Norwegian Wood (2 page)

“Wrong how?” I murmured.

“Don’t you see? It’s just not possible for one person to watch over another person for ever and ever. I mean, say we got married. You’d have to go to work during the day. Who’s going to watch over me while you’re away? Or say you have to go on a business trip, who’s going to watch over me then? Can I be glued to you every minute of our lives? What kind of equality would there be in that? What kind of relationship would that be? Sooner or later you’d get sick of me. You’d wonder what you were doing with your life, why you were spending all your time babysitting this woman. I couldn’t stand that. It wouldn’t solve any of my problems.”

“But your problems are not going to continue for the rest of your life,” I said, touching her back. “They’ll end eventually. And when they do, we’ll stop and think about how to go on from there. Maybe
you
will have to help
me
. We’re not running our lives according to some account book. If you need me, use me. Don’t you see? Why do you have to be so rigid? Relax, let your guard down. You’re all tensed up so you always expect the worst. Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.”

“How can you say that?” she asked in a voice drained of feeling.

Naoko’s voice alerted me to the possibility that I had said something I shouldn’t have.

“Tell me how you could say such a thing,” she said, staring down at the ground beneath her feet. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. ‘Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.’ What’s the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I’d fall apart. I’ve always lived like this, and it’s the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I’d never find my way back. I’d go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can’t you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can’t see that?”

I said nothing in return.

“I’m confused. Really confused. And it’s a lot deeper than you think. Deeper … darker … colder. But tell me something. How could you have slept with me that time? How could you have done such a thing? Why didn’t you just leave me alone?”

Now we were walking through the frightful silence of a pine wood. The desiccated corpses of cicadas that had died at the end of the summer littered the surface of the path, crunching beneath our shoes. As if searching for something we’d lost, Naoko and I continued slowly down the path in the woods.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking my arm and shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Try not to let what I said bother you. Really, I’m sorry. I was just angry at myself.”

“I guess I don’t really understand you yet,” I said. “I’m not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I
do
have the time, I
will
come to understand you—better than anyone else in the world ever can.”

We came to a stop and stood in the silent woods, listening. I tumbled pinecones and cicada shells with the toe of my shoe, then looked up at the patches of sky showing through the pine branches. Hands thrust in her jacket pockets, Naoko stood there thinking, her eyes focused on nothing in particular.

“Tell me something, Toru,” she said. “Do you love me?”

“You know I do,” I answered.

“Will you do me two favors?”

“You may have up to three wishes, madame.”

Naoko smiled and shook her head. “No, two will be enough. One is for you to realize how grateful I am that you came to see me here. I hope you’ll understand how happy you’ve made me. I know it’s going to save me if anything will. I may not show it, but it’s true.”

“I’ll come to see you again,” I said. “And what is the other wish?”

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

“Always,” I said. “I’ll always remember.”

She walked on ahead without speaking. The autumn light filtering through the branches danced over the shoulders of her jacket. A dog barked again, closer than before. Naoko climbed a small mound of a hill, stepped out of the pine wood, and hurried down a gentle slope. I followed two or three steps behind.

“Come over here,” I called toward her back. “The well might be around here somewhere.” Naoko stopped and smiled and took my arm. We walked the rest of the way side by side.

“Do you really promise never to forget me?” she asked in a near whisper.

“I’ll never forget you,” I said. “I
could
never forget you.”

E
VEN SO
, my memory has grown increasingly distant, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing?
What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Be that as it may, it’s all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones. This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko.

Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about Naoko. But I was never able to produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start—the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.

The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.

O
NCE UPON A TIME, MANY YEARS AGO—JUST TWENTY YEARS AGO,
in fact—I was living in a dormitory. I was eighteen and a freshman. I was new to Tokyo and new to living alone, and so my anxious parents found a private dorm for me to live in rather than the kind of single room that most students took. The dormitory provided meals and various facilities and would probably help their unworldly eighteen-year-old to survive. Expenses were also a consideration. A dorm cost far less than a private room. As long as I had bedding and a lamp, there was no need to buy a lot of furnishings. For my part, I would have preferred to rent an apartment and live in comfortable solitude, but knowing what my parents had to spend on matriculation fees and tuition at the private university I was attending, I was in no position to insist. And besides, I really didn’t care where I lived.

Located on a hill with open views in the middle of the city, the dormitory compound sat on a large quadrangle surrounded by a concrete wall. A huge, towering zelkova tree stood just inside the front gate. People said it was at least a hundred and fifty years old. Standing at its base, you could look up and see nothing of the sky through its dense cover of green leaves.

The paved road leading from the gate curved around the tree and continued on long and straight across a broad quadrangle, two three-story concrete dorm buildings facing each other on either side of the road. These were large buildings with lots of windows, and they gave the impression of being either apartment houses that had been converted into jails or jails that had been converted into apartment houses. There was nothing dirty about them, however, nor did they feel dark. You could hear radios playing through open windows, all of which had the same cream-colored curtains that could not be faded by the sun.

Beyond the two dormitories, the road led up to the entrance of a two-story common building, the first floor of which contained a dining hall and bath facility, the second consisting of an auditorium, meeting rooms, and even guest rooms, whose use I could never fathom. Next to the common building stood a third dormitory, also three stories high. Broad green lawns filled the quadrangle, and circulating sprinklers caught the sunlight as they turned. Behind the common building there was a field used for baseball and soccer, and six tennis courts. The complex had everything you could want.

There was just one problem with the place: its political smell. The complex was run by some kind of fishy foundation that centered on some kind of extreme right-wing guy, and there was something strangely twisted—as far as I was concerned—about the way they ran the place. You could see it in the pamphlet they gave to new students and in the dorm rules. The proclaimed “founding spirit” of the dormitory was “to strive to nurture human resources of service to the nation through the ultimate in educational fundamentals,” and many financial leaders who endorsed this “spirit” had contributed their private funds to the construction of the facility. This was the public face of the project, though what lay behind it was vague in the extreme. Some said it was a tax dodge, while others saw it as a publicity stunt for the contributors, and still others claimed that the construction of the dormitory was a cover for swindling the public out of a prime piece of real estate. One thing was certain, though: in the dorm complex there existed a privileged club composed of elite students from various universities. They formed “study groups” that met several times a month and that included some of the founders. Any member of the club could be assured of a good job upon graduation. I had no idea which—if any—of these theories was correct, but all shared the assumption that there was “something fishy” about the place.

In any case, I spent two years—from the spring of 1968 to the spring of 1970—living in this “fishy” dormitory. Why I put up with it so long, I can’t really say. In terms of everyday life, it made no practical difference to me whether the place was right wing or left wing or anything else.

Each day at the complex began with the solemn raising of the flag. They played the national anthem, too, of course. You can’t have one without the other. The flagpole stood in the very center of the compound, where it was visible from every window of all three dormitories.

The head of the east dormitory (my building) was in charge of the flag. He was a tall, eagle-eyed man in his late fifties or early sixties. His bristly hair was flecked with gray, and his sunburned neck bore a long scar. People whispered that he was a graduate of the wartime Nakano spy school, but no one knew for sure. Next to him stood a student who acted as his assistant. No one really knew this guy, either. He had the world’s shortest crewcut and always wore a navy blue student uniform. I didn’t know his name or which room he lived in, never saw him in the dining hall or the bath. I’m not even sure he was a student, though you would think he must have been, given the “Uniform,” which quickly became his nickname. In contrast to Sir Nakano, Uniform was short, pudgy, and pasty-faced. This creepy couple would raise the banner of the Rising Sun every morning at six.

When I first entered the dormitory, the sheer novelty of the event would often prompt me to get up in the morning to observe this patriotic ritual. The two would appear in the quadrangle at almost the exact moment the radio beeped the six o’clock signal. Uniform was wearing his uniform, of course, with black leather shoes, and Nakano wore a short jacket and white training shoes. Uniform held a ceremonial box of unfinished paulownia wood, while Nakano carried a Sony tape player at his side. Nakano set the player at the base of the flagpole. Uniform opened the box to reveal a neatly folded banner. This he reverentially proffered to Nakano, who would clip it to the rope on the flagpole, revealing the bright red circle of the rising sun on a field of pure white. Then Uniform pressed the switch for the playing of the anthem.

“May Our Lord’s Reign …”

And up the flag would climb.

“Until pebbles turn to boulders …”

It would reach halfway up the pole.

“And be covered with moss.”

Now it was at the top. The two stood at rigid attention, looking up at the flag. This was quite a sight on clear days when the wind was blowing.

The lowering of the flag at dusk was carried out with the same ceremonial reverence, but in reverse. Down the banner would come and find its place in the box. The national flag does not fly at night.

I did not know why the flag had to be taken down at night. The nation continued to exist after dark, and plenty of people worked the whole night
through—track construction crews and taxi drivers and bar hostesses and firemen and night watchmen: it seemed unfair to me that such people were denied the protection of the flag. Or maybe it didn’t matter all that much and nobody really cared—aside from me. Not that I really cared, either. It was just something that happened to cross my mind.

The rules for room assignments put freshmen and sophomores in doubles while juniors and seniors had single rooms. Double rooms were a little longer and narrower than nine-by-twelve, with an aluminum-framed window in the wall opposite the door and two desks by the window arranged so the inhabitants of the room could study back-to-back. To the left of the door stood a steel bunk bed. The supplied furniture was sturdy and simple in the extreme and included a pair of lockers, a small coffee table, and some built-in shelves. Even the most well-disposed observer would have had trouble calling this setting poetic. The shelves of most rooms carried such items as transistor radios, hair dryers, electric carafes and cookers, instant coffee, tea bags, sugar lumps, and simple pots and bowls for preparing instant
ramen
. The walls bore pinups from girlie magazines or stolen porno movie posters. One guy had a photo of pigs mating, but this was a far-out exception to the usual naked women or girl pop singers or actresses. Bookshelves on the desks held textbooks and dictionaries and novels.