Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

I tried phoning Midori's flat again, and again her sister answered.

Midori hadn't come back since yesterday, she said, sounding tired, and now she herself was beginning to worry: did I have any idea where she might have gone? All I knew was that Midori had her pyjamas and a toothbrush in her bag.

I saw Midori at the lecture on Wednesday. She was wearing a deep green pullover and the dark sunglasses she had often worn that summer. She was seated in the last row, talking with a thin girl with glasses I had seen once before. I approached her and said I'd like to talk afterwards. The girl with glasses looked at me first, and then Midori looked at me. Her hairstyle was, in fact, somewhat more feminine than it had been before: more mature.

"I have to meet someone," she said, cocking her head slightly.

"I won't take up much of your time," I said. "Five minutes."

Midori removed her sunglasses and narrowed her eyes. She might just as well have been looking at a crumbling, abandoned house some hundred yards in the distance.

"I don't want to talk to you. Sorry," she said.

The girl with glasses looked at me with eyes that said: She says she doesn't want to talk to you. Sorry.

I sat at the right end of the front row for the lecture (an overview of the works of Tennessee Williams and their place in American literature), and when it was over, I did a long count to three and turned around. Midori was gone.

April was too lonely a month to spend all alone. In April, everyone around me looked happy. People would throw off their coats and enjoy each other's company in the sunshine - talking, playing catch, holding hands. But I was always by myself. Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa: all of them had gone away from where I stood. Now I had no one to say "Good morning" to or "Have a nice day". I even missed Storm Trooper. I spent the whole month with this hopeless sense of isolation. I tried to speak to Midori a few times, but the answer I got from her was always the same: "I don't want to talk to you now" - and I knew from the tone of her voice that she meant it. She was always with the girl with glasses, or else I saw her with a tall, short-haired guy. He had these incredibly long legs and always wore white basketball shoes.

April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice b ut to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass - but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache in its path.

At those times I would write to Naoko. In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a film I'd seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me. I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one. I wrote any number of letters like this, but from Naoko or Reiko I heard nothing.

At the restaurant where I worked I got to know another student my age named Itoh. It took quite a while before this gentle, quiet student from the oil-painting department of an art college would engage me in conversation, but eventually we started going to a nearby bar after work and talking about all kinds of things. He also liked to read and to listen to music, so we'd usually talk about books and records we liked.

He was a slim, good-looking guy with much shorter hair and far cleaner clothes than the typical art student. He never had a lot to say, but he had his definite tastes and opinions. He liked French novels, especially those of Georges Bataille and Boris Vian. For music, he preferred Mozart and Ravel. And, like me, he was looking for a friend with whom he could talk about such things.

Itoh once invited me to his flat. It was not quite as hard to get to as mine: a strange, one-floored house behind Inokashira Park. His room was stuffed with painting supplies and canvases. I asked to see his work, but he said he was too embarrassed to show me anything. We drank some Chivas Regal that he had quietly removed from his father's place, grilled some smelts on his charcoal stove, and listened to Robert Casadesus playing a Mozart piano concerto.

Itoh was from Nagasaki. He had a girlfriend he would sleep with whenever he went home, he said, but things weren't going too well with her lately.

"You know what girls are like," he said. "They turn 20 or 21 and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super- realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and loveable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing. Now when I see her, usually after we do it, she starts asking me, "What are you going to do after you graduate?"'

"Well, what are you going to do after you graduate?" I asked him.

Munching on a mouthful of smelt, he shook his head. "What can I do?

I'm in oil painting! Start worrying about stuff like that, and nobody's going to study oil painting! You don't do it to feed yourself. So she's like, "Why don't you come back to Nagasaki and become an art teacher?' She's planning to be an English teacher."

"You're not so crazy about her any more, are you?"

"That just about sums it up," Itoh admitted. "And who on earth wants to be an art teacher? I'm not gonna spend my whole fuckin' life teaching teenaged monkeys how to draw!"

"That's beside the point," I said. "Don't you think you ought to break up with her? For both your sakes."

"Sure I do. But I don't know how to say it to her. She's planning to spend her life with me. How the hell can I say, "Hey, we ought to split up. I don't like you any more'?"

We drank our Chivas straight, without ice, and when we ran out of smelts we cut up some cucumbers and celery and dipped them in miso. When my teeth crunched down on my cucumber slices, I thought of Midori's father, which reminded me how flat and tasteless my life had become without Midori and this put me in a foul mood.

Without my being aware of it, she had become a huge presence inside me.

"Got a girlfriend?" asked Itoh.

"Yeah," I said, then, after a pause added, "but I can't be with her at the moment."

"But you understand each other's feelings, right?"

"I like to think so. Otherwise, what's the point?" I said with a chuckle.

Itoh talked in hushed tones about the greatness of Mozart. He knew Mozart inside out, the way a country boy knows his mountain trails.

His father loved the music and had exposed him to it ever since he was tiny. I didn't know so much about classical music, but listening to this Mozart concerto with Itoh's smart and heartfelt commentary ("There - that part,"

"How about that?"), I felt myself calming down for the first time in ages. We stared at the crescent moon hanging over Inokashira Park and drank our Chivas Regal to the last drop. Fantastic whisky.

Itoh said I could spend the night there, but I told him I had to do something, thanked him for the whisky and left his flat before nine.

On the way back to my place I called Midori from a phone box. Much to my surprise she actually answered.

"Sorry," she said, "but I don't want to talk to you right now."

"I know, I know. But I don't want our relationship to end like this.