Norwegian Wood Vol 1.

by Haruki Murakami

  “Be sorry to see you go,” said Reiko.

  “I’ll be back next May, though,” the girl said with a smile.

  Cream’s “White Room” came on, followed by a commercial and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair.” When the song was over, Reiko told me she really liked that song.

  “I saw the movie,” I said.

  “Who’s in it?”

  “Dustin Hoffman.”

  “Can’t say I know the name,” pondered Reiko, shaking her head. “Everything changes so fast, before you even know it.”

  Reiko asked the girl if she wouldn’t mind lending her a guitar. Coming right up, was the reply, and she switched off the radio and brought out an old guitar from inside. The dog looked up and gave it a few sniffs. “It’s not something for you to eat,” Reiko said for its benefit. A grass-scented breeze wafted through the porch. The line of the hills floated up immediately in front of us.

  “It’s just like The Sound of Music,” I told Reiko as she tuned up.

  “What kind of a remark is that?” she said.

  She struck up the opening to “Scarborough Fair.” Playing for the first time without sheet music, there were a couple of false-starts before she found the correct chords and had the melody down to where she could play the whole thing smoothly. By the third time through she was adding grace notes and embellishments. “I have a feeling for these things,” said Reiko with a wink and an it’s-all-up-here tap of her finger on her head. “By the third time around, I can generally pick up any tune.”

  Humming softly, she played “Scarborough Fair” from beginning to end. Then all three of us clapped and Reiko bowed her head politely.

  “I used to get more applause when I played Mozart concertos,” she admitted.

  The shop girl said she’d put the cold milks on-the-house if Reiko would play the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” Reiko gave her a thumbs-up and she was off, singing in accompaniment to herself. Not too loud and a little husky, probably due to excessive smoking, but it was still a voice with character. Sitting there drinking my beer, listening to her singing, I could swear the sun was about to peer into view. I felt all warm inside.

  After “Here Comes the Sun,” Reiko returned the guitar to the girl and asked her to turn the FM station back on. Then she suggested that Naoko and I take a little walk, just the two of us, for an hour or so.

  “I’ll stay here and chat and listen to the radio. Just make sure you’re back by three.”

  “It’s okay to let us be alone together so long?” I asked.

  “Really it’s not, but what the hell. I feel like taking a bit of a break from this chaperone routine myself. And I’m sure you have loads to talk about, having come all this way,” said Reiko, lighting another cigarette.

  “C’mon,” said Naoko, standing up.

  I followed suit and trailed after Naoko. The dog perked up and tagged along behind us for a while before it gave up and headed back. We strolled along a level road that bordered the fenced perimeter of the pasture, sometimes holding hands, sometimes arm in arm.

  “Just like old times, eh?” said Naoko.

  “They’re not so old. It’s only been since this spring,” I said with a laugh. “If spring’s already old times, then ten years ago must be prehistory.”

  “It’s prehistoric enough,” said Naoko. “Sorry about yesterday, though. I got all nervous. And after you’d come all this way. Forgive me.”

  “Never mind. It’s probably better that you let all sorts of feelings out, you and me both. So if anybody’s going to run up against those feelings, I’d rather it be me. That way we can come to a better understanding of each other.”

  “And if you understood me, what then?”

  “Hey, none of that,” I said. “It’s not a question of ‘what then?’ There’s people in this world who get off reading timetables and that’s what they do all day long. Or those who build yard-long boats out of matchsticks. So there’s room in the world for at least one person who’s trying to understand you.” “Is it all just a hobby, then?” said Naoko coquettishly.

  “Call it a personal pastime if you like. Most regular-minded people might call it ‘good will’ or ‘love,’ though.”

  “Tell me, Toru,” said Naoko, changing the subject. “You liked Kizuki, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did,” I replied.

  “And Reiko?”

  “I like her a lot. She’s a wonderful person.” “How come you go for all us off-types?” said Naoko. “All screwed up or twisted somewhere, real sinkers on the sink-or-swim scale. Me and Kizuki and Reiko, we’re all like that. How come you can’t see your way to liking normal people?”

  “That’s not how I look at things. The people I think are screwed up are all out walking around fine and dandy as can be.”

  “But we are screwed up. I know it,” said Naoko. We walked on a while in silence. The road veered away from the pasture fence, leading off to a small round clearing encircled by woods like a pond.

  “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night frightened out of my wits,” confessed Naoko, snuggling into the crook of my arm. “Frightened that I’ll stay twisted like this and never return to normal, that I’ll just get old and rot away up here. When I get to thinking like that, my whole body freezes to the core. It’s too horrible. Bitter and cold.”

  I threw my arm around her shoulders and drew her close to me.

  “It’s as if Kizuki was reaching for me from the darkness, calling out to me, ‘You’re not going anywhere, Naoko, we’re inseparable.’ When I hear that, I really don’t know what to do.”

  “So what do you do at times like that?”

  “Now, Toru, don’t think it strange—”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “I have Reiko hold me,” said Naoko. “I wake Reiko up, climb into bed with her, and have her hold me tight. And I cry. She rubs me all over until I’m thawed out. Strange?”

  “No, it’s not strange at all. Only I’d like to hold you instead of Reiko.”

  “Hold me then, now,” said Naoko.

  So we sat ourselves down on the dry grass and embraced. We were completely hidden in the tall grass. All we could see was the sky and the clouds above. I slowly let Naoko down on the ground and held her tight. Naoko’s body was soft and warm. Her hands sought me out. We exchanged a real kiss.

  “Tell me, Toru,” said Naoko close by my ear.

  “Hmm?”

  “You want to sleep with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you hold off, though?”

  “Of course I can hold off.”

  “Before we do that, I want to get myself more together. Together and more the sort of person who can give you what you want. Will you wait for me to do that?”

  “Of course I’ll wait.”

  “Are you hard?”

  “The soles of my feet?”

  “Silly!” snickered Naoko.

  “If you mean whether I have an erection or not, of course I do.”

  “Say, would you cut out this ‘of course’ business?”

  “Good as done,” I said.

  “Is it really tough?”

  “What?”

  “When it’s hard…”

  “Tough? Hard?” I wanted to get this straight. “What I mean is, you know, is it really unbearable?”

  “It depends on how you look at it.”

  “Shall I do it for you?”

  “By hand?”

  “Mmm,” said Naoko. “To be honest, the thing has been shoving up against me and it hurts.”

  I shifted positions. “How’s that?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Say, Naoko…?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like that a lot.”

  “Okay,” agreed Naoko with a smile. Whereupon she undid the zipper to my trousers, slipped a hand in, and grabbed my erect penis.

  “It’s warm!” exclaimed Naoko.

  I had Naoko wait a moment on the han
d job while I unbuttoned her blouse, reached my hand around her back, and unhooked her brassiere. Then I put my lips to her soft white breasts. Naoko closed her eyes, then slowly began moving her fingers.

  “You’re not bad at this, you know?” I said.

  “Be a good boy and keep quiet,” said Naoko.

  When I finished coming, I squeezed her gently. Then we kissed again. Then Naoko did her brassiere and blouse back up. I zipped my fly.

  “Think you can walk around a little easier now?” asked Naoko.

  “Thanks to you,” I replied.

  “Well, then, if it’s all right with you, why don’t we do a bit more walking?”

  “Most certainly,” I said.

  Cutting across the clearing, we headed through the woods and across another field. Meanwhile Naoko told me about her older sister who’d died. She’d hardly ever told anyone about her, but she figured it would be better if I knew.

  “We were six years apart in age and quite different in character, but we were still very close,” said Naoko. “We never once fought. No, really. Granted, our not fighting was probably to do with us being on different levels.”

  Her older sister had been one of those people who had been the best at whatever she did. Tops in her studies, tops in sports, she had everyone’s respect, she had leadership qualities. Yet she was kind and open-hearted, so she was popular with the boys and favored by her teachers. She was the girl who had a hundred awards, your always-one-in-every-high-school model girl. Still, she didn’t pull any rank for being the older sister, wasn’t spoiled or overbearing. Nor did she especially care to make a show of herself. She just naturally came out on top, whatever she set herself at doing.

  “That’s why, from when I was really small, I made up my mind to take the cute girl route,” said Naoko, twirling a stalk of pampas grass. “I mean, what else? When you grow up listening to everyone talking about how your older sister’s so smart, so good at sports, so looked up to. I could fall over backwards and there was no way I’d better her. But when it came to looks, I was pretty enough, and, besides, the folks seemed intent on raising me cute anyway. That’s why they had me going to those schools from elementary school on, dressing me in velvet dresses with frilly blouses and patent leather shoes, piano and ballet lessons, the whole works. Thanks to which, my sister was extra nice to me, her ‘darling little sister.’ She was always buying me little gifts and taking me different places and checking my school work. She even took me along on dates with her boyfriends. The perfect older sister.

  “Nobody could figure out just why she committed suicide, any more than they could with Kizuki. It was exactly the same. Both seventeen, no forewarning, no farewell note—I mean, talk about coincidence, the similarities were incredible.” “Sure sounds that way,” I said.

  “Everyone said she was just too smart for her own good or had read too much, or whatnot. True, she did read a great deal. She had a lot of books, many of which I read after she died. It was so pathetic. All her notes in the margins, pressed flowers, letters from boyfriends. It was enough to make me cry more times than I care to remember.” Naoko paused and twirled the stalk of grass. “She was the type who took care of most things for herself. Practically never asked anyone for advice or help. Not that she was so full of pride or anything. That’s simply the way she was, and it probably just never even occurred to her. Our parents were used to her being that way and knew that left on her own she’d do fine. I often used to talk things over with my sister, and she’d always help me out in any way she could, but she herself never talked over anything with anybody. She’d do everything single-handed. Never got mad or out of sorts. No, really, I’m not boasting. I mean most girls, when they get their periods, they go to pieces in some way or another. That’s just how it is. But she wouldn’t get upset, she’d get depressed. Maybe once every two or three months, and for two days she’d just stay in her room and sleep. She wouldn’t go to school, she wouldn’t eat much of anything, she’d turn off all the lights and simply space out. But she wouldn’t snap at anyone. She’d call me into her room when I came home from school, have me sit down and tell her about my day. Not that I had anything exciting to say. What games I played with my friends, what the teacher said, test grades, stuff like that. But she’d still listen intently and say what she thought, give me pointers. But as soon as I’d leave—say I went off somewhere with a friend or had to go to my ballet lesson—she’d just space out again all by her lonesome. Two days like that and, snap, she’d be up on her feet again and off to school, all perfectly naturally. This went on for, oh, maybe four years. Our parents were all worried at first and took her to see a doctor, but they thought that as long as she’s only dead to the world two days at a time, they might as well just reconcile themselves to letting things run their course. She was an intelligent, together kid after all.

  “But after my sister died, I overheard my parents talking. About my father’s younger brother who died a long time before. He’d been extremely intelligent, too, but then for four years between seventeen and twenty-one he’d stayed in the house, until one day he upped and jumped in front of a train. That’s when my father said, ‘Guess it runs in the family, on my side.’ ”

  All the while she talked, Naoko was unconsciously breaking the head of the pampas grass between her fingers, letting the pieces fly with the breeze. And when it was all gone, she wrapped the stalk around her finger.

  “It was me who found my sister when she died,” continued Naoko. “The autumn of sixth grade. November. It was raining. A dark, gloomy day. She was in her junior year of high school. It was six-thirty, because I’d just come back from my piano lesson. Mother was preparing dinner and she told me to go call my sister. I went upstairs and knocked on her door to tell her it was dinner time, but there was just dead silence. Which struck me as a little strange. So I knocked again and opened the door. Dozed off, has she, I must have thought. But she wasn’t asleep. She was standing by the window, head a little to one side, looking out. Like she was thinking or something. The room was dark, the lights off, things just a bit hard to make out clearly. So I spoke up, ‘Hey, what’re you doing? Dinner’s ready.’ It was only then that I noticed she seemed taller than usual. Which made me wonder, hey, what’s going on here? Is she wearing high heels or standing on some kind of platform? But when I went closer to say something to her, that’s when I noticed it. The rope above her head. Leading straight down from a ceiling beam—I mean astonishingly straight, like a line ruled in space. My sister was wearing a white blouse—yes, something simple like the one I’m wearing now—with a gray skirt and standing on tiptoe like for ballet. Only there were eight inches of empty space between the tips of her toes and the floor. I examined it all in detail. The face, too. I couldn’t stop myself from looking. I knew I should hurry downstairs and let Mother know, scream, something. But my body wouldn’t listen. It was as if it had a mind of its own. No matter that I knew I had to run downstairs quick, my body moved of its own accord to try to get my sister down from that rope. But of course it was nothing a child’s strength could manage and I just stayed there for five, six minutes, blanked out. Not knowing what was what. Like something had died inside me. I just stayed there, in the cold and dark, together with my sister, until my mother came to look.”

  Naoko shook her head.

  “After that, I didn’t speak a word for three days. I just lay in bed like a corpse, my eyes open, with absolutely no idea what was what.” Naoko huddled into my arm. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you in my letter. That I was a lot more imperfect than you thought. That I was much more gravely ill than you thought, that the roots ran deep. So if you want to go on ahead, I’d want you to go on your own, without waiting for me. If you want to sleep with other girls, then sleep with them. Don’t hold back on my account. Go ahead and do what you like. I’d only drag you down otherwise, and whatever happens that’s the last thing I want for you. I don’t want to interfere with your life. I don’t want to interfere with
anybody’s life. Like I said before, just come to see me from time to time and don’t forget me. That’s all I hope for.”

  “That’s not all I hope for,” I said.

  “But you’ll ruin your life if you have anything to do with me.”

  “I’m not ruining anything.”

  “But I might never recover. Would you still wait for me? Ten years, twenty years, could you wait for me that long?”

  “You can’t let these things get to you,” I said. “The darkness and painful dreams and dead people. What you have to do is forget about all of them, and as soon as you’ve done that, you’ll recover for sure.”

  “If I can forget,” said Naoko doubtfully.

  “Once you’re out of here, why don’t we live together?” I said. “That way I can keep you safe from the darkness and dreams. Reiko won’t be there, but I can hold you when things get bad.”

  Naoko burrowed even more deeply into my arms. “That would be so lovely,” she said.

  It was a little before three when we returned to the coffee house. Reiko was reading a book while listening to Brahms’s 2nd Piano Concerto on the radio. Gazing across the pasture, not a soul in sight as far as the eye could see, Brahms playing, it was quite something. She was whistling snatches of the opening cello melody from the third movement.

  “Backhaus and Boehm,” said Reiko. “I listened to this record enough to wear scratches in it. Wore it right down. Listened to it from beginning to end. I was practically glued to the thing.”

  Naoko and I ordered coffee.

  “Had a good talk?” Reiko asked Naoko.

  “Mmm, talked about a whole lot of things,” said Naoko.

  “Fill me in later, you know, about his thing.”

  “We didn’t do any of that,” said Naoko, blushing.

  “Really? You didn’t do anything?” Reiko asked me.

  “Not this time.”

  “What a letdown,” said Reiko disappointedly.

  “ ’Fraid so,” said I, sipping my coffee.

  *

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  p. 7 4 about to land 着陸しようとする 5 turning the scene into a gloomy Flemish painting 何もかもをフランドル派の陰うつな絵の 背景のように見せていた 12 issues from the ceiling speakers 天井のスピーカーから（BGMが）流れはじめた 14 the melody gets to me, same as always そのメロディーはいつものように僕を 混乱させた 16 my head is going to burst 頭がはりさけてしまいそうになる