Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

"This is terrific!" she said. "You made these shelves and the desk?"

"Yep," I said, pouring tea.

"You're obviously good with your hands. And you keep the place so clean!"

"Storm Trooper's influence," I said. "He turned me into a cleanliness freak. Not that my landlord's complaining."

"Oh, your landlord! I ought to introduce myself to him.

That's his place on the other side of the garden, I suppose."

"Introduce yourself to him? What for?"

"What do you mean "what for'? Some weird old lady shows up in your place and starts playing the guitar, he's going to wonder what's going on. Better to start out on the right foot. I even brought a box of tea sweets for him."

"Very clever," I said.

"The wisdom that comes with age. I'm going to tell him I'm your aunt on your mother's side, visiting from Kyoto, so don't contradict me.

The age difference comes in handy at times like this. Nobody's going to get suspicious."

Reiko took the box of sweets from her bag and went off to pay her respects. I sat on the veranda, drinking another cup of tea and playing with the cat. Twenty minutes went by, and when Reiko finally came back, she pulled a tin of rice crackers from her bag and said it was a present for me.

"What were you talking about for so long?" I asked, munching on a cracker.

"You, of course," said Reiko, cradling the cat and rubbing her cheek against it. "He says you're a very proper young man, a serious student."

"Are you sure he was talking about me?"

"There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that he was talking about you," she said with a laugh. Then, noticing my guitar, she picked it up, adjusted the tuning, and played Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Desafinado".

It had been months since I last heard Reiko's guitar, and it gave me that old, warm feeling.

"You practising the guitar?" she asked.

"It was kicking around the landlord's storehouse, so I borrowed it and I plunk on it once in a while. That's all."

"I'll give you a lesson later. Absolutely free." Reiko put down the guitar and took off her tweed jacket. Sitting against the veranda post, she smoked a cigarette. She was wearing a madras check short-sleeve shirt.

"Nice shirt, don't you think?" she asked.

"It is," I said. In fact it was a good-looking shirt with a handsome pattern.

"It's Naoko's," said Reiko. "I bet you didn't know we were the same size. Especially when she first came to the sanatorium. She put on a little weight after that, but still we were pretty much the same size: blouses, trousers, shoes, hats. Bras were about the only thing we couldn't share. I've got practically nothing here. So we were always swapping clothes. Actually, it was more like joint ownership."

Now that she mentioned it, I saw that Reiko's build was almost identical to Naoko's. Because of the shape of her face and her thin arms and legs, she had always given me the impression of being smaller and slimmer than Naoko, but in fact she was surprisingly solid.

"The jacket and trousers are hers, too," said Reiko. "It's all hers. Does it bother you to see me wearing her stuff?"

"Not at all," I said. "I'm sure Naoko would be glad to have somebody wearing her clothes - especially you."

"It's strange," Reiko said with a little snap of the fingers. "Naoko didn't leave a will or anything - e xcept where her clothes were concerned. She scribbled one line on a memo pad on her desk. "Please give all my clothes to Reiko.' She was a funny one, don't you think?

Why would she be concerned about her clothes of all things when she's getting ready to die? Who gives a damn about clothes? She must have had tons of other things she wanted to say."

"Maybe not," I said.

Puffing on her cigarette, Reiko seemed lost in thought. Then she said, "You want to hear the whole story, in order, I suppose."

"I do," I said. "Please tell me everything."

"Tests at the hospital in Osaka showed that Naoko's condition was improving for the moment but that she should stay there on a somewhat longer-term basis so that they could continue the intensive therapy for its future benefits. I told you that much in my letter - the one I sent you somewhere around the tenth of August."

"Right. I read that letter."

"Well, on the 24th of August I got a call from Naoko's mother asking if it was OK for Naoko to visit me at the sanatorium. Naoko wanted to pack the things she had left with me and, because she wouldn't be able to see me for a while, she wanted to have a nice long talk with me, and perhaps spend a night in our flat. I said that would be fine. I wanted to see her really badly and to have a talk with her. So Naoko and her mother arrived the next day, the 25th, in a taxi. The three of us worked together, packing Naoko's things and chatting away. Late in the afternoon, Naoko said it would be OK for her mother to go home, that she'd be fine, so they called a taxi and the mother left. We weren't worried at all because Naoko seemed to be in such good spirits. In fact, until then I had been very worried. I had been expecting her to be depressed and worn out and emaciated. I mean, I knew how much the testing and therapy and stuff they do at those hospitals can take it out of you, so I had some real doubts about this visit. But one look at her was all it took to convince me she'd be OK. She looked a lot healthier than I had expected and she was smiling and joking and talking much more normally than when I had seen her last. She had been to the hairdresser's and was showing off her new hairdo. So I thought there would be nothing to worry about even if her mother left us alone.

Naoko told me that this time she was going to let those hospital doctors cure her once and for all, and I said that that would probably be the best thing to do. So then the two of us went out for a walk, talking all the time, mainly about the future. Naoko told me that what she'd really like was for the two of us to get out of the sanatorium and live together somewhere."

"Live together? You and Naoko?"

"That's right," said Reiko with a little shrug. "So I told her it sounded good to me, but what about Watanabe? And she said, "Don't worry, I'll get everything straight with him.' That's all. Then she talked about where she and I would live and what we'd do, that kind of thing. After that we went to the aviary and played with the birds."

I took a beer from the fridge and opened it. Reiko lit another cigarette, the cat sound asleep in her lap.

"That girl had everything worked out for herself. I'm sure that's why she was so full of energy and smiling and healthylooking. It must have been such a load off her mind to feel she knew exactly what she was going to do. So then we finished going through her stuff and throwing what she didn't need into the metal drum in the garden and burning it: the notebook she had used as a diary, and all the letters she had received. Your letters, too. This seemed a bit strange to me, so I asked her why she was burning stuff like that. I mean, she had always been so careful about putting your letters away in a safe place and reading them over and over. She said, "I'm getting rid of everything from the past so I can be reborn in the future.' I suppose I pretty much took her at her word. It had its own kind of logic to it, sort of. I remember thinking how much I wanted her to get healthy and happy. She was so sweet and lovely that day: I wish you could have seen her!

"When that was over, we went to the dining hall for supper the way we used to. Then we bathed and I opened a bottle of good wine that I had been keeping for a special occasion like this and we drank and I played the guitar. The Beatles, as always, "Norwegian Wood", "Michelle", her favourites. Both of us were feeling pretty good. We turned out the lights, got undressed and lay in our beds. It was one of those steaming hot nights. We had the windows wide open, but there was hardly a breath of wind. It was black as ink outside, the grasshoppers were screaming, and the smell of the summer grass was so thick in the room it was hard to breathe. All of a sudden, Naoko started talking about you - about the night she had sex with you. In incredible detail. How you took her clothes off, how you touched her, how she found herself getting wet, how you went inside her, how wonderful it felt: she told me all of this in vivid detail. So I asked her: why are you telling me this now, all of a sudden? I mean, up to then, she had never spoken openly to me about sex. Of course, we had had some frank sexual talk as a kind of therapy, but she had been too embarrassed to go into details. Now I couldn't stop her. I was shocked.