Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

I think of you now more than ever. It's raining today. Rainy Sundays are hard for me. When it rains I can't do laundry, which means I can't do ironing. I can't go walking, and I can't lie on the roof. About all I can do is put the record player on auto repeat and listen to Kind of Blue over and over while I watch the rain falling in the quadrangle. As I wrote to you earlier, I don't wind my spring on Sundays. That's why this letter is so damn long. I'm stopping now. I'm going to the dining hall for lunch. Goodbye.

There was no sign of Midori at the next day's lecture, either. What had happened to her? Ten days had gone by since we last talked on the phone. I thought about calling her, but decided against it. She had said that she would call me.

That Thursday I saw Nagasawa in the dining hall. He sat down next to me with a tray full of food and apologized for having made our "party" so unpleasant.

"Never mind," I said. "I should be thanking you for a great dinner. I have to admit, though, it was a funny way to celebrate your first job."

"You can say that again."

A few minutes went by as we ate in silence. "I made up with Hatsumi," he said.

"I'm not surprised."

"I was kind of tough on you, too, as I recall it."

"What's with all the apologizing?" I asked. "Are you ill?"

"I may be," he said with a few little nods. "Hatsumi tells me you told her to leave me."

"It only makes sense," I said.

"Yeah, I s'pose so," said Nagasawa.

"She's a great girl," I said, slurping my miso soup.

"I know," he said with a sigh. "A little too great for me."

I was sleeping the sleep of death when the buzzer rang to let me know I had a call. It brought me back from the absolute core of sleep in total confusion. I felt as if I had been sleeping with my head soaked in water until my brain swelled up. The clock said 6.15 but I had no idea if that meant a. m. or p. m., and I couldn't remember what day it was. I looked out of the window and realized there was no flag on the pole. It was probably p. m. So, raising that flag served some purpose after all.

"Hey, Watanabe, are you free now?" Midori asked.

"I don't know, what day is it?"

"Friday."

"Morning or evening?"

"Evening, of course! You're so weird! Let's see, it's, uh, 6.18 p.m."

So it was p. m. after all! That's right, I had been stretched out on my bed reading a book when I dozed off. Friday. My head started working. I didn't have to go to the record shop on Friday nights.

"Yeah, I'm free. Where are you?"

"Ueno Station. Why don't you meet me in Shinjuku? I'll leave now."

We set a time and place and hung up.

When I got to DUG, Midori was sitting at the far end of the counter with a drink. She wore a man's wrinkled, white balmacaan coat, a thin yellow jumper, blue jeans, and two bracelets on one wrist.

"What're you drinking?" I asked.

"Tom Collins."

I ordered a whisky and soda, then realized there was a big suitcase by Midori's feet.

I went away," she said. "Just got back."

"Where'd you go?"

"South to Nara and north to Aomori."

"On the same trip?!"

"Don't be stupid. I may be strange, but I can't go north and south at the same time. I went to Nara with my boyfriend, and then took off to Aomori alone."

I sipped my whisky and soda, then struck a match to light the Marlboro that Midori held between her lips. "You must have had a terrible time, what with the funeral and everything."

"Nah, a funeral's a piece of cake. We've had plenty of practice. You put on a black kimono and sit there like a lady and everybody else takes care of business - an uncle, a neighbour, like that. They bring the sake, order the sushi, say comforting things, cry, carry on, divide up the keepsakes. It's a breeze. A picnic. Compared to nursing someone day after day, it's an absolute picnic. We were drained, my sister and me. We couldn't even cry. We didn't have any tears left. Really.

Except, when you do that, they start whispering about you: "Those girls are as cold as ice.' So then, we're never going to cry, that's just how the two of us are. I know we could have faked it, but we would never do anything like that. The bastards! The more they wanted to see us cry, the more determined we were not to give them the satisfaction. My sister and I are totally different types, but when it comes to something like that, we're in absolute sync."

Midori's bracelets jangled on her arm as she waved to the waiter and ordered another Tom Collins and a small bowl of pistachios.

"So then, after the funeral ended and everybody went home, the two of us drank sake till the sun went down. Polished off one of those huge half-gallon bottles, and half of another one, and the whole time we were dumping on everybody - this one's an idiot, that one's a shithead, one guy looks like a mangy dog, another one's a pig, so-and-so's a hypocrite, that one's a crook.

You have no idea how great it felt!"

"I can imagine."

"We got pissed and went to bed - both of us out cold. We slept for hours, and if the phone rang or something, we just let it go. Dead to the world. Finally, after we woke up, we ordered sushi and talked about what to do. We decided to close the shop for a while and enjoy ourselves. We'd been killing ourselves for months and we deserved a break. My sister just wanted to hang around with her boyfriend for a while, and I decided I'd take mine on a trip for a couple of days and fuck like crazy." Midori clamped her mouth shut and rubbed her ears.

"Oops, sorry."

"That's OK," I said. "So you went to Nara."

"Yeah, I've always liked that place. The temples, the deer park."

"And did you fuck like crazy?"

"No, not at all, not even once," she said with a sigh. "The second we walked into the hotel room and dumped our bags, my period started. A real gusher."

I couldn't help laughing.

"Hey, it's not funny. I was a week early! I couldn't stop crying when that happened. I think all the stress threw me off. My boyfriend got sooo angry! He's like that: he gets angry straight away. It wasn't my fault, though. It's not like I wanted to get my period. And, well, mine are kind of on the heavy side anyway. The first day or two, I don't want to do anything.

Make sure you keep away from me then."

"I'd like to, but how can I tell?" I asked.

"OK, I'll wear a hat for a couple of days after my period starts. A red one. That should work," she said with a laugh "If you see me on the street and I'm wearing a red hat, don't talk to me, just run away."

"Great. I wish all girls would do that," I said. "So anyway what did you do in Nara?"

"What else could we do? We fed the deer and walked all over the place. It was just awful! We had a big fight and I haven't seen him since we got back. I hung around for a couple of days and decided to take a nice trip all by myself. So I went to Aomori. I stayed with a friend in Hirosaki for the first two nights, and then I started travelling around - Shimokita, Tappi, places like that. They're nice. I once wrote a map brochure for the area. Ever been there?"

"Never."

"So anyway," said Midori, sipping her Tom Collins, then wrenching open a pistachio, "the whole time I was travelling by myself, I was thinking of you. I was thinking how nice it would be if I could have you with me."

"How come?"

"How come?!" Midori looked at me with eyes focused on nothingness.