Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

Bookshelves on the desks held textbooks, dictionaries and novels.

The filth of these all-male rooms was horrifying. Mouldy mandarin skins clung to the bottoms of waste-paper baskets. Empty cans used for ashtrays held mounds of cigarette butts, and when these started to smoulder they'd be doused with coffee or beer and left to give off a sour stink. Blackish grime and bits of indefinable matter clung to all the bowls and dishes on the shelves, and the floors were littered with instant ramen wrappers and empty beer cans and discarded lids from one thing or another. It never occurred to anyone to sweep up and throw these things in the bin. Any wind that blew through would raise clouds of dust. Each room had its own horrendous smell, but the components of that smell were always the same: sweat, body odour and rubbish.

Dirty clothes would pile up under the beds, and without anyone bothering to air the mattresses on a regular basis, these sweat- impregnated pads would give off odours beyond redemption. In retrospect, it seems amazing that these shitpiles gave rise to no killer epidemics.

My room, on the other hand, was as sanitary as a morgue. The floor and window were spotless, the mattresses were aired each week, all pencils stood in the pencil holders, and even the curtains were washed once a month. My room-mate was a cleanliness freak. None of the others in the dorm believed me when I told them about the curtains.

They didn't know that curtains could be washed. They believed, rather, that curtains were semi-permanent parts of the window.

"There's something wrong with that guy," they'd say, labelling him a Nazi or a storm trooper.

We didn't even have pin-ups. No, we had a photo of a canal in Amsterdam. I had put up a nude shot, but my room-mate had pulled it down. "Hey, Watanabe," he said, "I-I'm not too crazy about this kind of thing," and up went the canal photo instead. I wasn't especially attached to the nude, so I didn't protest.

"What the hell's that?" was the universal reaction to the Amsterdam photo whenever any of the other guys came to my room.

"Oh, Storm Trooper likes to wank looking at this," I said.

I meant it as a joke, but they all took me seriously - so seriously that I began to believe it myself.

Everybody sympathized with me for having Storm Trooper as a room- mate, but I really wasn't that upset about it. He left me alone as long as I kept my area clean, and in fact having him as my room-mate made things easier for me in many ways. He did all the cleaning, he took care of sunning the mattresses, he threw out the rubbish. He'd give a sniff and suggest a bath for me if I'd been too busy to wash for a few days. He'd even point out when it was time for me to go to the barber's or trim my nasal hair. The one thing that bothered me was the way he would spray clouds of insecticide if he noticed a single fly in the room, because then I had to take refuge in a neighbouring shitpile.

Storm Trooper was studying geography at a national university.

As he told me the first time we met, "I'm studying m-m-maps."

"You like maps?" I asked.

"Yup. When I graduate, I'm going to work for the Geographical Survey Institute and make m-m-maps."

I was impressed by the variety of dreams and goals that life could offer. This was one of the very first new impressions I received when I came to Tokyo for the first time. The thought struck me that society needed a few people - just a few - who were interested in and even passionate about mapmaking. Odd, though, that someone who wanted to work for the government's Geographical Survey Institute should stutter every time he said the word "map". Storm Trooper often didn't stutter at all, except when he pronounced the word "map", for which it was a 100 per cent certainty.

"W what are you studying?" he asked me.

"Drama," I said.

"Gonna put on plays?"

"Nah, just read scripts and do research. Racine, lonesco, Shakespeare, stuff like that."

He said he had heard of Shakespeare but not the others. I hardly knew anything about the others myself, I'd just seen their names in lecture handouts.

"You like plays?" he asked.

"Not especially."

This confused him, and when he was confused, his stuttering got worse. I felt sorry I had done that to him.

"I could have picked anything," I said. "Ethnology, Asian history. I just happened to pick drama, that's all," which was not the most convincing explanation I could have come up with.

"I don't get it," he said, looking as if he really didn't get it. "I like m- m-maps, so I decided to come to Tokyo and get my parents to s-send me money so I could study m-m-maps. But not you, huh?"

His approach made more sense than mine. I gave up trying to explain myself. Then we drew lots (matchsticks) to choose bunks. He got the upper bunk.

Tall, with a crewcut and high cheekbones, he always wore the same outfit: white shirt, black trousers, black shoes, navy-blue jumper. To these he would add a uniform jacket and black briefcase when he went to his university: a typical right-wing student. Which is why everybody called him Storm Trooper. But in fact he was totally indifferent to politics. He wore a uniform because he didn't want to be bothered choosing clothes. What interested him were things like changes in the coastline or the completion of a new railway tunnel.

Nothing else. He'd go on for hours once he got started on a subject like that, until you either ran away or fell asleep.

He was up at six each morning with the strains of "May Our Lord's Reign". Which is to say that that ostentatious flag-raising ritual was not entirely useless. He'd get dressed, go to the bathroom and wash his face - for ever. I sometimes got the feeling he must be taking out each tooth and washing it, one at a time. Back in the room, he would snap the wrinkles out of his towel and lay it on the radiator to dry, then return his toothbrush and soap to the shelf. Finally he'd do radio callisthenics with the rest of the nation.

I was used to reading late at night and sleeping until eight o'clock, so even when he started shuffling around the room and exercising, I remained unconscious - until the part where he started jumping. He took his jumping seriously and made the bed bounce every time he hit the floor. I stood it for three days because they had told us that communal life called for a certain degree of resignation, but by the morning of the fourth day, I couldn't take it any more.

"Hey, can you do that on the roof or somewhere?" I said. "I can't sleep."

"But it's already 6.30!" he said, open-mouthed.

"Yeah, I know it's 6.30. I'm still supposed to be asleep. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but that's how it works for me."

"Anyway, I can't do it on the roof. Somebody on the third floor would complain. Here, we're over a storeroom."

"So go out on the quad. On the lawn."

"That's no good, either. I don't have a transistor radio. I need to plug it in. And you can't do radio callisthenics without music."

True, his radio was an old piece of junk without batteries. Mine was a transistor portable, but it was strictly FM, for music.

"OK, let's compromise," I said. "Do your exercises but cut out the jumping part. It's so damned noisy. What do you say?"

"J-jumping? What's that?"

"Jumping is jumping. Bouncing up and down."

"But there isn't any jumping."

My head was starting to hurt. I was ready to give up, but I wanted to make my point. I got out of bed and started bouncing up and down and singing the opening melody of NHK's radio callisthenics. "I'm talking about this,"

I said.

"Oh, that.

I guess you're right. I never noticed."

"See what I mean?" I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Just cut out that part. I can put up with the rest. Stop jumping and let me sleep."