Norwegian Wood Vol 1. Read online

  Originally published in Japanese under the title Noruwei no mori.

  Published by Kodansha Publishers Ltd., 12-21 Otowa 2-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112 and Kodansha International Ltd. 17-14, Otowa 1-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112.

  Copyright © 1987 Haruki Murakami.

  English Translation copyright © 1989 by Kodansha International Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.

  ISBN 4-06-186051-8

  First Edition, 1989

  Sixth Printing, 1990

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  Here I am, thirty-seven years old, seated in a Boeing 747. The giant plane is diving into a thick cover of clouds, about to land at Hamburg Airport. A chill November rain darkens the land, turning the scene into a gloomy Flemish painting. The airport workers in their rain gear, the flags atop the faceless airport buildings, the BMW billboards, everything. Just great, I’m thinking, Germany again.

  The plane completes its landing procedures, the NO SMOKING sign goes off, and soft background music issues from the ceiling speakers. Some orchestra’s muzak rendition of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” And sure enough, the melody gets to me, same as always. No, this time it’s worse than ever before. I get it real bad. I swear my head is going to burst.

  I crouch forward and cover my face with my hands, and I just stay like that. Eventually a German stewardess comes by to ask if I’m feeling ill. I’m fine, I answer, just a little dizzy.

  ‘‘Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Really, I’m fine. Thanks,” I say. The stewardess smiles and heads off. Meanwhile the music changes to a Billy Joel number. I look up at the dark clouds over the North Sea and think of how many things I’ve lost up to now in the course of living. Lost time, people dead or gone, feelings never to return.

  As the plane comes to a complete stop, all the while until people unfasten their seat belts and start taking down bags and jackets from the overhead compartments, I’m in the middle of a meadow. I can smell the grass, feel the breeze on my skin, hear the birds singing. It’s the autumn of 1969. I’m about to turn twenty.

  The same stewardess comes back, sits down beside me, and asks if I’m feeling better.

  “I’m all right now, thank you. I was only feeling a little lonely,” I say, cheerfully as I can.

  “I get the same way once in a while. I know what you mean.” She nods as she gets up from the seat, then turns a lovely smile my way. “I hope you have a nice trip. Auf wiedersehen!”

  “Auf wiedersehen!” I echo.

  Even now, eighteen years later, I can still picture the meadow with amazing clarity. Several days of drizzle had washed away the last speck of that summer dust, bringing out a deep, vivid green in the hills. Tall stalks of pampas grass were swaying in the October breeze, thin trailing clouds frozen precisely in place against the blue overhead. The sky reached such heights it hurt your eyes just to look at it. Her hair stirred slightly with each puff of wind that swept across the meadow and passed on to the woods. Leaves rustled in the treetops, and far off somewhere a dog was barking. Tiny muffled cries that seemed to issue from the threshold of another world. Other than that, all was silent. Not a sound reached our ears. Not a soul did we encounter. Just two bright red birds we chanced to see fly up startled from the grass, only to disappear into the woods. And as we walked, Naoko told me about a well.

  Memory is a strange thing. When I was actually there, I hardly paid any attention to the scenery. It didn’t impress me as particularly memorable, nor did I have any idea I’d be remembering it in minute detail eighteen years later. To be perfectly honest, at the time I couldn’t have cared less about the scenery one way or the other. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful woman walking beside me. I was thinking about her and me, and I was thinking about myself again. I was at that age when no matter what I saw, no matter what I felt or thought, in the end it all boomeranged back to me. On top of which I was in love and the whole situation had put me in a difficult frame of mind. No way I’d have had a spare moment to notice the surroundings.

  And yet now, the first thing that drifts into mind is that meadow. The smell of the grass, the breeze tinged with the hint of a chill, the line of hills, the dog barking, these are what come floating up first. And all too distinctly. So distinctly I feel I could almost reach out and run my fingers over each and every thing. Still, there is no one in that landscape. Not a soul. Naoko isn’t there, and I’m not there, either. But where could we have disappeared to? How could this be? Everything that seemed so important at the time, her and my then-self, my own little world, where had they gone? Why, I can’t even picture Naoko’s face right away. All I have left is this setting with nobody in it.

  Of course, given time, her face is well within recall. Her small cold hands, her sleek straight hair so silky to the touch, her full-fleshed earlobe with the tiny mole right below, the camel-hair coat she used to wear in winter, her habit of looking you in the eye when asking a question, the way some things set her voice atremble, as if she were speaking on a windswept hill. The images build up one by one until her face comes floating into view. All very naturally. First it’s her profile, maybe because Naoko and I always walked side by side. Then she turns toward me, smiles that little smile of hers, tilts her head a bit, and starts to speak, peering into my eyes. Almost as if she were gazing after tiny fish darting about the bottom of a crystal clear spring.

  Even so, it’s a while before her face registers in my mind like that. And it takes more time with each passing year. Sad, but true. What used to take only five seconds to recall began taking ten seconds, then thirty seconds, then a minute, longer and longer like shadows at dusk. Soon it will be swallowed up in the night. My memory has obviously strayed far from where Naoko stood, just as certainly as I have become distanced from the site of my own former self. So only the scenery, only that October meadow, keeps playing over and over again in my head like some symbolic film sequence. And the scene keeps tugging back at some part of me. Hey, wake up! I’m still here! Wake up! Make some sense of me, realize that I’m still here for a reason! Not that it hurts. Not in the least. Each tug brings only a faint ghost of a sound. And soon enough even that will go away. Just like everything else in the end. Still, here in this Lufthansa plane at Hamburg Airport the ghosts have kept at me, kicking me in the head longer and harder than ever— Wake up! Make some sense of it all! So here I am, writing this. I’m the type who has to set things down on paper for myself before it all falls into place.

  What was she talking about at the time?

  That’s right, she was telling me about a well. I don’t even know if there really was such a well. Maybe it was only an image or a symbol of something inside her, like so many other things that unraveled in her mind in those dark days. All the same, no sooner had Naoko told me about that well than I couldn’t picture the meadow without seeing that well. I never actually set eyes on the well, yet it was etched indelibly into the landscape in my head. I can even describe it in detail. It lay right where the meadow ended and the woods began. A dark, yard-wide opening, just right there in the ground, cleverly hidden by the grass. No fence around it, no raised stone enclosure, only an open hole. The edging stones have weathered to a strange milky white, cracked and broken here and there, and you can spot little green lizards scrambling in between the cracks. Lean over the edge and look into the well, and you won’t see a thing. The only thing I can tell is that it’s awfully deep. Just how deep, I have no idea, but it’s dark down there.
A thick, black stew of all the varieties of darkness in the world.

  “It’s deep, really deep,” said Naoko, carefully choosing her words, the way she sometimes talked. Slowly, searching for the right word. “It’s really deep. Though no one knows exactly where it is. Only that it’s around here somewhere.”

  With this, she thrust both hands into the pockets of her tweed jacket and smiled at me as though to say, “Honest!”

  “But it must be incredibly dangerous,” I said. “Having a deep well around and nobody knowing just where. If someone fell in, there’d be no way to get out.’’

  “No way out. Ayeeeee, sploosh, and that’d be that.”

  “Doesn’t that ever happen?”

  “Sometimes. Once every two or three years. Someone suddenly disappears and can’t be found no matter how hard they look. When that happens, people around here say, ‘Must’ve fallen down that well.’ ”

  “Not a very nice way to go,” I said.

  “It’s a terrible way to go,” she said, picking off a stalk of grass that had stuck to her jacket. “It’d be okay if you broke your neck and died just like that, but if you only mangled your foot or something you’d really be out of luck. Shout all you want, no one would hear you. Not a chance anyone would find you. The whole place crawling with centipedes and spiders, bones lying around of God knows how many others who’d died in there. It’d be all dark and dank. And up above, a tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. All alone, you’d just shrivel up and die there.”

  “It’s enough to make your hair stand on end just thinking about it,’’ I said. “Somebody ought to find it and build a wall around it.”

  “But no one can find the well. That’s why you mustn’t stray from the beaten path.”

  “You won’t see me straying.”

  Naoko took her left hand out of her pocket and grasped my hand. “You, you’ll be all right. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You could walk through here blindfold in the dead of night and never fall in. And so long as I stick with you, I’ll absolutely never fall in either.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “And what makes you so sure?”

  “I just know, that’s all,” said Naoko, holding tight to my hand, then falling silent as we walked on a while. “I know about these things. There’s no logic to it, I just feel it. For instance, sticking right here beside you like this, I’m not the least bit scared. Not one dark or bad thing’s going to get to me.”

  “Well, that makes it easy. All we have to do is stay like this,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Really? Do you mean that?’’

  “Of course I mean it.”

  Naoko stopped in her tracks. I stopped as well. Putting both her hands on my shoulders, she peered straight into my eyes. Far back, in the depths of her pupils, some thick, pitch-black fluid was charting strange whorled patterns. Such were the pair of beautiful eyes that peered on and on into mine. Then she stretched up and lightly pressed her cheek against mine. With that one little gesture, a heart-stopping instant of wonderful warmth shot through me.

  “Thank you,” said Naoko.

  “You’re very welcome,” said I.

  “You’ve made me so happy, saying that. Honest!” she said with a sad little smile. “But it’s impossible.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because it can’t be. It’s just no good. It…” Naoko began, but then only pursed her lips and walked on in silence. I could tell that all kinds of thoughts were churning around inside her head, so I just kept quiet and walked along beside her.

  “It… wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Not for you, not for me,” she resumed at last.

  “And why wouldn’t it be right?” I asked.

  “Why, it’s just impossible, the idea of somebody watching over someone else for ever and ever. Say if, just if, I were to marry you. And if you went to work in a company. Who’d look after me while you were at work? Who’d look after me when you went away on business? Would you stay by my side until the day I died? That just wouldn’t be a fair arrangement. You couldn’t call that a relationship, could you? You’d only get discouraged with me. ‘What kind of life is this,’ you’d say, ‘just baby-sitting this woman?’ I don’t want that. That wouldn’t be any solution to the problems I’ve got.”

  “They’re not going to last forever,” I said, placing my hand on her shoulder. “You’ll get over them. And when that happens, we can think things through afresh. We’ll take it from there. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be you who’s helping me out. We’re not living according to a balance sheet, you know. If you need me now, you should use what I can offer. It’s that simple. Why do you have to look at things so hard? Relax. You’re all tensed up, that’s why everything seems so difficult. If you’d only loosen up a bit, you’d feel a lot lighter.”

  “Why’d you have to say that?” said Naoko in a distinctly drier tone.

  I could tell from her voice that I’d said something wrong.

  “Why?” she insisted, staring at the ground by her feet. “Don’t you think I know that if I relaxed, things’d seem a lot lighter? I don’t need you to tell me that. Listen, if I loosened up, I’d go to pieces. This is the only way I’ve been able to hold myself together so far, and this is the only way I can go on living. If I let go, I’d never get myself back together. Pieces’d be scattered all over the place and be blown away by the first gust of wind that came along. Why can’t you understand? If you don’t understand that, what makes you say that you can look after me?”

  There was nothing I could say.

  “I’m far more confused than you think. Dark and cold and confused. Really, why’d you have to go and sleep with me? Why couldn’t you have just left me alone?”

  We walked on through the intense silence of the woods. The path was littered with cicadas that had died at the end of summer, their corpses crunching beneath our feet. As we slowly moved forward, Naoko and I kept our eyes trained on the ground, almost as if we were searching for something.

  “Forgive me,” said Naoko, gently taking hold of my arm. Then she shook her head. “I didn’t mean to say anything to hurt you. Think nothing of it. I was just mad at myself, that’s all.”

  “It may well be that I still haven’t really figured you out at all,” I said. “I’m not the brightest person and it takes a while for things to sink in. But give me time and I’ll get to see the real you, and I’ll know you better than anyone else in the world.”

  Pausing there amidst the stillness, I poked among the dead cicadas and pine cones with the tip of my shoe, then looked up at the sky through the pine branches. Naoko buried her hands in her jacket pockets and stared off vacantly, lost in thought.

  “Tell me, do you like me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Well, then, may I make two requests?”

  “Three if you like.”

  Naoko laughed and shook her head. “Two’s enough. Two’s all I ask. First, I’d like you to realize how much I appreciate you coming here to see me. You’ve made me very happy, you’ve…been my salvation. Even if it doesn’t seem that way, I want you to know it’s true.”

  “You can count on me coming again,” I said. “And the other?”

  “I want you to remember me. Always remember that I existed and that I was here beside you, will you?”

  “Of course I’ll always remember.”

  Without a word, she stepped forward and started walking. Autumn light filtered through the branches and danced on the shoulders of her jacket. The dog barked again, perhaps a little nearer than before. Naoko climbed a little rise, strode out of the pine woods, and rushed down a gentle slope. I followed two or three paces back.

  “This way, over here. The well might be around there,” I called after her. Naoko stopped and laughed, then quickly took my arm. We walked side by side the rest of way.

  “You won’t forget me, ever?” she whispered softly.

  “Never ever,” I said. “No way I’d for
get you.”

  *

  And yet, in fact, memory drifts ever further away and I’ve already forgotten far too much. Tracing memories by writing like this, I’m sometimes overcome with terrible doubts. I find myself thinking, what if I’ve lost the most essential part of these memories? Suppose that somewhere in me, in some dark recess, all my most important recollections have become buried in the sludge of memory.

  Be that as it may, whatever I’ve managed to hold on to is all I have to go on at this date. Already faint and growing still fainter with each passing moment, I must embrace these imperfect memories for all I’m worth and keep writing them with the same care I’d lay cremated bones to rest. For there’s no other way for me to keep my promise to Naoko.

  Years back, when I was young and these memories were still fresh, I tried any number of times to write about Naoko. But I never could get one line down on paper. I knew very well that if I could only manage to squeeze out that first line, the rest would write itself, but that line just wouldn’t come. Everything was in such plain view, I had no idea where to begin. It’s as if you have a map with so much detail that you don’t even know where to start. But now I know. Ultimately, as I see it, imperfect memories and imperfect ideas are all you can put into something so imperfect as writing. What’s more, the fainter these memories of Naoko become in me, the more I feel I’ve come to understand her. The man I am today knows the reason why Naoko asked me never to forget her. But, of course, Naoko knew it all along.

  Which only makes it more unbearable, because Naoko never even loved me.

  CHAPTER 2

  Once upon a time, which means maybe twenty years ago at the most, I lived in a student dormitory. I was eighteen and had just entered university. Knowing nothing but nothing about Tokyo and being on my own for the first time, my parents had worried themselves into finding me that dorm. There I would be provided with meals, have the benefit of various conveniences, and generally get by well enough for one green eighteen-year-old. Of course, cost was a consideration, too. Especially since dorming worked out to be cheaper than living alone. You only needed bedding and a lamp, and had to buy nothing else. Still, if it had been up to me, I’d have rented an apartment and lived happily by myself. But what with the private university entrance fees and tuition, plus living expenses, I really couldn’t complain. And, besides, in the end it was all the same to me wherever I lived.