Norwegian Wood

  Reiko cleared her throat with a dry rasp and broke off her story.

  “So, did you take her as a pupil?” I asked.

  “Sure I did. One lesson a week. Saturday mornings. Saturday was a day off at her school. She never missed a lesson, she was never late, she was an ideal pupil. She always practiced for her lessons. After every lesson, we’d have some cake and chat.”

  At that point, Reiko looked at her watch as if suddenly remembering something.

  “Don’t you think we should be getting back to the room? I’m a little worried about Naoko. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten about her now, have you?”

  “Of course not.” I laughed. “It’s just that I was drawn into your story.”

  “If you’d like to hear the rest, I’ll tell it to you tomorrow. It’s a long story—too long for one sitting.”

  “You’re a regular Scheherazade.”

  “I know,” she said, joining her laughter with mine. “You’ll never get back to Tokyo.”

  We retraced our steps through the path in the woods and returned to the apartment. The candles had been extinguished and the living room lights were out. The bedroom door was open and the lamp on the night table was on, its pale light spilling into the living room. Naoko sat alone on the sofa in the gloom. She had changed into a loose-fitting blue nightgown, its collar pulled tight around her neck, her legs folded under her on the sofa. Reiko approached her and rested a hand on the crown of her head.

  “Are you all right now?”

  “I’m fine. Sorry,” answered Naoko in a tiny voice. Then she turned toward me and repeated her apology. “I must have scared you.”

  “A little,” I said with a smile.

  “Come here,” she said. When I sat down next to her, Naoko, her legs still folded, leaned toward me until her face was nearly touching my ear, as if she was going to share a secret with me. Then she planted a soft kiss by my ear. “Sorry,” she said once more, this time directly into my ear, her voice subdued. Then she moved away from me.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I get so confused, I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “That happens to me all the time,” I said.

  Naoko smiled and looked at me.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to hear more about you. About your life here. What you do every day. The people you meet.”

  Naoko talked about her daily routine in this place, speaking in short but crystal-clear phrases. Wake up at six in the morning. Breakfast in the apartment. Clean out the birdhouse. Then usually farm work. She took care of the vegetables. Before or after lunch, she would have either an hour-long session with her doctor or a group discussion. In the afternoon she could choose from among courses that might interest her, outside work, or sports. She had taken several courses: French, knitting, piano, ancient history.

  “Reiko is teaching me piano,” she said. “She also teaches guitar. We all take turns as pupils or teachers. Somebody with fluent French teaches French, one person who used to be in social studies teaches history, another good at knitting teaches knitting: that’s a pretty impressive school right there. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything I can teach anyone.”

  “Neither do I,” I said.

  “I put a lot more energy into my studies here than I ever did in college. I work hard and enjoy it—a lot.”

  “What do you do after supper?”

  “Talk with Reiko, read, listen to records, go to other peoples’ apartments and play games, stuff like that.”

  “I do guitar practice and write my autobiography,” said Reiko.

  “Autobiography?”

  “Just kidding.” Reiko laughed. “We go to bed around ten o’clock. Pretty healthy lifestyle, wouldn’t you say? We sleep like babies.”

  I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before nine. “I guess you’ll be getting sleepy soon.”

  “That’s O.K. We can stay up late today,” said Naoko. “I haven’t seen you in such a long time, I want to talk more. So talk.”

  “When I was alone before, all of a sudden I started thinking about the old days,” I said. “Do you remember when Kizuki and I came to visit you at the hospital? The one on the seashore. I think it was the second year of high school.”

  “When I had the chest operation,” Naoko said with a smile. “Sure, I remember. You and Kizuki came on a motorcycle. You brought me a box of chocolates and they were all melted together. They were so hard to eat! I don’t know, it seems like such a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, really. I think you were writing a poem then, a long one.”

  “All girls write poems at that age,” Naoko tittered. “What reminded you of that all of a sudden?”

  “I wonder. The smell of the sea wind, the oleanders: before I knew it, they just popped into my head. Did Kizuki come to see you at the hospital a lot?”

  “No way! We had a big fight about that afterward. He came once, and then he came with you, and that was it for him. He was terrible. And that first time he couldn’t sit still and he only stayed about ten minutes. He brought me some oranges and mumbled all this stuff I couldn’t understand, and he peeled an orange for me and mumbled more stuff and he was out of there. He said he had a thing about hospitals.” Naoko laughed. “He was always a kid about that kind of stuff. I mean, nobody likes hospitals, right? That’s why people visit people in hospitals—to make them feel better, and perk up their spirits and stuff. But Kizuki just didn’t get it.”

  “He wasn’t so bad when the two of us came to see you, though. He was just his usual self.”

  “Because you were there,” said Naoko. “He was always like that around you. He struggled to keep his weaknesses hidden. I’m sure he was very fond of you. He made a point of letting you see only his best side. He wasn’t like that with me. He’d let his guard down. He could be really moody. One minute he’d be chattering away, and the next thing he’d be depressed. It happened all the time. He was like that from the time he was little. He did keep trying to change himself, to improve himself, though.”

  Naoko recrossed her legs atop the sofa.

  “He tried hard, but it didn’t do any good, and that would make him really angry and sad. There was so much about him that was fine and beautiful, but he could never find the confidence he needed. ‘I’ve got to do that, I’ve got to change this,’ he was always thinking, right up to the end. Poor Kizuki!”

  “Still, though,” I said, “if it’s true that he was always struggling to show me his best side, I’d say he succeeded. His best side was all that I could see.”

  Naoko smiled. “He’d be thrilled if he could hear you say that. You were his only friend.”

  “And Kizuki was my only friend,” I said. “There was never anybody I could really call a friend, before him or after him.”

  “That’s why I loved being with the two of you. His best side was all that I could see then, too. I could relax and stop worrying when the three of us were together. Those were my favorite times. I don’t know how you felt about it.”

  “I used to worry about what you were thinking,” I said, giving my head a shake.

  “The problem was that that kind of thing couldn’t go on forever,” said Naoko. “Such perfect little circles are impossible to maintain. Kizuki knew it, and I knew it, and so did you. Am I right?”

  I nodded.

  “To tell you the truth, though,” Naoko went on, “I loved his weak side, too. I loved it as much as I loved his good side. There was absolutely nothing mean or sneaky about him. He was weak: that’s all. I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t believe me. He’d always tell me it was because we had been together from the time we were three. I knew him too well, he’d say: I couldn’t tell the different between his strong points and his flaws, they were all the same to me. He couldn’t change my mind about him, though. I went on loving him just the same, and I could never be interested in anyone else.”

  Naoko looked at me with a sad smile.

  “Our boy-girl relat
ionship was really unusual, too. It was as if we were physically joined somewhere. If we happened to be apart, some special gravitational force would pull us back together again. It was the most natural thing in the world when we became boyfriend and girlfriend. It was nothing we had to think about or make any choices about. We started kissing at twelve and petting at thirteen. I’d go to his room or he’d come to my room and I’d finish him off with my hands. It never occurred to me that we were being precocious. It just happened as a matter of course. If he wanted to play with my breasts or vagina, I didn’t mind at all, or if he had semen he wanted to get rid of, I didn’t mind helping with that, either. I’m sure it would have shocked us both if someone had accused us of doing anything wrong. Because we weren’t. We were just doing what we were supposed to do. We had always shown each other every part of our bodies. It was almost as if we owned each other’s bodies jointly. For a while, at least, we made sure we didn’t go any further than what I’ve said, though. We were afraid of getting me pregnant, and had almost no idea at that point of how you go about preventing it … Anyhow, that’s how Kizuki and I grew up together, hand in hand, an inseparable pair. We had almost no sense of the oppressiveness of sex or the anguish that comes with the sudden swelling of the ego that ordinary kids experience when they reach puberty. We were totally open about sex, and where our egos were concerned, the way we absorbed and shared each other’s, we had no strong awareness of them. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “We couldn’t bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I’m sure we would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing unhappy.”

  “Unhappy? Why’s that?”

  With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair back several times. She had taken her barrette off, which made the hair fall over her face when she dropped her head forward.

  “Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it,” she said, raising her eyes to mine. “The pain of growing up. We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I’m in here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we’d just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we’d go to sleep in each other’s arms. But that kind of thing doesn’t last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn’t work, of course.”

  I nodded.

  “I wouldn’t want you to think that we were using you, though. Kizuki really loved you. It just so happened that our connection with you was our first connection with anyone else. And it still is. Kizuki may be dead, but you are still my only link with the outside world. And just as Kizuki loved you, I love you. We never meant to hurt you, but we probably did; we probably ended up making a deep wound in your heart. It never occurred to us that anything like that might happen.”

  Naoko lowered her head again and fell silent.

  “Say, how about a cup of cocoa?” suggested Reiko.

  “Good. I’d like some,” said Naoko.

  “I’d like to have some of the brandy I brought, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Reiko. “Could I have a sip?”

  “Sure,” I said, laughing.

  Reiko brought out two glasses and we toasted each other. Then she went into the kitchen to make cocoa.

  “Can we talk about something a little more cheerful?” asked Naoko.

  I didn’t happen to have anything cheerful to talk about. I thought, If only Storm Trooper were still around! That guy could inspire a string of stories. A few of those would have made everybody feel good. The best I could do was talk at length about the filthy habits of the guys in the dormitory. I felt sick just talking about something so gross, but Naoko and Reiko practically fell over laughing, it was all so new to them. Next Reiko did imitations of mental patients. This was a lot of fun, too. Naoko started looking sleepy once eleven o’clock rolled around, so Reiko let down the sofa back and gave me a pillow, sheets, and blankets.

  “If you feel like raping anybody in the middle of the night, don’t get the wrong one,” said Reiko. “The unwrinkled body in the left bed is Naoko’s.”

  “Liar! Mine’s the right bed,” said Naoko.

  Reiko added, “By the way, I arranged for us to skip some of our afternoon schedule. Why don’t the three of us have a little picnic? I know a nice place close by.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  The women took turns brushing their teeth and withdrew to the bedroom. I poured myself a sip of brandy and stretched out on the sofa bed, going over the day’s events from morning to night. It felt like an awfully long day. The room continued to glow white in the moonlight. Aside from the occasional slight creak of a bed, hardly a sound came from the bedroom, where Naoko and Reiko lay sleeping. Tiny diagrammatic shapes seemed to float in the darkness when I closed my eyes, and my ears sensed the lingering reverberation of Reiko’s guitar, but neither of these lasted any length of time. Sleep came and carried me into a mass of warm mud. I dreamed of willows. Both sides of a mountain road were lined with willows. An incredible number of willows. A fairly stiff breeze was blowing, but the branches of the willow trees never swayed. Why should that be? I wondered, and then I saw that every branch of every tree had tiny birds clinging to it. Their weight kept the branches from stirring. I grabbed a stick and hit a nearby branch with it, hoping to chase the birds off and allow the branch to sway. But the birds would not leave. Instead of flying away, they turned into bird-shaped metal chunks that crashed to the ground.

  When I opened my eyes, I felt as if I were seeing the continuation of my dream. The moonlight filled the room with the same soft white glow. As if by reflex, I sat up in bed and started searching for the metal birds, which of course were not there. What I saw instead was Naoko at the foot of the bed, sitting still and alone, staring out through the window. She had drawn her knees up and was resting her chin on them, looking like a hungry orphan. I searched for the watch I had left by my pillow, but it was not in the place where I knew it should be. I figured from the angle of the moonlight that the time must be two or three o’clock in the morning. I felt a violent thirst but I decided to keep still and continue watching Naoko. She was wearing the same blue nightgown I had seen her in earlier, and on one side her hair was held in place by the butterfly barrette, revealing the beauty of her face in the moonlight. Strange, I thought; she had taken the barrette off before going to bed.

  Naoko stayed frozen in place, like a small nocturnal animal that has been lured out by the moonlight. The direction of the glow exaggerated the silhouette of her lips. Seeming utterly fragile and vulnerable, the silhouette pulsed almost imperceptibly with the beating of her heart or the motions of her inner heart, as if she were whispering soundless words to the darkness.

  I swallowed in hopes of easing my thirst, but in the stillness of the night, the sound I made was huge. As if this were a signal to her, Naoko stood and glided toward the head of the bed, gown rustling faintly. She knelt on the floor by my pillow, eyes fixed on mine. I stared back at her, but her eyes told me nothing. Strangely transparent, they seemed like windows to a world beyond, but however long I peered into their depths, there was nothing I could see. Our faces were no more than ten inches apart, but she was light-years away from me.

  I reached out and tried to touch her, but Naoko drew back, lips trembling faintly. A moment later, she brought her hands up and began slowly to undo the buttons of her gown. There were seven in all. I felt as if it were the continuation of my dream as I watched her slim, lovely fingers opening the buttons one by one from top to bottom. Seven small, white buttons: when she had unfastened them all, Naoko slipped the gown from her shoulders and threw it off completely like an insect shedding its skin. She had been wearing nothing under the gown. All she had on was the butterfly barret
te. Naked now, and still kneeling by the bed, she looked at me. Bathed in the soft light of the moon, Naoko’s body had the heartbreaking luster of newborn flesh. When she moved—and she did so almost imperceptibly—the play of light and shadow on her body shifted subtly. The swelling roundness of her breasts, her tiny nipples, the indentation of her navel, her hipbones and pubic hair, all cast grainy shadows, the shapes of which kept changing like ripples spreading over the calm surface of a lake.

  What perfect flesh! I thought. When had Naoko come to possess such a perfect body? What had happened to the body I held in my arms that night last spring?

  A sense of imperfection had been what Naoko’s body had given me that night as I tenderly undressed her while she cried. Her breasts had seemed hard, the nipples oddly jutting, the hips strangely rigid. She was a beautiful girl, of course, her body marvelous and alluring. It aroused me that night and swept me along with a gigantic force. But still, as I held her and caressed her and kissed her naked flesh, I felt a strange and powerful awareness of the imbalance and awkwardness of the human body. Holding Naoko in my arms, I wanted to explain to her, “I am having intercourse with you now. I am inside you. But really this is nothing. It doesn’t matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies. All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh. By doing this, we are sharing our imperfection.” But of course I could never have said such a thing with any hope of being understood. I just went on holding her tightly. And as I did so, I was able to feel inside her body some kind of stony foreign matter, something extra that I could never draw close to. And that sensation both filled my heart for Naoko and gave my erection a terrifying intensity.

  The body that Naoko revealed before me now, though, was nothing like the one I had held that night. This flesh had been through many changes to be reborn in utter perfection beneath the light of the moon. All signs of girlish plumpness had been stripped away since Kizuki’s death to be replaced by the flesh of a mature woman. So perfect was Naoko’s physical beauty now that it aroused nothing sexual in me. I could only stare, astounded, at the lovely curve from waist to hips, the rounded richness of the breasts, the gentle movement with each breath of the slim belly, and the soft, black pubic shadow beneath.