Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

"He sounds like a strange person," said Naoko. "He is strange," I said. "But you like him?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "I guess I can't say I like him. Nagasawa is beyond liking or not liking. He doesn't try to be liked. In that sense, he's a very honest guy, stoic even. He doesn't try to fool anybody."

"Stoic' sleeping with all those girls? Now that is weird," said Naoko, laughing. "How many girls has he slept with?"

"It's probably up to 80 now," I said. "But in his case, the higher the numbers go, the less each individual act seems to mean. Which is what I think he's trying to accomplish."

"And you call that "stoic'?"

"For him it is."

Naoko thought about my words for a minute. "I think he's a lot sicker in the head than I am," she said.

"So do I," I said. "But he can put all of his warped qualities into a logical system. He's brilliant. If you brought him here, he'd be out in two days. "Oh, sure, I know all that,' he'd say. "I understand everything you're doing here.' He's that kind of guy. The kind people respect."

"I guess I'm the opposite of brilliant," said Naoko. "I don't understand anything they're doing here - any better than I understand myself."

"It's not because you're not smart," I said. "You're normal. I've got tons of things I don't understand about myself. We're both normal: ordinary."

Naoko raised her feet to the edge of the sofa and rested her chin on her knees. "I want to know more about you," she said.

"I'm just an ordinary guy - ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary exam results, ordinary thoughts in my head."

"You're such a big Scott Fitzgerald fan... wasn't he the one who said you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinary man? You lent me the book!" said Naoko with a mischievous smile.

"True," I said. "But this is no affectation. I really, truly believe deep down that I'm an ordinary person. Can you find something in me that's not ordinary?"

"Of course I can!" said Naoko with a hint of impatience. "Don't you get it? Why do you think I slept with you? Because I was so drunk I would have slept with anyone?"

"No, of course I don't think that," I said.

Naoko remained silent for a long time, staring at her toes. At a loss for words, I took another sip of wine.

"How many girls have you slept with, Toru?" Naoko asked in a tiny voice as if the thought had just crossed her mind.

"Eight or nine," I answered truthfully.

Reiko plopped the guitar into her lap. "You're not even 20 years old!" she said. "What kind of life are you leading?"

Naoko kept silent and watched me with those clear eyes of hers. I told Reiko about the first girl I'd slept with and how we had broken up. I had found it impossible to love her, I explained. I went on to tell her about my sleeping with one girl after another under Nagasawa's tutelage.

"I'm not trying to make excuses, but I was in pain," I said to Naoko.

"Here I was, seeing you almost every week, and talking with you, and knowing that the only one in your heart was Kizuki. It hurt. It really hurt. And I think that's why I slept with girls I didn't know."

Naoko shook her head for a few moments, and then she raised her face to look at me. "You asked me that time why I had never slept with Kizuki, didn't you? Do you still want to know?"

"I suppose it's something I really ought to know," I said.

"I think so, too," said Naoko. "The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living."

I nodded. Reiko played the same difficult passage over and over, trying to get it right.

"I was ready to sleep with him," said Naoko, unclasping her hairslide and letting her hair down. She toyed with the butterfly shape in her hands. "And of course he wanted to sleep with me. So we tried. We tried a lot. But it never worked. We couldn't do it. I didn't know why then, and I still don't know why. I loved him, and I wasn't worried about losing my virginity. I would have been glad to do anything he wanted. But it never worked."

Naoko lifted the hair she had let down and fastened it with the slide.

"I couldn't get wet," she said in a tiny voice. "I never opened to him.

So it always hurt. I was just too dry, it hurt too much. We tried everything we could think of - creams and things - but still it hurt me.

So I used my fingers, or my lips. I would always do it for him that way. You know what I mean."

I nodded in silence.

Naoko cast her gaze through the window at the moon, which looked bigger and brighter now than it had before. "I never wanted to talk about any of this," she said. "I wanted to shut it up in my heart. I wish I still could. But I have to talk about it. I don't know the answer. I mean, I was plenty wet the time I slept with you, wasn't I?"

"Uh-huh," I said.

"I was wet from the minute you walked into my flat the night of my twentieth birthday. I wanted you to hold me. I wanted you to take off my clothes, to touch me all over and enter me. I had never felt like that before. Why is that? Why do things happen like that? I mean, I really loved him."

"And not me," I said. "You want to know why you felt that way about me, even though you didn't love me?"

"I'm sorry," said Naoko. "I don't mean to hurt you, but this much you have to understand: Kizuki and I had a truly special relationship. We had been together from the time we were three. It's how we grew up: always together, always talking, understanding each other perfectly.

The first time we kissed it was in the first year of junior school - was just wonderful. The first time I had my period, I ran to him and cried like a baby. We were that close. So after he died, I didn't know how to relate to other people. I didn't know what it meant to love another person."

She reached for her wineglass on the table but only managed to knock it over, spilling wine on the carpet. I crouched down and retrieved the glass, setting it on the table. Did she want to drink some more? I asked. Naoko remained silent for a while, then suddenly burst into tears, trembling all over. Slumping forward, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed with the same suffocating violence as she had that night with me. Reiko laid down her guitar and sat by Naoko, caressing her back. When she put an arm across Naoko's shoulders, she pressed her face against Reiko's chest like a baby.

"You know," Reiko said to me, "it might be a good idea for you to go out for a little walk. Maybe 20 minutes. Sorry, but I think that would help."

I nodded and stood, pulling a jumper on over my shirt. "Thanks for stepping in," I said to Reiko.

"Don't mention it," she said with a wink. "This is not your fault. Don't worry, by the time you come back she'll be OK."

My feet carried me down the road, which was illuminated by the oddly unreal light of the moon, and into the woods.

Beneath that moonlight, all sounds bore a strange reverberation. The hollow sound of my own footsteps seemed to come from another direction as though I were hearing someone walking on the bottom of the sea. Behind me, every now and then, I would hear a crack or a rustle. A heavy pall hung over the forest, as if the animals of the night were holding their breath, waiting for me to pass.

Where the road sloped upwards beyond the trees, I sat and looked towards the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell her room.

All I had to do was find the one window towards the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final pulse of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching it the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night.

When I walked back to the front entrance of the building half an hour later, I could hear Reiko practising the guitar. I padded up the stairs and tapped on the door to the flat. Inside there was no sign of Naoko.