Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

By the time I had finished it the sky was growing light. I made myself some instant coffee and used some notepaper and a ballpoint pen I found on the table to write a message to Midori: I drank some of your brandy. I bought a copy of Beneath the Wheel.

It's light outside, so I'm going home. Goodbye.

Then, after some hesitation, I wrote: You look really cute when you're sleeping.

I washed my coffee cup, switched off the kitchen light, went downstairs, quietly lifted the shutter, and stepped outside. I worried that a neighbour might find me suspicious, but there was no one on the street at 5.50-something in the morning.

Only the crows were on their usual rooftop perch, glaring down at the street. I glanced up at the pale pink curtains in Midori's window, walked to the tram stop, rode to the end of the line, and walked to my dorm. On the way I found an open cafe and ate a breakfast of rice and miso soup, pickled vegetables and fried eggs. Circling around to the back of the dorm, I tapped on Nagasawa's ground-floor window. He let me in immediately.

"Coffee?" he asked.

"Nah."

I thanked him, went up to my room, brushed my teeth, took my trousers off, got under the covers, and clamped my eyes shut. Finally, a dreamless sleep closed over me like a heavy lead door.

I wrote to Naoko every week, and she often wrote back. Her letters were never very long. Soon there were references to the cold November mornings and evenings.

You went back to Tokyo just about the time the autumn weather was deepening, so for a time I couldn't tell whether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of the season.

Reiko and I talk about you all the time. She says be sure to say "Hi" to you. She is as nice to me as ever. I don't think I would have been able to stand this place if I didn't have her with me. I cry when I'm lonely.

Reiko says it's good I can cry. But feeling lonely really hurts. When I'm lonely at night, people talk to me from the darkness. They talk to me the way trees moan in the wind at night. Kizuki; my sister: they talk to me like that all the time. They're lonely, too, and looking for someone to talk to.

I often reread your letters at night when I'm lonely and in pain. I get confused by a lot of things that come from outside, but your descriptions of the world around you give me wonderful relief. It's so strange! I wonder why that should be? So I read them over and over, and Reiko reads them, too. Then we talk about the things you tell me.

I really liked the part about that girl Midori's father. We look forward to getting your letter every week as one of our few entertainments - yes, in a place like this, letters are our entertainments.

I try my best to set aside a time in the week for writing to you, but once I actually sit down in front of the blank sheet of paper, I begin to feel depressed. I'm really having to push myself to write this letter, too. Reiko's been yelling at me to answer you. Don't get me wrong, though. I have tons of things I want to talk to you about, to tell you about. It's just hard for me to put them into words. Which is why it's so painful for me to write letters.

Speaking of Midori, she sounds like an interesting person. Reading your letter, I got the feeling she might be in love with you. When I told that to Reiko, she said, "Well, of course she is! Even I am in love with Watanabe!' We're picking mushrooms and gathering chestnuts and eating them every day. And I do mean every day: rice with chestnuts, rice with matsutake mushrooms, but they taste so great, we never get tired of them. Reiko doesn't eat that much, though. For her, it's still one cigarette after another. The birds and the rabbits are doing fine.

Goodbye.

Three days after my twentieth birthday, a package arrived for me from Naoko. Inside I found a wine-coloured crew neck pullover and a letter.

Happy Birthday! I hope you have a happy year being 20. My own year of being 20 looks like it's going to end with me as miserable as ever, but I'd really like it if you could have your share of happiness and mine combined. Really. Reiko and I each knitted half of this jumper.

If I had done it all by myself, it would have taken until next Valentine's Day. The good half is Reiko's, and the bad half is mine.

Reiko is so good at everything she does, I sometimes hate myself when I'm watching her. I mean, there's not a single thing I'm really good at!

Goodbye.

Be well.

The package had a short note from Reiko, too.

How are you? For you, Naoko may be the pinnacle of happiness, but for me she's just a clumsy girl. Still, we managed to finish this jumper in time for your birthday. Handsome, isn't it? We chose the colour and the style.

Happy Birthday.

Thinking back on the year 1969, all that comes to mind for me is a swamp - a deep, sticky bog that feels as if it's going to suck off my shoe each time I take a step. I walk through the mud, exhausted. In front of me, behind me, I can see nothing but the endless darkness of a swamp.

Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps. The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. The world around me was on the verge of great transformations. Death had already taken John Coltrane who was joined now by so many others. People screamed there'd be revolutionary changes - which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the "changes" that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, backdrops without substance or meaning.

I trudged along through each day in its turn, rarely looking up, eyes locked on the never-ending swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.

I turned 20, autumn gave way to winter, but in my life nothing changed in any significant way. Unexcited, I went to my lectures, worked three nights a week in the record shop reread The Great Gatsby now and then, and when Sunday came I would do my washing and write a long letter to Naoko. Sometimes I would go out with Midori for a meal or to the zoo or to the cinema. The sale of the Kobayashi Bookshop went as planned, and Midori and her sister moved into a two-bedroom flat near Myogadani, a more upmarket neighbourhood. Midori would move out when her sister got married, and rent a flat by herself, she said. Meanwhile, she invited me to their new place for lunch once. It was a sunny, handsome flat, and Midori seemed to enjoy living there far more than she had above the Kobayashi Bookshop.

Every once in a while, Nagasawa would suggest that we go out on one of our excursions, but I always found something else to do instead. I just didn't want the hassle. Not that I didn't like the idea of sleeping with girls: it was just that, when I thought about the whole process I had to go through - drinking in town, looking for the right kind of girls, talking to them, going to a hotel - it was all too much effort. I had to admire Nagasawa all the more for the way he could continue the ritual without ever getting sick and tired of it. Maybe what Hatsumi had said to me had had some effect: I could make myself feel far happier just thinking about Naoko than sleeping with some stupid, anonymous girl. The sensation of Naoko's fingers bringing me to climax in a grassy field remained vivid inside me.

I wrote to her at the beginning of December to ask if it would be all right for me to come and visit her during the winter holidays. An answer came from Reiko saying they would love to have me. She explained that Naoko was having trouble writing and that she was answering for her. I was not to take this to mean that Naoko was feeling especially bad: there was no need for me to worry. These things came in waves.