all. It seems that way every day.”
“Thinking that way, in due course you get older like me. What with thinking dawn and dusk,” said Reiko, as if it were her own private joke, “happens almost overnight.”
“Yet you sure seem to have done well by growing older, Reiko,” exclaimed Naoko.
“Not that I especially find aging fun, but then neither would I want to be young again at this point,” said Reiko.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Too much trouble, obviously!” answered Reiko. Then she went back to whistling “Proud Mary” as she heaved the broom into the shed and shut the door.
On returning to the room, the women traded their rubber boots for regular tennis shoes, saying they were off to the vegetable field. Not much to look at, Reiko claimed, and besides they’d be working with others, so why didn’t I stay put and read?
“Also, there’s a bucket full of our dirty underwear by the washstand if you don’t mind doing the laundry,” Reiko added.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I asked in surprise. I couldn’t be sure.
“Really now!” laughed Reiko. “Of course I’m joking. But aren’t you the cute one. Don’t you think so, Naoko?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she concurred.
“I’ll study my German, then,” I said with a sigh.
“Good boy. You do that. We’ll be back before noon,” said Reiko. And the two of them snickered out of the room. I could hear voices and footsteps passing under the window.
I went over to the washbasin and washed my face, borrowed a nail clipper and trimmed my fingernails. It was an incredibly clutter-free wash-stand for an apartment with two women occupants. For all the lineup of facial creams and lip balms and suntan lotion and whatnot, there were practically no cosmetics. After I’d trimmed my nails, I went to the kitchen and made coffee, sat myself down with a cup at the table and opened my German textbook. Sitting there in a patch of sunlight, wearing only a T-shirt, memorizing German grammar tables from one end to the other, it all began to do strange things to my head. German irregular verbs struck me as being possibly about as far removed from this kitchen table scene as you could get.
At eleven-thirty the two of them returned from the field and took turns in the shower, emerging in a fresh change of clothes. Then we all three went to the dining hall for lunch and walked to the gate afterward. This time the gatekeeper was in the gatehouse, thoroughly enjoying the lunch tray he’d been brought. The transistor radio on the shelf was tuned to a pop music station. As we walked into view, he greeted us with a wave and we greeted him back.
Reiko told him we’d be going for a walk and would be back around three.
“Good. It sure is nice weather for a hike. Just be careful where the rains washed out that patch of road down below not long ago. Other than that, I’m sure you’ll be just fine,” said the gatekeeper. Then Reiko entered Naoko’s name and hers in the outbound column, along with the date and checkout time.
“Take care then,” said the gatekeeper.
“Kind man,” I offered.
“The guy’s a little off up here,” said Reiko, tapping her head.
Be that as it may, it surely was a fine day for a hike, just as the gatekeeper had said. The sky was a penetrating blue, with tentative dabs of cloud stroked white onto the heights. We walked along the low stone wall of Ami Lodge for a while, then headed off and started up the narrow path single file. Reiko took the lead, with Naoko in the middle and me bringing up the rear. Reiko maintained a brisk pace that said she knew every inch of the hills thereabouts. We walked and walked and hardly uttered a word. Naoko wore a white shirt and jeans, and carried a jacket. I watched her long, straight hair swing left and right about her shoulders as she walked ahead of me. Naoko turned around from time to time and smiled when our eyes met. It was an exhausting climb, but Reiko never once slackened her pace. Naoko would occasionally wipe away the sweat, but she never let herself fall behind. I was out of breath, not having been hiking in a while.
“Do you go hiking like this often?” I asked Naoko.
“Maybe once a week,” she replied. “Toughgoing, eh?”
“A little,” I said.
“We’re two-thirds there, only a little farther. You’re a man aren’t you? Act the part,” chided Reiko.
“Out of shape, I am.”
“Playing around with women the whole time, that’s why,” said Naoko, as if to herself.
I tried to say something in rebuttal, but was too out of breath. Across my field of vision kept streaking these red birds with head plumes framed vividly against the blue sky. The meadows were a riot of countless white and blue and yellow flowers, bees buzzing everywhere.
Ten minutes on, the slope leveled off into a high plain. We stopped and took a breather, wiped off the sweat and took swigs from the canteen. Reiko found some kind of leaf, which she rolled and blew upon until it whistled.
The path began to slant lazily downhill, hemmed in on either side by tall stalks of pampas grass. After a fifteen-minute walk, we came to a completely abandoned settlement of twelve or thirteen houses, all waist-deep in weeds, holes in the walls caked white with pigeon droppings. One house had caved in, leaving only the posts upright, but others looked positively inviting, as if you could just slide back the storm doors and move in. The path threaded through the midst of these dead, silent homes.
“To think that people were living here only seven or eight years ago,” Reiko informed us. “They worked the fields around here, but they all up and left. The going was too hard. Snowed in over the winters, the soil worn out. They went to find their fortunes in town.”
“What a waste! These houses are perfectly livable,” I said.
“For a while some hippies did live here, but they couldn’t take the winters and left.”
Heading on past the settlement we came to a large pasture surrounded by a fence. We could see a few horses grazing in the distance. As we walked along the fence, a huge dog came up, wagging its tail gleefully. It sniffed at Reiko, then practically floored Naoko. I whistled for it to come over and the beast licked my hand with its long, wet tongue.
“The dog belongs to the pasture,” said Naoko, patting it on the head. “Must be close to twenty years old, poor thing. Weak teeth, can hardly manage hard things. Sleeps the whole day in front of the shop and comes running to get attention when it hears people coming.”
Reiko pulled a scrap of cheese out of her knapsack. The dog smelled it and raced over, pouncing upon it joyfully.
“We won’t be seeing this one all that much longer,” said Reiko, patting the dog on the head. “Mid-October they take all the horses and cows in a truck down to a barn below. They only let them graze up here during the summer months, when they run a little coffee house of sorts for the tourists. Well, not exactly tourists. They’re lucky to get twenty hikers a day. Care for something to drink?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
The dog went on ahead, leading the way to the coffee house. It was a small cabin with a white porch out front and a faded sign in the shape of a coffee cup hanging from the eaves. The dog bounded up onto the porch, flopped down, and shut its eyes
. We sat down at a table on the porch, and a pony-tailed girl in a sweat shirt and white jeans came out and greeted Reiko and Naoko warmly.
“This is a friend of ours,” said Reiko by way of introducing me.
“Hello,” said the girl.
“Hello,” I echoed.
The three women plunged headlong into chitchat, leaving me to stroke the dog’s head under the table. The dog’s neck was gnarled with age, and when I scratched the hard spots, the dog panted with relief, eyes agleam.
“What’s his name?” I asked the girl.
“Pepe,” she answered.
“Pepe,” I called, eliciting not the slightest reaction.
“He can’t hear you unless you shout, ’cause he’s going deaf,” she said, revealing her Kyoto accent.
“Pe-pe!” I shouted, at which point the behemoth opened its eyes, stood straight up, and barked.
“There, there, it’s all right. Just go back to sleep and have yourself a long happy life,” said the girl, whereupon the beast plopped back down where it stood.
Reiko and Naoko both ordered cold milk and I asked for a beer. When Reiko asked the girl to turn on the radio, she tuned into an FM station. Blood, Sweat and Tears were singing “Spinning Wheel.”
“I really only come here to listen to the FM, you know,” said Reiko contentedly. “Don’t even have a radio back in the room, so if I didn’t come here every once in a while I’d never know what was going on in the music world.”
“You stay up here straight through?” I asked the girl.
“You kidding?” she answered with a laugh. “I’d die up here it gets so lonely. No, the folks from the farm drive me down to town each evening and bring me back in the morning.” So saying, she pointed to a car with four-wheel-drive parked over by the farm office.
“You’re gonna have time on your hands soon enough, I guess,” Reiko thought aloud.
“Yep, season’s just about up,” said the girl. Reiko offered her a cigarette and the two of them lit up.
Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Page 17