Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

Some of them were pleasant, but others carried a trace of sadness.

How long did this go on? I was so immersed in that torrent of memory (and it was a torrent, like a spring gushing out of the rocks) that I failed to notice Naoko quietly open the door and come in. I opened my eyes, and there she was. I raised my head and looked into her eyes for a time. She was sitting on the arm of the sofa, looking at me. At first I thought she might be an image spun into existence by my own memories. But it was the real Naoko.

"Sleeping?" she whispered.

"No," I said, "just thinking." I sat up and asked, "How are you?"

"I'm good," she said with a little smile like a pale, distant scene. "I don't have much time, though. I'm not supposed to be here now. I just got away for a minute, and I have to go back right away. Don't you hate my hair?"

"Not at all," I said. "It's cute." Her hair was in a simple schoolgirl style, with one side held in place with a hairslide the way she used to have it in the old days. It suited her very well, as if she had always worn it that way. She looked like one of the beautiful little girls you see in woodblock prints from the Middle Ages.

"It's such a pain, I have Reiko cut it for me. Do you really think it's cute?"

"Really."

"My mother hates it." She opened the hairslide, let the hair hang down, smoothed it with her fingers, and closed the hairslide again. It was shaped like a butterfly.

"I wanted to see you alone before the three of us get together. Not that I had anything special to say. I just wanted to see your face and get used to having you here. Otherwise, I'd have trouble getting to know you again. I'm so bad with people."

"Well?" I asked. "Is it working?"

"A little," she said, touching her hairslide again. "But time's up. I've got to go."

I nodded.

"Toru," she began, "I really want to thank you for coming to see me. It makes me very happy. But if being here is any kind of burden to you, you shouldn't hesitate to tell me so. This is a special place, and it has a special system, and some people can't get into it. So if you feel like that, please be honest and let me know. I won't be crushed. We're honest with each other here. We tell each other all kinds of things with complete honesty."

"I'll tell you," I said. "I'll be honest."

Naoko sat down and leaned against me on the sofa. When I put my arm around her, she rested her head on my shoulder and pressed her face to my neck. She stayed like that for a time, almost as if she were taking my temperature. Holding her, I felt warm in the chest. After a short while, she stood up without saying a word and went out through the door as quietly as she had come in.

With Naoko gone, I went to sleep on the sofa. I hadn't intended to do so, but I fell into the kind of deep sleep I had not had for a long time, filled with a sense of Naoko's presence. In the kitchen were the dishes Naoko used, in the bathroom was the toothbrush Naoko used, and in the bedroom was the bed in which Naoko slept. Sleeping soundly in this flat of hers, I wrung the fatigue from every cell of my body, drop by drop. I dreamed of a butterfly dancing in the half-light.

When I awoke again, the hands of my watch were pointing to 4.35.

The light had changed, the wind had died, the shapes of the clouds were different. I had sweated in my sleep, so I dried my face with a small towel from my rucksack and put on a fresh vest. Going to the kitchen, I drank some water and stood there looking through the window over the sink. I was facing a window in the building opposite, on the inside of which hung several paper cut-outs - a bird, a cloud, a cow, a cat, all in skilful silhouette and joined together. As before, there was no sign of anyone about, and there were no sounds of any kind. I felt as if I were living alone in an extremely well-cared-for ruin.

People started coming back to Area C a little after five Looking out of the kitchen window, I saw three women passing below. All wore hats that prevented me from telling their ages, but judging from their voices, they were not very young. Shortly after they had disappeared around a corner, four more women appeared from the same direction and, like the first group, disappeared around the same corner. An evening mood hung over everything. From the living room window I could see trees and a line of hills. Above the ridge floated a border of pale sunlight.

Naoko and Reiko came back together at 5.30. Naoko and I exchanged proper greetings as if meeting for the first time. She seemed truly embarrassed. Reiko noticed the book I had been reading and asked what it was. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I told her.

"How could you bring a book like that to a place like this?" she demanded. She was right, of course.

Reiko then made coffee for the three of us. I told Naoko about Storm Trooper's sudden disappearance and about the last day I saw him, when he gave me the firefly.

"I'm so sorry he's gone," she said. "I wanted to hear more stories about him." Reiko asked who Storm Trooper was, so I told her about his antics and got a big laugh from her. The world was at peace and filled with laughter as long as Storm Trooper stories were being told.

At six we went to the dining hall in the main building for supper.

Naoko and I had fried fish with green salad, boiled vegetables, rice and miso soup. Reiko limited herself to pasta salad and coffee, followed by another cigarette.

"You don't need to eat so much as you get older," she said by way of explanation.

Some 20 other people were there in the dining hall. A few newcomers arrived as we ate, meanwhile some others left. Aside from the variety in people's ages, the scene looked pretty much like that of the dining hall in my dormitory. Where it differed was the uniform volume at which people conversed. There were no loud voices and no whispers, no one laughing out loud or crying out in shock, no one yelling with exaggerated gestures, nothing but quiet conversations, all carrying on at the same level. People were eating in groups of three to five, each with a single speaker, to whom the others would listen with nods and grunts of interest, and when that person had finished speaking, the next would take up the conversation. I could not tell what they were saying, but the way they said it reminded me of the strange tennis game I had seen at noon. I wondered if Naoko spoke like this when she was with them and, strangely enough, I felt a twinge of loneliness mixed with jealousy.

At the table behind me, a balding man in white with the authentic air of a doctor was holding forth to a nervouslooking young man in glasses and a squirrel-faced woman of middle age on the effects of weightlessness on the secretion of gastric juices. The two listened with an occasional "My goodness" or "Really?" but the longer I listened to the balding man's style of speaking, the less certain I became that, even in his white coat, he was really a doctor.

No one in the dining hall paid me any special attention. No one stared or even seemed to notice I was there. My presence must have been an entirely natural event.

Just once, though, the man in white spun around and asked me, "How long will you be staying?"

"Two nights," I said. "I'll be leaving on Wednesday."

"It's nice here this time of year, isn't it? But come again in winter. It's really nice when everything's white."

"Naoko may be out of here by the time it snows," said Reiko to the man.

"True, but still, the winter's really nice," he repeated with a sombre expression. I felt increasingly unsure as to whether or not he was a doctor.

"What do you people talk about?" I asked Reiko, who seemed to not quite follow me.

"What do we talk about? Just ordinary things. What happened that day, or books we've read, or tomorrow's weather, you know. Don't tell me you're wondering if people jump to their feet and shout stuff like: "It'll rain tomorrow if a polar bear eats the stars tonight!"'