Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami Norwegian Wood

I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth, lending everything the gloomy air of a Flemish landscape: the ground crew in waterproofs, a flag atop a squat airport building, a BMW billboard. So - Germany again. Once the plane was on the ground, soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood". The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever. I bent forward, my face in my hands to keep my skull from splitting open. Before long one of the German stewardesses approached and asked in English if I were sick. "No," I said, "just dizzy." "Are you sure?" "Yes, I'm sure. Thanks." She smiled and left, and the music changed to a Billy Joel tune. I straightened up and looked out of the window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of all I had lost in the course of my life: times gone for ever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again. The plane reached the gate. People began unfastening their seatbelts and pulling luggage from the overhead lockers, and all the while I was in the meadow. I could smell the grass, feel the wind on my face, hear the cries of the birds. Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20. The stewardess came to check on me again. This time she sat next to me and asked if I was all right. "I'm fine, thanks," I said with a smile. "Just feeling kind of blue." "I know what you mean," she said. "It happens to me, too, every once in a while." She stood and gave me a lovely smile. "Well, then, have a nice trip. Auf Wiedersehen." "Auf Wiedersehen." Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer's dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-high grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking - a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway to another world. We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods. As we ambled along, Naoko spoke to me of wells. Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene I hardly paid it any attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that 18 years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. I was at that age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind. Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. The smell of the grass, the faint chill of the wind, the line of the hills, the barking of a dog: these are the first things, and they come with absolute clarity. I feel as if I can reach out and trace them with a fingertip. And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then - Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It's true, I can't even bring back her face - not straight away, at least. All I'm left holding is a background, pure scenery, with no people at the front. True, given time enough, I can remember her face. I start joining images - her tiny, cold hand; her straight, black hair so smooth and cool to the touch; a soft, rounded earlobe and the microscopic mole just beneath it; the camel-hair coat she wore in the winter; her habit of looking straight into my eyes when asking a question; the slight trembling that would come to her voice now and then (as though she were speaking on a windy hilltop) - and suddenly her face is there, always in profile at first, because Naoko and I were always out walking together, side by side. Then she turns to me and smiles, and tilts her head just a little, and begins to speak, and she looks into my eyes as if trying to catch the image of a minnow that has darted across the pool of a limpid spring. It takes time, though, for Naoko's face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in 5 seconds all too soon needed 10, then 30, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a film. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. Wake up, it says. I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here. The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. At Hamburg airport, though, the kicks were longer and harder than usual. Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them. Let's see, now, what was Naoko talking about that day? Of course: the "field well". I have no idea whether there was such a well. It might have been an image or a sign that existed only inside Naoko, like all the other things she used to spin into existence inside her mind in those dark days. Once she had described it to me, though, I was never able to think of that meadow scene without the well. From that day forward, the image of a thing I had never laid eyes on became inseparably fused to the actual scene of the field that lay before me. I can describe the well in minute detail. It lay precisely on the border where the meadow ended and the woods began - a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by grass. Nothing marked its perimeter - no fence, no stone curb (at least not one that rose above ground level). It was nothing but a hole, a wide-open mouth. The stones of its collar had been weathered and turned a strange muddy-white. They were cracked and chunks were missing, and a little green lizard slithered into an open seam. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world's darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density. "It's really, really deep," said Naoko, choosing her words with care. She would speak that way sometimes, slowing down to find the exact word she was looking for. "But no one knows where it is," she continued. "The one thing I know for sure is that it's around here somewhere." Hands thrust into the pockets of her tweed jacket, she smiled at me as if to say "It's true!" "Then it must be incredibly dangerous," I said. "A deep well, but nobody knows where it is. You could fall in and that'd be the end of you." "The end. Aaaaaaaah! Splat! Finished." "Things like that must happen." "They do, every once in a while. Maybe once in two or three years. Somebody disappears all of a sudden, and they just can't find him. So then the people around here say, "Oh, he fell in the field well'." "Not a nice way to die," I said. "No, it's a terrible way to die," said Naoko, brushing a cluster of grass seed from her jacket. "The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing. You'd yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody would hear you, and you couldn't expect anyone to find you, and you'd have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it's dark and soggy, and high overhead there's this tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little by little, all by yourself." "Yuck, just thinking about it makes my flesh creep," I said. "Somebody should find the thing and build a wall around it." "But nobody can find it. So make sure you don't go off the path." "Don't worry, I won't." Naoko took her left hand from her pocket and squeezed my hand. "Don't you worry," she said. "You'll be OK. You could go running all around here in the middle of the night and you'd never fall into the well. And as long as I stick with you, I won't fall in, either." "Never?" "Never!" "How can you be so sure?" "I just know," she said, increasing her grip on my hand and walking along in silence. "I know these things. I'm always right. It's got nothing to do with logic: I just feel it. For example, when I'm really close to you like this, I'm not the least bit scared. Nothing dark or evil could ever tempt me." "Well, that's the answer," I said. "All you have to do is stay with me like this all the time." "Do you mean that?" "Of course." Naoko stopped short. So did I. She put her hands on my shoulders and peered into my eyes. Deep within her own pattern. Those beautiful eyes of hers were looking inside me for a long, long time. Then she stretched to her full height and touched her cheek to mine. It was a marvelous, warm gesture that stopped my heart for a moment. "Thank you." "My pleasure," I answered. "I'm so happy you said that. Really happy," she said with a sad smile. "But it's impossible." "Impossible? Why?" "It would be wrong. It would be terrible. It - " Naoko clamped her mouth shut and started walking again. I could tell that all kinds of thoughts were whirling around in her head, so rather than intrude on them I kept silent and walked by her side. "It would be wrong - wrong for you, wrong for me," she said after a long pause. "Wrong how?" I murmured. "Don't you see? It's just not possible for one person to watch over another person forever and ever. I mean, suppose we got married. You'd have to work during the day. Who's going to watch over me while you're away? Or if you go on a business trip, who's going to watch over me then? Can I be glued to you every minute of our lives? What kind of equality would there be in that? What kind of relationship would that be? Sooner or later you'd get sick of me. You'd wonder what you were doing with your life, why you were spending all your time babysitting this woman. I couldn't stand that. It wouldn't solve any of my problems." "But your problems are not going to continue for the rest of your life," I said, touching her back. "They'll end eventually. And when they do, we'll stop and think about how to go on from there. Maybe you will have to help me. We're not running our lives according to some account book. If you need me, use me. Don't you see? Why do you have to be so rigid? Relax, let down your guard. You're all tensed up so you always expect the worst. Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up." "How can you say that?" she asked in a voice drained of feeling. Naoko's voice alerted me to the possibility that I had said something I shouldn't have. "Tell me how you could say such a thing," she said, staring at the ground beneath her feet. "You're not telling me anything I don't know already. "Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.' What's the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back. I'd go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can't you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can't see that?" I said nothing. "I'm confused. Really confused. And it's a lot deeper than you think. Deeper... darker... colder. But tell me something. How could you have slept with me that time? How could you have done such a thing? Why didn't you just leave me alone?" Now we were walking through the frightful silence of a pine forest. The desiccated corpses of cicadas that had died at the end of summer littered the surface of the path, crunching beneath our shoes. As if searching for something we'd lost, Naoko and I continued slowly along the path. "I'm sorry," she said, taking my arm and shaking her head. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Try not to let what I said bother you. Really, I'm sorry. I was just angry at myself." "I suppose I don't really understand you yet," I said. "I'm not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you - better than anyone else in the world." We came to a stop and stood in the silent forest, listening. I tumbled pinecones and cicada shells with my toecap, then looked up at the patches of sky showing through the pine branches. Hands in pockets, Naoko stood there thinking, her eyes focused on nothing in particular. "Tell me something, Toru," she said. "Do you love me?" "You know I do." "Will you do me two favors?" "You can have up to three wishes, Madame." Naoko smiled and shook her head. "No, two will do. One is for you to realize how grateful I am that you came to see me here. I hope you'll understand how happy you've made me. I know it's going to save me if anything will. I may not show it, but it's true." "I'll come to see you again," I said. "And what is the other wish?" "I want you always to remember me. W ill you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?" "Always," I said. "I'll always remember." She walked on without speaking. The autumn light filtering through the branches danced over the shoulders of her jacket. A dog barked again, closer than before. Naoko climbed a small mound, walked out of the forest and hurried down a gentle slope. I followed two or three steps behind. "Come over here," I called towards her back. "The well might be around here somewhere." Naoko stopped and smiled and took my arm. We walked the rest of the way side by side. "Do you really promise never to forget me?" she asked in a near whisper. "I'll never forget you," I said. "I could never forget you." Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? Be that as it may, it's all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones. This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko. Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about her. But I couldn't produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start - the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me. Once upon a time, many years ago - just 20 years ago, in fact - I was living in a dormitory. I was 18 and a first-year student. I was new to Tokyo and new to living alone, and so my anxious parents found a private dorm for me to live in rather than the kind of single room that most students took. The dormitory provided meals and other facilities and would probably help their unworldly 18-year-old survive. Expenses were also a consideration. A dorm cost far less than a private room. As long as I had bedding and a lamp, there was no need to buy a lot of furnishings. For my part, I would have preferred to rent a flat and live in comfortable solitude, but knowing what my parents had to spend on enrolment fees and tuition at the private university I was attending, I was in no position to insist. And besides, I really didn't care where I lived. Located on a hill in the middle of the city with open views, the dormitory compound sat on a large quadrangle surrounded by a concrete wall. A huge, towering zelkova tree stood just inside the front gate. People said it was at least 150 years old. Standing at its base, you could look up and see nothing of the sky through its dense cover of green leaves. The paved path leading from the gate circumvented the tree and continued on long and straight across a broad quadrangle, two three- story concrete dorm buildings facing each other on either side of the path. They were large with lots of windows and gave the impression of being either flats that had been converted into jails or jails that had been converted into flats. However there was nothing dirty about them, nor did they feel dark. You could hear radios playing through open windows, all of which had the same cream-coloured curtains that the sun could not fade. Beyond the two dormitories, the path led up to the entrance of a two-story common building, the first floor of which contained a dining hall and bathrooms, the second consisting of an auditorium, meeting rooms, and even guest rooms, whose use I could never fathom. Next to the common building stood a third dormitory, also three storeys high. Broad green lawns filled the quadrangle, and circulating sprinklers caught the sunlight as they turned. Behind the common building there was a field used for baseball and football, and six tennis courts. The complex had everything you could want. There was just one problem with the place: its political smell. It was run by some kind of fishy foundation that centered on this extreme right-wing guy, and there was something strangely twisted - as far as I was concerned - about the way they ran the place. You could see it in the pamphlet they gave to new students and in the dorm rules. The proclaimed "founding spirit" of the dormitory was "to strive to nurture human resources of service to the nation through the ultimate in educational fundamentals", and many financial leaders who endorsed this "spirit" had contributed their private funds to the construction of the place. This was the public face of the project, though what lay behind it was extremely vague. Some said it was a tax dodge, others saw it as a publicity stunt for the contributors, and still others claimed that the construction of the dormitory was a cover for swindling the public out of a prime piece of real estate. One thing was certain, though: in the dorm complex there existed a privileged club composed of elite students from various universities. They formed "study groups" that met several times a month and included some of the founders. Any member of the club could be assured of a good job after graduation. I had no idea which - if any - of these theories was correct, but they all shared the assumption that there was "something fishy" about the place. In any case, I spent two years - from the spring of 1968 to the spring of 1970 - living in this "fishy" dormitory. Why I put up with it so long, I can't really say. In terms of everyday life, it made no practical difference to me whether the place was right wing or left wing or anything else. Each day began with the solemn raising of the flag. They played the national anthem, too, of course. You can't have one without the other. The flagpole stood in the very center of the compound, where it was visible from every window of all three dormitories. The Head of the east dormitory (my building) was in charge of the flag. He was a tall, eagle-eyed man in his late fifties or early sixties. His bristly hair was flecked with grey, and his sunburned neck bore a long scar. People whispered that he was a graduate of the wartime Nakano spy school, but no one knew for sure. Next to him stood a student who acted as his assistant. No one really knew this guy, either. He had the world's shortest crewcut and always wore a navy-blue student uniform. I didn't know his name or which room he lived in, never saw him in the dining hall or the bath. I'm not even sure he was a student, though you would think he must have been, given the uniform - which quickly became his nickname. In contrast to Sir Nakano, "Uniform" was short, pudgy and pasty-faced. This creepy couple would raise the banner of the Rising Sun every morning at six. When I first entered the dormitory, the sheer novelty of the event would often prompt me to get up early to observe this patriotic ritual. The two would appear in the quadrangle at almost the exact moment the radio beeped the six o'clock signal. Uniform was wearing his uniform, of course, with black leather shoes, and Nakano wore a short jacket and white trainers. Uniform held a ceremonial box of untreated paulownia wood, while Nakano carried a Sony tape recorder at his side. He placed this at the base of the flagpole, while Uniform opened the box to reveal a neatly folded banner. This he reverentially proffered to Nakano, who would clip it to the rope on the flagpole, revealing the bright red circle of the Rising Sun on a field of pure white. Then Uniform pressed the switch for the playing of the anthem. "May Our Lord's Reign..." And up the flag would climb. "Until pebbles turn to boulders..." It would reach halfway up the pole. "And be covered with moss." Now it was at the top. The two stood to attention, rigid, looking up at the flag, which was quite a sight on clear days when the wind was blowing. The lowering of the flag at dusk was carried out with the same ceremonial reverence, but in reverse. Down the banner would come and find its place in the box. The national flag did not fly at night. I didn't know why the flag had to be taken down at night. The nation continued to exist while it was dark, and plenty of people worked all night - railway construction crews and taxi drivers and bar hostesses and firemen and night watchmen: it seemed unfair to me that such people were denied the protection of the flag. Or maybe it didn't matter all that much and nobody really cared - aside from me. Not that I really cared, either. It was just something that happened to cross my mind. The rules for room assignments put first- and second-year students in doubles while third- and final-year students had single rooms. Double rooms were a little longer and narrower than nine-by-twelve, with an aluminium-framed window in the wall opposite the door and two desks by the window arranged so the inhabitants of the room could study back-to-back. To the left of the door stood a steel bunk bed. The furniture supplied was sturdy and simple and included a pair of lockers, a small coffee table, and some built-in shelves. Even the most well-disposed observer would have had trouble calling this setting poetic. The shelves of most rooms carried such items as transistor radios, hairdryers, electric carafes and cookers, instant coffee, tea bags, sugar cubes, and simple pots and bowls for preparing instant ramen. The walls bore pin-ups from girlie magazines or stolen porno movie posters. One guy had a photo of pigs mating, but this was a far- out exception to the usual naked women, girl pop singers or actresses. Bookshelves on the desks held textbooks, dictionaries and novels. The filth of these all-male rooms was horrifying. Mouldy mandarin skins clung to the bottoms of waste-paper baskets. Empty cans used for ashtrays held mounds of cigarette butts, and when these started to smoulder they'd be doused with coffee or beer and left to give off a sour stink. Blackish grime and bits of indefinable matter clung to all the bowls and dishes on the shelves, and the floors were littered with instant ramen wrappers and empty beer cans and discarded lids from one thing or another. It never occurred to anyone to sweep up and throw these things in the bin. Any wind that blew through would raise clouds of dust. Each room had its own horrendous smell, but the components of that smell were always the same: sweat, body odour and rubbish. Dirty clothes would pile up under the beds, and without anyone bothering to air the mattresses on a regular basis, these sweat- impregnated pads would give off odours beyond redemption. In retrospect, it seems amazing that these shitpiles gave rise to no killer epidemics. My room, on the other hand, was as sanitary as a morgue. The floor and window were spotless, the mattresses were aired each week, all pencils stood in the pencil holders, and even the curtains were washed once a month. My room-mate was a cleanliness freak. None of the others in the dorm believed me when I told them about the curtains. They didn't know that curtains could be washed. They believed, rather, that curtains were semi-permanent parts of the window. "There's something wrong with that guy," they'd say, labelling him a Nazi or a storm trooper. We didn't even have pin-ups. No, we had a photo of a canal in Amsterdam. I had put up a nude shot, but my room-mate had pulled it down. "Hey, Watanabe," he said, "I-I'm not too crazy about this kind of thing," and up went the canal photo instead. I wasn't especially attached to the nude, so I didn't protest. "What the hell's that?" was the universal reaction to the Amsterdam photo whenever any of the other guys came to my room. "Oh, Storm Trooper likes to wank looking at this," I said. I meant it as a joke, but they all took me seriously - so seriously that I began to believe it myself. Everybody sympathized with me for having Storm Trooper as a room- mate, but I really wasn't that upset about it. He left me alone as long as I kept my area clean, and in fact having him as my room-mate made things easier for me in many ways. He did all the cleaning, he took care of sunning the mattresses, he threw out the rubbish. He'd give a sniff and suggest a bath for me if I'd been too busy to wash for a few days. He'd even point out when it was time for me to go to the barber's or trim my nasal hair. The one thing that bothered me was the way he would spray clouds of insecticide if he noticed a single fly in the room, because then I had to take refuge in a neighbouring shitpile. Storm Trooper was studying geography at a national university. As he told me the first time we met, "I'm studying m-m-maps." "You like maps?" I asked. "Yup. When I graduate, I'm going to work for the Geographical Survey Institute and make m-m-maps." I was impressed by the variety of dreams and goals that life could offer. This was one of the very first new impressions I received when I came to Tokyo for the first time. The thought struck me that society needed a few people - just a few - who were interested in and even passionate about mapmaking. Odd, though, that someone who wanted to work for the government's Geographical Survey Institute should stutter every time he said the word "map". Storm Trooper often didn't stutter at all, except when he pronounced the word "map", for which it was a 100 per cent certainty. "W what are you studying?" he asked me. "Drama," I said. "Gonna put on plays?" "Nah, just read scripts and do research. Racine, lonesco, Shakespeare, stuff like that." He said he had heard of Shakespeare but not the others. I hardly knew anything about the others myself, I'd just seen their names in lecture handouts. "You like plays?" he asked. "Not especially." This confused him, and when he was confused, his stuttering got worse. I felt sorry I had done that to him. "I could have picked anything," I said. "Ethnology, Asian history. I just happened to pick drama, that's all," which was not the most convincing explanation I could have come up with. "I don't get it," he said, looking as if he really didn't get it. "I like m- m-maps, so I decided to come to Tokyo and get my parents to s-send me money so I could study m-m-maps. But not you, huh?" His approach made more sense than mine. I gave up trying to explain myself. Then we drew lots (matchsticks) to choose bunks. He got the upper bunk. Tall, with a crewcut and high cheekbones, he always wore the same outfit: white shirt, black trousers, black shoes, navy-blue jumper. To these he would add a uniform jacket and black briefcase when he went to his university: a typical right-wing student. Which is why everybody called him Storm Trooper. But in fact he was totally indifferent to politics. He wore a uniform because he didn't want to be bothered choosing clothes. What interested him were things like changes in the coastline or the completion of a new railway tunnel. Nothing else. He'd go on for hours once he got started on a subject like that, until you either ran away or fell asleep. He was up at six each morning with the strains of "May Our Lord's Reign". Which is to say that that ostentatious flag-raising ritual was not entirely useless. He'd get dressed, go to the bathroom and wash his face - for ever. I sometimes got the feeling he must be taking out each tooth and washing it, one at a time. Back in the room, he would snap the wrinkles out of his towel and lay it on the radiator to dry, then return his toothbrush and soap to the shelf. Finally he'd do radio callisthenics with the rest of the nation. I was used to reading late at night and sleeping until eight o'clock, so even when he started shuffling around the room and exercising, I remained unconscious - until the part where he started jumping. He took his jumping seriously and made the bed bounce every time he hit the floor. I stood it for three days because they had told us that communal life called for a certain degree of resignation, but by the morning of the fourth day, I couldn't take it any more. "Hey, can you do that on the roof or somewhere?" I said. "I can't sleep." "But it's already 6.30!" he said, open-mouthed. "Yeah, I know it's 6.30. I'm still supposed to be asleep. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but that's how it works for me." "Anyway, I can't do it on the roof. Somebody on the third floor would complain. Here, we're over a storeroom." "So go out on the quad. On the lawn." "That's no good, either. I don't have a transistor radio. I need to plug it in. And you can't do radio callisthenics without music." True, his radio was an old piece of junk without batteries. Mine was a transistor portable, but it was strictly FM, for music. "OK, let's compromise," I said. "Do your exercises but cut out the jumping part. It's so damned noisy. What do you say?" "J-jumping? What's that?" "Jumping is jumping. Bouncing up and down." "But there isn't any jumping." My head was starting to hurt. I was ready to give up, but I wanted to make my point. I got out of bed and started bouncing up and down and singing the opening melody of NHK's radio callisthenics. "I'm talking about this," I said. "Oh, that. I guess you're right. I never noticed." "See what I mean?" I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Just cut out that part. I can put up with the rest. Stop jumping and let me sleep." "But that's impossible," he said matter-of-factly. "I can't leave anything out. I've been doing the same thing every day for ten years, and once I start I do the whole routine unconsciously. If I left something out, I wouldn't be able to do any of it." There was nothing more for me to say. What could I have said? The quickest way to put a stop to this was to wait for him to leave the room and throw his goddamn radio out the goddamn window, but I knew if I did that all hell would break loose. Storm Trooper treasured everything he owned. He smiled when he saw me sitting on the bed at a loss for words, and tried to comfort me. "Hey, Watanabe, why don't you just get up and exercise with me?" And he went off to breakfast. Naoko chuckled when I told her the story of Storm Trooper and his radio callisthenics. I hadn't been trying to amuse her, but I ended up laughing myself. Though her smile vanished in an instant, I enjoyed seeing it for the first time in a long while. We had left the train at Yotsuya and were walking along the embankment by the station. It was a Sunday afternoon in the middle of May. The brief on-and-off showers of the morning had cleared up before noon, and a south wind had swept away the low-hanging clouds. The brilliant green leaves of the cherry trees stirred in the air, splashing sunlight in all directions. This was an early summer day. The people we passed carried their jumpers or jackets over their shoulders or in their arms. Everyone looked happy in the warm Sunday afternoon sun. The young men playing tennis in the courts beyond the embankment had stripped down to their shorts. Only where two nuns in winter habits sat talking on a bench did the summer light seem not to reach, though both wore looks of satisfaction as they enjoyed chatting in the sun. Fifteen minutes of walking and I was sweaty enough to take off my thick cotton shirt and go with a T-shirt. Naoko had rolled the sleeves of her light grey sweatshirt up to her elbows. It was nicely faded, obviously having been washed many times. I felt as if I had seen her in that shirt long before. This was just a feeling I had, not a clear memory. I didn't have that much to remember about Naoko at the time. "How do you like communal living?" she asked. "Is it fun to live with a lot of other people?" "I don't know, I've only been doing it a month or so. It's not that bad, I can stand it." She stopped at a fountain and took a sip, wiping her mouth with a white handkerchief she took from her trouser pocket. Then she bent over and carefully retied her laces. "Do you think I could do it?" "What? Living in a dorm?" "Uh-huh." "I suppose it's all a matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to - the rules, the idiots who think they're hot shit, the room-mates doing radio callisthenics at 6.30 in the morning. But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage." "I guess so," she said with a nod. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind. Then she looked straight into my eyes as if peering at some unusual object. Now I saw that her eyes were so deep and clear they made my heart thump. I realized that I had never had occasion to look into her eyes like this. It was the first time the two of us had ever gone walking together or talked at such length. "Are you thinking about living in a dorm or something?" I asked. "Uh-uh," she said. "I was just wondering what communal life would be like. And..." She seemed to be trying - and failing - to find exactly the right word or expression. Then she sighed and looked down. "Oh, I don't know. Never mind." That was the end of the conversation. She continued walking east, and I followed just behind. Almost a year had gone by since I had last seen Naoko, and in that time she had lost so much weight as to look like a different person. The plump cheeks that had been a special feature of hers were all but gone, and her neck had become delicate and slender. Not that she was bony now or unhealthy looking: there was something natural and serene about the way she had slimmed down, as if she had been hiding in some long, narrow space until she herself had become long and narrow. And a lot prettier than I remembered. I wanted to tell her that, but couldn't find a good way to put it. We had not planned to meet but had run into each other on the Chuo commuter line. She had decided to see a film by herself, and I was headed for the bookshops in Kanda - nothing urgent in either case. She had suggested that we leave the train, which we happened to do in Yotsuya, where the green embankment makes for a nice place to walk by the old castle moat. Alone together, we had nothing in particular to talk about, and I wasn't quite sure why Naoko had suggested we get off the train. We had never really had much to say to each other. Naoko started walking the minute we hit the street, and I hurried after her, keeping a few paces behind. I could have closed the distance between us, but something held me back. I walked with my eyes on her shoulders and her straight black hair. She wore a big, brown hairslide, and when she turned her head I caught a glimpse of a small, white ear. Now and then she would look back and say something. Sometimes it would be a remark I might have responded to, and some- times it would be something to which I had no idea how to reply. Other times, I simply couldn't hear what she was saying. She didn't seem to care one way or another. Once she had finished saying whatever she wanted to say, she'd face front again and keep on walking. Oh, well, I told myself, it was a nice day for a stroll. This was no mere stroll for Naoko, though, judging from that walk. She turned right at Lidabashi, came out at the moat, crossed the intersection at Jinbocho, climbed the hill at Ochanomizu and came out at Hongo. From there she followed the tram tracks to Komagome. It was a challenging route. By the time we reached Komagome, the sun was sinking and the day had become a soft spring evening. "Where are we?" asked Naoko, as if noticing our surroundings for the first time. "Komagome," I said. "Didn't you know? We made this big arc." "Why did we come here?" "You brought us here. I was just following you." We went to a shop by the station for a bowl of noodles. Thirsty, I had a whole beer to myself. Neither of us said a word from the time we gave our order to the time we finished eating. I was exhausted from all that walking, and she just sat there with her hands on the table, mulling something over again. All the leisure spots were crowded on this warm Sunday, they were saying on the TV news. And we just walked from Yotsuya to Komagome, I said to myself. "Well, you're in good shape," I said when I had finished my noodles. "Surprised?" "Yeah." "I was a long distance runner at school, I'll have you know. I used to do the 10,000 metres. And my father took me mountain climbing on Sundays ever since I can remember. You know our house - right there, next to the mountain. I've always had strong legs." "It doesn't show," I said. "I know," she answered. "Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl. But you can't judge a book by its cover." To which she added a momentary smile. "And that goes for me, too," I said. "I'm worn out." "Oh, I'm sorry, I've been dragging you around all day." "Still, I'm glad we had a chance to talk. We've never done that before, just the two of us," I said, trying without success to recall what we had talked about. She was playing with the ashtray on the table. "I wonder..." she began, "... if you wouldn't mind... I mean, if it really wouldn't be any bother to you... Do you think we could see each other again? I know I don't have any right to be asking you this." "Any right? What do you mean by that?" She blushed. My reaction to her request might have been a little too strong. "I don't know... I can't really explain it," she said, tugging the sleeves of her sweatshirt up over the elbows and down again. The soft hair on her arms shone a lovely golden colour in the lights of the shop. "I didn't mean to say "right' exactly. I was looking for another way to put it." Elbows on the table, she stared at the calendar on the wall, almost as though she were hoping to find the proper expression there. Failing, she sighed and closed her eyes and played with her hairslide. "Never mind," I said. "I think I know what you're getting at. I'm not sure how to put it, either." "I can never say what I want to say," continued Naoko. "It's been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch her." She raised her face and looked into my eyes. "Does this make any sense to you?" "Everybody feels like that to some extent," I said. "They're trying to express themselves and it bothers t can't get it right." Naoko looked disappointed with my answer. "No, that's not it either," she said without further explanation "Anyway, I'd be glad to see you again," I said. "I'm always free on Sundays, and walking would be good for me." We boarded the Yamanote Line, and Naoko transferred to the Chuo Line at Shinjuku. She was living in a tiny flat way out in the western suburb of Kokubunji. "Tell me," she said as we parted. "Has anything changed about the way I talk?" "I think so," I said, "but I'm not sure what. Tell you the truth, I know I saw you a lot back then, but I don't remember talking to you much." "That's true," she said. "Anyway, can I call you on Saturday?" "Sure. I'll be expecting to hear from you." I first met Naoko when I was in the sixth-form at school. She was also in the sixth-form at a posh girls' school run by one of the Christian missions. The school was so refined you were considered unrefined if you studied too much. Naoko was the girlfriend of my best (and only) friend, Kizuki. The two of them had been close almost from birth, their houses not 200 yards apart. As with most couples who have been together since childhood, there was a casual openness about the relationship of Kizuki and Naoko and little sense that they wanted to be alone together. They were always visiting each other's homes and eating or playing mah-jong with each other's families. I double-dated with them any number of times. Naoko would bring a school friend for me and the four of us would go to the zoo or the pool or the cinema. The girls she brought were always pretty, but a little too refined for my taste. I got along better with the somewhat cruder girls from my own State school who were easier to talk to. I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn't understand me, either. After a while, Kizuki gave up trying to arrange dates for me, and instead the three of us would do things together. Kizuki and Naoko and I: odd, but that was the most comfortable combination. Introducing a fourth person into the mix would always make things a little awkward. We were like a TV talk show, with me the guest, Kizuki the talented host, and Naoko his assistant. He was good at occupying that central position. True, he had a sarcastic side that often struck people as arrogant, but in fact he was a considerate and fair- minded person. He would distribute his remarks and jokes fairly to Naoko and to me, taking care to see that neither of us felt left out. If one or the other stayed quiet too long, he would steer his conversation in that direction and get the person to talk. It probably looked harder than it was: he knew how to monitor and adjust the air around him on a second-by-second basis. In addition, he had a rare talent for finding the interesting parts of someone's generally uninteresting comments so that, while speaking to him, you felt you were an exceptionally interesting person with an exceptionally interesting life. And yet he was not the least bit sociable. I was his only real friend at school. I could never understand why such a smart and capable talker did not turn his talents to the broader world around him but remained satisfied to concentrate on our little trio. Nor could I understand why he picked me to be his friend. I was just an ordinary kid who liked to read books and listen to music and didn't stand out in any way that would prompt someone like Kizuki to pay attention to me. We hit it off straight away, though. His father was a dentist, known for his professional skill and his high fees. "Want to double-date Sunday?" he asked me just after we met. "My girlfriend goes to a girls' school, and she'll bring along a cute one for you." "Sure," I said, and that was how I met Naoko. The three of us spent a lot of time together, but whenever Kizuki left the room, Naoko and I had trouble talking to each other. We never knew what to talk about. And in fact there was no topic of conversation that we had in common. Instead of talking, we'd drink water or toy with something on the table and wait for Kizuki to come back and start up the conversation again. Naoko was not particularly talkative, and I was more of a listener than a talker, so I felt uncomfortable when I was left alone with her. Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about. Naoko and I saw each other only once after Kizuki's funeral. Two weeks after the event, we met at a cafo take care of some minor matter, and when that was finished we had nothing more to say. I tried raising several different topics, but none of them led anywhere. And when Naoko did talk, there was an edge to her voice. She seemed angry with me, but I had no idea why. We never saw each other again until that day a year later we happened to meet on the Chuo Line in Tokyo. Naoko might have been angry with me because I, not she, had been the last one to see Kizuki. That may not be the best way to put it, but I more or less understood how she felt. I would have swapped places with her if I could have, but finally, what had happened had happened, and there was nothing I could do about it. It had been a nice afternoon in May. After lunch, Kizuki suggested we skip classes and go play pool or something. I had no special interest in my afternoon classes, so together we left school, ambled down the hill to a pool hall on the harbour, and played four games. When I won the first, easy-going game, he became serious and won the next three. This meant I paid, according to our custom. Kizuki didn't make a single joke as we played, which was most unusual. We smoked afterwards. "Why so serious?" I asked. "I didn't want to lose today," said Kizuki with a satisfied smile. He died that night in his garage. He led a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe of his N-360 to a window, taped over the gap in the window, and revved the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. His parents had been out visiting a sick relative, and when they opened the garage to put their car away, he was already dead. His radio was going, and a petrol station receipt was tucked under the windscreen wiper. Kizuki had left no suicide note, and had no motive that anyone could think of. Because I had been the last one to see him, I was called in for questioning by the police. I told the investigating officer that Kizuki had given no indication of what he was about to do, that he had been exactly the same as always. The policeman had obviously formed a poor impression of both Kizuki and me, as if it was perfectly natural for the kind of person who would skip classes and play pool to commit suicide. A small article in the paper brought the affair to a close. Kizuki's parents got rid of his red N-360. For a time, a white flower marked his school desk. In the ten months between Kizuki's death and my exams, I was unable to find a place for myself in the world around me. I started sleeping with one of the girls at school, but that didn't last six months. Nothing about her really got to me. I applied to a private university in Tokyo, the kind of place with an entrance exam for which I wouldn't have to study much, and I passed without exhilaration. The girl asked me not to go to Tokyo - "It's 500 miles from here!" she pleaded - but I had to get away from Kobe at any cost. I wanted to begin a new life where I didn't know a soul. "You don't give a damn about me any more, now that you've slept with me," she said, crying. "That's not true," I insisted. "I just need to get away from this town." But she was not prepared to understand me. And so we parted. Thinking about all the things that made her so much nicer than the other girls at home, I sat on the bullet train to Tokyo feeling terrible about what I'd done, but there was no way to undo it. I would try to forget her. There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green baize pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium chimneys, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It's a clichranslated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust. Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there. The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well. I lived through the following spring, at 18, with that knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching the truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death. Naoko called me the following Saturday, and that Sunday we had a date. I suppose I can call it a date. I can't think of a better word for it. As before, we walked the streets. We stopped somewhere for coffee, walked some more, had dinner in the evening, and said goodbye. Again, she talked only in snatches, but this didn't seem to bother her, and I made no special effort to keep the conversation going. We talked about whatever came to mind - our daily routines, our colleges; each a little fragment that led nowhere. We said nothing at all about the past. And mainly, we walked - and walked, and walked. Fortunately, Tokyo is such a big city we could never have covered it all. We kept on walking like this almost every weekend. She would lead, and I would follow close behind. Naoko had a variety of hairslides and always wore them with her right ear exposed. I remember her most clearly this way, from the back. She would toy with her hairslide whenever she felt embarrassed by something. And she was always dabbing at her mouth with a handkerchief. She did this whenever she had something to say. The more I observed these habits of hers, the more I came to like her. Naoko went to a girls' college on the rural western edge of Tokyo, a nice little place famous for its teaching of English. Nearby was a narrow irrigation canal with clean, clear water, and Naoko and I would often walk along its banks. Sometimes she would invite me up to her flat and cook for me. It never seemed to concern her that the two of us were in such close quarters together. The room was small and neat and so lacking in frills that only the stockings drying in the corner by the window gave any hint that a girl lived there. She led a spare, simple life with hardly any friends. No one who had known her at school could have imagined her like this. Back then, she had dressed with real flair and surrounded herself with a million friends. When I saw her room, I realized that, like me, she had wanted to go away to college and begin a new life far from anyone she knew. "Know why I chose this place?" she said with a smile. "Because nobody from home was coming here. We were all supposed to go somewhere more chic. You know what I mean?" My relationship with Naoko was not without its progress, though. Little by little, she grew more accustomed to me, and I to her. When the summer holidays ended and a new term started, Naoko began walking next to me as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do. She saw me as a friend now, I concluded, and walking side by side with such a beautiful girl was by no means painful for me. We kept walking all over Tokyo in the same meandering way, climbing hills, crossing rivers and railway lines, just walking and walking with no destination in mind. We forged straight ahead, as if our walking were a religious ritual meant to heal our wounded spirits. If it rained, we used umbrellas, but in any case we walked. Then came autumn, and the dormitory grounds were buried in zelkova leaves. The fragrance of a new season arrived when I put on my first pullover. Having worn out one pair of shoes, I bought some new suede ones. I can't seem to recall what we talked about then. Nothing special, I expect. We continued to avoid any mention of the past and rarely spoke about Kizuki. We could face each other over coffee cups in total silence. Naoko liked to hear me tell stories about Storm Trooper. Once he had a date with a fellow student (a girl in geography, of course) but came back in the early evening looking glum. "Tell me, W W -Watanabe, what do you talk about with g -g-girls?" I don't remember how I answered him, but he had picked the wrong person to ask. In July, somebody in the dorm had taken down Storm Trooper's Amsterdam canal scene and put up a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge instead. He told me he wanted to know if Storm Trooper could masturbate to the Golden Gate Bridge. "He loved it," I reported later, which prompted someone else to put up a picture of an iceberg. Each time the photo changed in his absence, Storm Trooper became upset. "Who-who-who the hell is doing this?" he asked. "I wonder," I said. "But what's the difference? They're all nice pictures. You should be grateful." "Yeah, I s'pose so, but it's weird." My stories of Storm Trooper always made Naoko laugh. Not many things succeeded in doing that, so I talked about him often, though I was not exactly proud of myself for using him this way. He just happened to be the youngest son in a not-too-wealthy family who had grown up a little too serious for his own good. Making maps was the one small dream of his one small life. Who had the right to make fun of him for that? By then, however, Storm-Trooper jokes had become an indispensable source of dormitory talk, and there was no way for me to undo what I had done. Besides, the sight of Naoko's smiling face had become my own special source of pleasure. I went on supplying everyone with new stories. Naoko asked me one time - just once - if I had a girl I liked. I told her about the one I had left behind in Kobe. "She was nice," I said, "I enjoyed sleeping with her, and I miss her every now and then, but finally, she didn't move me. I don't know, sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody." "Have you ever been in love?" Naoko asked. "Never," I said. She didn't ask me more than that. When autumn ended and cold winds began tearing through the city, Naoko would often walk pressed against my arm. I could sense her breathing through the thick cloth of her duffel coat. She would entwine her arm with mine, or cram her hand in my pocket, or, when it was really cold, cling tightly to my arm, shivering. None of this had any special meaning. I just kept walking with my hands shoved in my pockets. Our rubber-soled shoes made hardly any sound on the pavement, except for the dry crackling when we trod on the broad, withered sycamore leaves. I felt sorry for Naoko whenever I heard that sound. My arm was not the one she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else. I felt almost guilty being me. As the winter deepened, the transparent clarity of Naoko's eyes seemed to increase. It was a clarity that had nowhere to go. Sometimes Naoko would lock her eyes on to mine for no apparent reason. She seemed to be searching for something, and this would give me a strange, lonely, helpless sort of feeling. I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words. Instead, she would fiddle with her hairslide, dab at the corners of her mouth with a handkerchief, or look into my eyes in that meaningless way. I wanted to hold her tight when she did these things, but I would hesitate and hold back. I was afraid I might hurt her. And so the two of us kept walking the streets of Tokyo, Naoko searching for words in space. The guys in the dorm would always tease me when I got a call from Naoko or went out on a Sunday morning. They assumed, naturally enough, that I had found a girlfriend. There was no way to explain the truth to them, and no need to explain it, so I let them think what they wanted to. I had to face a barrage of stupid questions in the evening - what position had we used? What was she like down there? What colour underwear had she been wearing that day? I gave them the answers they wanted. And so I went from 18 to 19. Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Every Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend's girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do. For my courses I would read Claudel and Racine and Eisenstein, but they meant almost nothing to me. I made no friends at the lectures, and hardly knew anyone in the dorm. The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be. I tried to talk about this feeling with Naoko. She, at least, would be able to understand what I was feeling with some degree of precision, I thought. But I could never find the words to express myself. Strange, I seemed to have caught her word-searching sickness. On Saturday nights I would sit by the phone in the lobby, waiting for Naoko to call. Most of the others were out, so the lobby was usually deserted. I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing. I read a lot, but not a lot of different books: I like to read my favourites again and again. Back then it was Truman Capote, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, but I didn't see anyone else in my lectures or the dorm reading writers like that. They liked Kazumi Takahashi, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, or contemporary French novelists, which was another reason I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy. At 18 my favourite book was John Updike's The Centaur, but after I had read it a number of times, it began to lose some of its initial lustre and yielded first place to The Great Gatsby. Gatsby stayed in first place for a long time after that. I would pull it off the shelf when the mood hit me and read a section at random. It never once disappointed me. There wasn't a boring page in the whole book. I wanted to tell people what a wonderful novel it was, but no one around me had read The Great Gatsby or was likely to. Urging others to read F Scott Fitzgerald, although not a reactionary act, was not something one could do in 1968. When I did finally meet the one person in my world who had read Gatsby, he and I became friends because of it. His name was Nagasawa. He was two years older than me, and because he was doing legal studies at the prestigious Tokyo University, he was on the fast track to national leadership. We lived in the same dorm and knew each other only by sight, until one day when I was reading Gatsby in a sunny spot in the dining hall. He sat down next to me and asked what I was reading. When I told him, he asked if I was enjoying it. "This is my third time," I said, "and every time I find something new that I like even more than the last." "This man says he has read The Great Gatsby three times," he said as if to himself. "Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine." And so we became friends. This happened in October. The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of weird people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short." "What kind of authors do you like?" I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior. "Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens," he answered without hesitation. "Not exactly fashionable." "That's why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven't you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in this dorm. The other guys are crap." This took me off guard. "How can you say that?" "'Cause it's true. I know. I can see it. It's like we have marks on our foreheads. And besides, we've both read The Great Gatsby." I did some quick calculating. "But Fitzgerald's only been dead 28 years," I said. "So what? Two years? Fitzgerald's advanced." No one else in the dorm knew that Nagasawa was a secret reader of classic novels, nor would it have mattered if they had. Nagasawa was known for being smart. He breezed into Tokyo University, he got good marks, he would take the Civil Service Exam, join the Foreign Ministry, and become a diplomat. He came from a wealthy family. His father owned a big hospital in Nagoya, and his brother had also graduated from Tokyo, gone on to medical school, and would one day inherit the hospital. Nagasawa always had plenty of money in h is pocket, and he carried himself with real dignity. People treated him with respect, even the dorm Head. When he asked someone to do something, the person would do it without protest. There was no choice in the matter. Nagasawa had a certain inborn quality that drew people to him and made them follow him. He knew how to stand at the head of the pack, to assess the situation, to give precise and tactful instructions that others would obey. Above his head hung an aura that revealed his powers like an angel's halo, the mere sight of which would inspire awe in people for this superior being. Which is why it shocked everyone that Nagasawa chose me, a person with no distinctive qualities, to be his special friend. People I hardly knew treated me with a certain respect because of it, but what they did not seem to realize was that the reason for my having been chosen was a simple one, namely that I treated Nagasawa with none of the adulation he received from other people. I had a definite interest in the strange, complex aspects of his nature, but none of those other things - his good marks, his aura, his looks - impressed me. This must have been something new for him. There were sides to Nagasawa's personality that conflicted in the extreme. Even I would be moved by his kindness at times, but he could just as well be malicious and cruel. He was both a spirit of amazing loftiness and an irredeemable man of the gutter. He could charge forward, the optimistic leader, even as his heart writhed in a swamp of loneliness. I saw these paradoxical qualities of his from the start, and I could never understand why they weren't just as obvious to everyone else. He lived in his own special hell. Still, I think I always managed to view him in the most favourable light. His greatest virtue was his honesty. Not only would he never lie, he would always acknowledge his shortcomings. He never tried to hide things that might embarrass him. And where I was concerned, he was unfailingly kind and supportive. Had he not been, my life in the dorm would have been far more unpleasant than it was. Still, I never once opened my heart to him, and in that sense my relationship with Nagasawa stood in stark contrast to me and Kizuki. The first time I saw Nagasawa drunk and tormenting a girl, I promised myself never, under any circumstances, to open myself up to him. There were several "Nagasawa Legends" that circulated throughout the dorm. According to one, he supposedly once ate three slugs. Another gave him a huge penis and had him sleeping with more than 100 girls. The slug story was true. He told me so himself. "Three big mothers," he said. "Swallowed 'em whole." "What the hell for?" "Well, it happened the first year I came to live here," he said. "There was some shit between the first-years and the third-years. Started in April and finally came to a head in September. As first-year representative I went to work things out with the third-years. Real right-wing arseholes. They had these wooden kendo swords, and "working things out' was probably the last thing they wanted to do. So I said, 'All right, let's put an end to this. Do what you want to me, but leave the other guys alone.' So they said, "OK, let's see you swallow a couple of slugs.' "Fine,' I said, "Let's have 'em.' The bastards went out and got three huge slugs. And I swallowed 'em." "What was it like?" "What was it like?' You have to swallow one yourself. The way it slides down your throat and into your stomach... it's cold, and it leaves this disgusting aftertaste... yuck, I get chills just thinking about it. I wanted to puke but I fought it. I mean, if I had puked 'em up, I would have had to swallow 'em all over again. So I kept 'em down. All three of 'em." "Then what happened?" "I went back to my room and drank a bucket of salt water. What else could I do?" "Yeah, I guess so." "But after that, nobody could say a thing to me. Not even the third-years. I'm the only guy in this place who can swallow three slugs." "I bet you are." Finding out about his penis size was easy enough. I just went to the dorm's communal shower with him. He had a big one, all right. But 100 girls was probably an exaggeration. "Maybe 75," he said. "I can't remember them all, but I'm sure it's at least 70." When I told him I had slept with only one, he said, "Oh, we can fix that, easy. Come with me next time. I'll get you one easy as that." I didn't believe him, but he turned out to be right. It was easy. Almost too easy, with all the excitement of flat beer. We went to some kind of bar in Shibuya or Shinjuku (he had his favourites), found a pair of girls (the world was full of pairs of girls), talked to them, drank, went to a hotel, and had sex with them. He was a great talker. Not that he had anything great to say, but girls would get carried away listening to him, they'd drink too much and end up sleeping with him. I guess they enjoyed being with somebody so nice and handsome and clever. And the most amazing thing was that, just because I was with him, I seemed to become equally fascinating to them. Nagasawa would urge me to talk, and girls would respond to me with the same smiles of admiration they offered him. He worked his magic, a real talent he had that impressed me every time. Compared with Nagasawa, Kizuki's conversational gifts were child's play. This was a completely different level of accomplishment. As much as I found myself caught up in Nagasawa's power, though, I still missed Kizuki. I felt a new admiration for his sincerity. Whatever talents he had he would share with Naoko and me alone, while Nagasawa was bent on disseminating his considerable gifts to all around him. Not that he was dying to sleep with the girls he found: it was just a game to him. I was not too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn't know. It was an easy way to take care of my sex drive of course, and I did enjoy all the holding and touching, but I hated the morning after. I'd wake up and find this strange girl sleeping next to me, and the room would reek of alcohol, and the bed and the lighting and the curtains had that special "love hotel" garishness, and my head would be in a hungover fog. Then the girl would wake up and start groping around for her knickers and while she was putting on her stockings she'd say something like, "I hope you used one last night. It's the worst day of the month for me." Then she'd sit in front of a mirror and start grumbling about her aching head or her uncooperative make-up while she redid her lipstick or attached her false eyelashes. I would have preferred not to spend the whole night with them, but you can't worry about a midnight curfew while you're seducing women (which runs counter to the laws of physics anyway), so I'd go out with an overnight pass. This meant I had to stay put until morning and go back to the dorm filled with self- loathing and disillusionment, sunlight stabbing my eyes, mouth coated with sand, head belonging to someone else. When I had slept with three or four girls this way, I asked Nagasawa, "After you've done this 70 times, doesn't it begin to seem kind of pointless?" "That proves you're a decent human being," he said. "Congratulations. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from sleeping with one strange woman after another. It just tires you out and makes you disgusted with yourself. It's the same for me." "So why the hell do you keep it up?" "Hard to say. Hey, you know that thing Dostoevsky wrote on gambling? It's like that. When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up. See what I mean?" "Sort of." "Look. The sun goes down. The girls come out and drink. They wander around, looking for something. I can give them that something. It's the easiest thing in the world, like drinking water from a tap. Before you know it, I've got 'em down. It's what they expect. That's what I mean by possibility. It's all around you. How can you ignore it? You have a certain ability and the opportunity to use it: can you keep your mouth shut and let it pass?" "I don't know, I've never been in a situation like that," I said with a smile. "I can't imagine what it's like." "Count your blessings," Nagasawa said. His womanizing was the reason Nagasawa lived in a dorm despite his affluent background. Worried that Nagasawa would do nothing else if allowed to live alone in Tokyo, his father had compelled him to live all four years at university in the dormitory. Not that it mattered much to Nagasawa. He was not going to let a few rules bother him. Whenever he felt like it, he would get an overnight permission and go girl-hunting or spend the night at his girlfriend's flat. These permissions were not easy to get, but for him they were like free passes - and for me, too, as long as he did the asking. Nagasawa did have a steady girlfriend, one he'd been going out with since his first year. Her name was Hatsumi, and she was the same age as Nagasawa. I had met her a few times and found her to be very nice. She didn't have the kind of looks that immediately attracted attention, and in fact she was so ordinary that when I first met her I had to wonder why Nagasawa couldn't do better, but anyone who talked to her took an immediate liking to her. Quiet, intelligent, funny, caring, she always dressed with immaculate good taste. I liked her a lot and knew that if I could have a girlfriend like Hatsumi, I wouldn't be sleeping around with a bunch of easy marks. She liked me, too, and tried hard to fix me up with a first-year in her club so we could double-date, but I would make up excuses to keep from repeating past mistakes. Hatsumi went to the absolute top girls' college in the country, and there was no way I was going to be able to talk to one of those super-rich princesses. Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love, but she never made demands. "I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi," Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him. That winter I found a part-time job in a little record shop in Shinjuku. It didn't pay much, but the work was easy - just watching the place three nights a week - and they let me buy records cheap. For Christmas I bought Naoko a Henry Mancini album with a track of her favourite "Dear Heart". I wrapped it myself and added a bright red ribbon. She gave me a pair of woollen gloves she had knitted. The thumbs were a little short, but they did keep my hands warm. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, blushing, "What a bad job!" "Don't worry, they fit fine," I said, holding my gloved hands out to her. "Well, at least you won't have to shove your hands in your pockets, I guess." Naoko didn't go home to Kobe for the winter break. I stayed in Tokyo, too, working in the record shop right up to the end of the year. I didn't have anything especially fun to do in Kobe or anyone I wanted to see. The dorm's dining hall was closed for the holiday, so I went to Naoko's flat for meals. On New Year's Eve we had rice cakes and soup like everybody else. A lot happened in late January and February that year, 1969. At the end of January, Storm Trooper went to bed with a raging fever. Which meant I had to stand up Naoko that day. I had gone to a lot of trouble to get my hands on some free tickets for a concert. She had been especially eager to go because the orchestra was performing one of her favourites: Brahms' Fourth Symphony. But with Storm Trooper tossing around in bed on the verge of what looked like an agonizing death, I couldn't just leave him, and I couldn't find anyone stupid enough to nurse him in my place. I bought some ice and used several layers of plastic bags to hold it on his forehead, wiped his sweating brow with cold towels, took his temperature every hour, and even changed his vest for him. The fever stayed high for a day, but the following morning he jumped out of bed and started exercising as though nothing had happened. His t emperature was completely normal. It was hard to believe he was a human being. "Weird," said Storm Trooper. "I've never run a fever in my life." It was almost as if he were blaming me. This made me mad. "But you did have a fever," I insisted, showing him the two wasted tickets. "Good thing they were free," he said. I wanted to grab his radio and throw it out of the window, but instead I went back to bed with a headache. It snowed several times in February. Near the end of the month I got into a stupid fight with one of the third-years on my floor and punched him. He hit his head against the concrete wall, but he wasn't badly injured, and Nagasawa straightened things out for me. Still, I was called into the dorm Head's office and given a warning, after which I grew increasingly uncomfortable living in the dormitory. The academic year ended in March, but I came up a few credits short. My exam results were mediocre - mostly "C"s and "D"s with a few "B"s. Naoko had all the grades she needed to begin the spring term of her second year. We had completed one full cycle of the seasons. Halfway through April Naoko turned 20. She was seven months older than I was, my own birthday being in November. There was something strange about her becoming 20. I. felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between 18 and 19. After 18 would come 19, and after 19, 18, of course. But she turned 20. And in the autumn, I would do the same. Only the dead stay 17 for ever. It rained on her birthday. After lectures I bought a cake nearby and took the tram to her flat. "We ought to have a celebration," I said. I probably would have wanted the same thing if our positions had been reversed. It must be hard to pass your twentieth birthday alone. The tram had been packed and had pitched so wildly that by the time I arrived at Naoko's room the cake was looking more like the Roman Colosseum than anything else. Still, once I had managed to stand up the 20 candles I had brought along, light them, close the curtains and turn out the lights, we had the makings of a birthday party. Naoko opened a bottle of wine. We drank, had some cake, and enjoyed a simple dinner. "I don't know, it's stupid being 20," she said. "I'm just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody's pushing me from behind." "I've got seven months to get ready," I said with a laugh. "You're so lucky! Still 19!" said Naoko with a hint of envy. While we ate I told her about Storm Trooper's new jumper. Until then he had had only one, a navy-blue pullover, so two was a big move for him. The jumper itself was a nice one, red and black with a knitted deer motif, but on him it made everybody laugh. He couldn't work out what was going on. "W what's so funny, Watanabe?" he asked, sitting next to me in the dining hall. "Is something stuck to my forehead?" "Nothing," I said, trying to keep a straight face. "There's nothing funny. Nice jumper." "Thanks," he said, beaming. Naoko loved the story. "I have to meet him," she said. "Just once." "No way," I said. "You'd laugh in his face." "You think so?" "I'd bet on it. I see him every day, and still I can't help laughing sometimes." We cleared the table and sat on the floor, listening to music and drinking the rest of the wine. She drank two glasses in the time it took me to finish one. Naoko was unusually talkative that night. She told me about her childhood, her school, her family. Each episode was a long one, executed with the painstaking detail of a miniature. I was amazed at the power of her memory, but as I sat listening it began to dawn on me that there was something wrong with the way she was telling these stories: something strange, warped even. Each tale had its own internal logic, but the link from one to the next was odd. Before you knew it, story A had turned into story B, which had been contained in A, and then came C from something in B, with no end in sight. I found things to say in response at first, but after a while I stopped trying. I put on a record, and when it ended I lifted the needle and put on another. After the last record I went back to the first. She only had six. The cycle started with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and ended with Bill Evans' Waltz for Debbie. Rain fell past the window. Time moved slowly. Naoko went on talking by herself. It eventually dawned on me what was wrong: Naoko was taking great care as she spoke not to touch on certain things. One of those things was Kizuki, of course, but there was more than Kizuki. And though she had certain subjects she w as determined to avoid, she went on endlessly and in incredible detail about the most trivial, inane things. I had never heard her speak with such intensity before, and so I did not interrupt her. Once the clock struck eleven, though, I began to feel nervous. She had been talking non-stop for more than four hours. I had to worry about the last train, and my midnight curfew. I saw my chance and cut in. "Time for the troops to go home," I said, looking at my watch. "Last train's coming." My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning. She clamped her mouth shut for a split second, then went on with her story. I gave up and, shifting to a more comfortable position, drank what was left of the second bottle of wine. I thought I had better let her talk herself out. The curfew and the last train would have to take care of themselves. She did not go on for long, though. Before I knew it, she had stopped talking. The ragged end of the last word she spoke seemed to float in the air, where it had been torn off. She had not actually finished what she was saying. Her words had simply evaporated. She had been trying to go on, but had come up against nothing. Something was gone now, and I was probably the one who had destroyed it. My words might have finally reached her, taken their time to be understood, and obliterated whatever energy it was that had kept her talking so long. Lips slightly parted, she turned her half focused eyes on mine. She looked like some kind of machine that had been humming along until someone pulled the plug. Her eyes appeared clouded, as if covered by some thin, translucent membrane. "Sorry to interrupt," I said, "but it's getting late, and..." One big tear spilled from her eye, ran down her cheek and splattered onto a record jacket. Once that first tear broke free, the rest followed in an unbroken stream. Naoko bent forwards on all fours on the floor and, pressing her palms to the mat, began to cry with the force of a person vomiting. Never in my life had I seen anyone cry with such intensity. I reached out and placed a hand on her trembling shoulder. Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound. My shirt became damp - then soaked - with her tears and hot breath. Soon her fingers began to move across my back as if in search of something, some important thing that had always been there. Supporting her weight with my left arm, I used my right hand to caress her soft, straight hair. And I waited. In that position, I waited for Naoko to stop crying. And I went on waiting. But Naoko's crying never stopped. I slept with Naoko that night. Was it the right thing to do? I can't tell. Even now, almost 20 years later, I can't be sure. I suppose I'll never know. But at the time, it was all I could do. She was in a heightened state of tension and confusion, and she made it clear she wanted me to give her release. I turned the lights down and began, one piece at a time, with the gentlest touch I could manage, to remove her clothes. Then I undressed. It was warm enough, that rainy April night, for us to cling to each other's nakedness without a sense of chill. We explored each other's bodies in the darkness without words. I kissed her and held her soft breasts in my hands. She clutched at my erection. Her opening was warm and wet and asking for me. And yet, when I went inside her, Naoko tensed with pain. Was this her first time? I asked, and she nodded. Now it was my turn to be confused. I had assumed that Naoko had been sleeping with Kizuki all that time. I went in as far as I could and stayed that way for a long time, holding Naoko, without moving. And then, as she began to seem calmer, I allowed myself to move inside her, taking a long time to come to climax, with slow, gentle movements. Her arms tightened around me at the end, when at last she broke her silence. Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard. When everything had ended, I asked Naoko why she had never slept with Kizuki. This was a mistake. No sooner had I asked the question than she took her arms from me and started crying soundlessly again. I pulled her bedding from the closet, spread it on the mat floor, and put her in beneath the covers. Smoking, I watched the endless April rain beyond the window. The rain had stopped when morning came. Naoko was sleeping with her back to me. Or maybe she hadn't slept at all. Whether she was awake or asleep, all words had left her lips, and her body now seemed stiff, almost frozen. I tried several times to talk to her, but she would not answer or move. I stared for a long time at her naked shoulder, but in the end I lost all hope of eliciting a response and decided to get up. The floor was still littered with record jackets, glasses, wine bottles and the ashtray I had been using. Half the caved-in birthday cake remained on the table. It was as if time had come to a halt. I picked up the things off the floor and drank two glasses of water at the sink. On Naoko's desk lay a dictionary and a French verb chart. On the wall above the desk hung a calendar, one without an illustration or photo of any kind, just the numbers of the days of the month. There were no memos or marks written next to any of the dates. I picked up my clothes and dressed. The chest of my shirt was still damp and chilly. It had Naoko's smell. On the notepad lying on the desk I wrote: I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday. I took one last look at Naoko's shoulder, stepped outside and quietly shut the door. No call came even after a week had passed. Naoko's house had no system for calling people to the phone, and so on Sunday morning I took the train out to Kokubunji. She wasn't there, and her name had been removed from the door. The windows and storm shutters were closed tight. The manager told me that Naoko had moved out three days earlier. He had no idea where she had moved to. I went back to the dorm and wrote Naoko a long letter addressed to her home in Kobe. Wherever she was, they would forward it to her at least. I gave her an honest account of my feelings. There was a lot I still didn't understand, I said, and though I was trying hard to understand, it would take time. Where I would be once that time had gone by, it was impossible for me to say now, which is why it was impossible for me to make promises or demands, or to set down pretty words. For one thing, we knew too little of each other. If, however, she would grant me the time, I would give it my best effort, and the two of us would come to know each other better. In any case, I wanted to see her again and have a good long talk. When I lost Kizuki, I lost the one person to whom I could speak honestly of my feelings, and I imagined it had been the same for Naoko. She and I had needed each other more than either of us knew. Which was no doubt why our relationship had taken such a major detour and become, in a sense, warped. I probably should not have done what I did, and yet I believe that it was all I could do. The warmth and closeness I felt for you at that moment was something I have never experienced before. I need you to answer this letter. Whatever that answer may be, I need to have it. No answer came. Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the empty cavern. There was an abnormal lightness to my body, and sounds had a hollow echo to them. I went to lectures more faithfully than ever. They were boring, and I never talked to my fellow students, but I had nothing else to do. I would sit by myself in the very front row of the lecture hall, speak to no one and eat alone. I stopped smoking. The student strike started at the end of May. "Dismantle the University!" they all screamed. Go ahead, do it, I thought. Dismantle it. Tear it apart. Crush it to bits. I don't give a damn. It would be a breath of fresh air. I'm ready for anything. I'll help if necessary. Just go ahead and do it. With the campus blockaded and lectures suspended, I started to work at a delivery company. Sitting with the driver, loading and unloading lorries, that kind of stuff. It was tougher than I thought. At first I could hardly get out of bed in the morning with the pain. The pay was good, though, and as long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside. I worked on the lorries five days a week, and three nights a week I continued my job at the record shop. Nights without work I spent with whisky and books. Storm Trooper wouldn't touch whisky and couldn't stand the smell, so when I was sprawled on my bed drinking it straight, he'd complain that the fumes made it impossible for him to study and ask me to take my bottle outside. "You get the hell out," I growled. "But you know drinking in the dorm is a-a-against the rules." "I don't give a shit. You get out." He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone. In June I wrote Naoko another long letter, addressing it again to her house in Kobe. It said pretty much the same thing as the first one, but at the end I added: Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you. When I posted it, I felt as if the cavern inside me had grown again. That June I went out with Nagasawa twice again to sleep with girls. It was easy both times. The first girl put up a terrific struggle when I tried to get her undressed and into the hotel bed, but when I began reading alone because it just wasn't worth it, she came over and started nuzzling me. And after I had done it with the second one, she started asking me all kinds of personal questions - how many girls had I slept with? Where was I from? Which university did I go to? What kind of music did I like? Had I ever read any novels by Osamu Dazai? Where would I like to go if I could travel abroad? Did I think her nipples were too big? I made up some answers and went to sleep, but next morning she said she wanted to have breakfast with me, and she kept up the stream of questions over the tasteless eggs and toast and coffee. What kind of work did my father do? Did I get good marks at school? What month was I born? Had I ever eaten frogs? She was giving me a headache, so as soon as we had finished eating I said I had to go to work. "Will I ever see you again?" she asked with a sad look. "Oh, I'm sure we'll meet again somewhere before long," I said, and left. What the hell am I doing? I started wondering as soon as I was alone, feeling disgusted with myself. And yet it was all I could do. My body was hungering for women. All the time I was sleeping with those girls I thought about Naoko: the white shape of her naked body in the darkness, her sighs, the sound of the rain. The more I thought about these things, the hungrier my body grew. I went up to the roof with my whisky and asked myself where I thought I was heading. Finally, at the beginning of July, a letter came from Naoko. A short letter. Please forgive me for not answering sooner. But try to understand. It took me a very long time before I was in any condition to write, and I have started this letter at least ten times. Writing is a painful process for me. Let me begin with my conclusion. I have decided to take a year off from college. Officially, it's a leave of absence, but I suspect that I will never be going back. This will no doubt come as a surprise to you, but in fact I had been thinking about doing this for a very long time. I tried a few times to mention it to you, but I was never able to make myself begin. I was afraid even to pronounce the words. Try not to get so worked up about things. Whatever happened - or didn't happen - the end result would have been the same. This may not be the best way to put it, and I'm sorry if it hurts you. What I am trying to tell you is, I don't want you to blame yourself for what happened with me. It is something I have to take on all by myself. I had been putting it off for more than a year, and so I ended up making things very difficult for you. There is probably no way to put it off any longer. After I moved out of my flat, I came back to my family's house in Kobe and was seeing a doctor for a while. He tells me there is a place in the hills outside Kyoto that would be perfect for me, and I'm thinking of spending a little time there. It's not exactly a hospital, more a sanatorium kind of thing with a far freer style of treatment. I'll leave the details for another letter. What I need now is to rest my nerves in a quiet place cut off from the world. I feel grateful in my own way for the year of companionship you gave me. Please believe that much even if you believe nothing else. You are not the one who hurt me. I myself am the one who did that. This is truly how I feel. For now, however, I am not prepared to see you. It's not that I don't want to see you: I'm simply not prepared for it. The moment I feel ready, I will write to you. Perhaps then we can get to know each other better. As you say, this is probably what we should do: get to know each other better. Goodbye. I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I would be filled with that same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko herself stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight nor could I wrap myself in it. Objects in the scene would drift past me, but the words they spoke never reached my ears. I continued to spend my Saturday nights sitting in the hall. There was no hope of a phone call, but I didn't know what else to do with the time. I would switch on a baseball game and pretend to watch it as I cut the empty space between me and the television set in two, then cut each half in two again, over and over, until I had fashioned a space small enough to hold in my hand. I would switch the set off at ten, go back to my room, and go to sleep. At the end of the month, Storm Trooper gave me a firefly. It was in an instant coffee jar with air holes in the lid and containing some blades of grass and a little water. In the bright room the firefly looked like some kind of ordinary black insect you'd find by a pond somewhere, but Storm Trooper insisted it was the real thing. "I know a firefly when I see one," he said, and I had no reason or basis to disbelieve him. "Fine," I said. "It's a firefly." It had a sleepy look on its face, but it kept trying to climb up the slippery glass walls of the jar and falling back. "I found it in the quad," he said. "Here? By the dorm?" "Yeah. You know the hotel down the street? They release fireflies in their garden for summer guests. This one made it over here." Storm Trooper was busy stuffing clothes and notebooks into his black Boston bag as he spoke. We were several weeks into the summer holidays, and he and I were almost the only ones left in the dorm. I had carried on with my jobs rather than go back to Kobe, and he had stayed on for a practical training session. Now that the training had ended, he was going back to the mountains of Yamanashi. "You could give this to your girlfriend," he said. "I'm sure she'd love it." "Thanks," I said. After dark the dorm was hushed, like a ruin. The flag had been lowered and the lights glowed in the windows of the dining hall. With so few students left, they turned on only half the lights in the place, keeping the right half dark and the left lighted. Still, the smell of dinner drifted up to me - some kind of cream stew. I took my bottled firefly to the roof. No one else was up there. A white vest hung on a clothesline that someone had forgotten to take in, waving in the evening breeze like the discarded shell of some huge insect. I climbed a steel ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of the dormitory's water tank. The tank was still warm with the heat of the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. I sat in the narrow space above the tank, leaning against the handrail and coming face-to-face with an almost full white moon. The lights of Shinjuku glowed to the right, Ikebukuro to the left. Car headlights flowed in brilliant streams from one pool of light to the other. A dull roar of jumbled sounds hung over the city like a cloud. The firefly made a faint glow in the bottom of the jar, its light all too weak, its colour all too pale. I hadn't seen a firefly in years, but the ones in my memory sent a far more intense light into the summer darkness, and that brilliant, burning image was the one that had stayed with me all that time. Maybe this firefly was on the verge of death. I gave the jar a few shakes. The firefly bumped against the glass walls and tried to fly, but its light remained dim. I tried to remember when I had last seen fireflies, and where it might have been. I could see the scene in my mind, but was unable to recall the time or place. I could hear the sound of water in the darkness and see an old-fashioned brick sluice gate. It had a handle you could turn to open and close the gate. The stream it controlled was small enough to be hidden by the grass on its banks. The night was dark, so dark I couldn't see my feet when I turned out my torch. Hundreds of fireflies drifted over the pool of water held back by the sluice gate, their hot glow reflected in the water like a shower of sparks. I closed my eyes and steeped myself in that long-ago darkness. I heard the wind with unusual clarity. A light breeze swept past me, leaving strangely brilliant trails in the dark. I opened my eyes to find the darkness of the summer night a few degrees deeper than it had been. I twisted open the lid of the jar and took out the firefly, setting it on the two-inch lip of t he water tank. It seemed not to grasp its new surroundings. It hobbled around the head of a steel bolt, catching its legs on curling scabs of paint. It moved to the right until it found its way blocked, then circled back to the left. Finally, with some effort, it mounted the head of the bolt and crouched there for a while, unmoving, as if it had taken its last breath. Still leaning against the handrail, I studied the firefly. Neither I nor it made a move for a very long time. The wind continued sweeping past the two of us while the numberless leaves of the zelkova tree rustled in the darkness. I waited for ever. Only much later did the firefly take to the air. As if some thought had suddenly occurred to it, the firefly spread its wings, and in a moment it had flown past the handrail to float in the pale darkness. It traced a swift arc by the side of the water tank as though trying to bring back a lost interval in time. And then, after hovering there for a few seconds as if to watch its curved line of light blend into the wind, it finally flew off to the east. Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul. More than once I tried stretching my hand out in the dark. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond my grasp. During the summer holidays the university called in the riot police. They broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside. This was nothing new. It's what all the students were doing at the time. The universities were not so easily "dismantled". Massive amounts of capital had been invested in them, and they were not about to dissolve just because a few students had gone wild. And in fact those students who had sealed off the campus had not wanted to dismantle the university either. All they had really wanted to do was shift the balance of power within the university structure, about which I couldn't have cared less. And so, when the strike was finally crushed, I felt nothing. I went to the campus in September expecting to find rubble. The place was untouched. The library's books had not been carted off, the tutors' offices had not been destroyed, the student affairs office had not been burned to the ground. I was thunderstruck. What the hell had they been doing behind the barricades? When the strike was defused and lectures started up again under police occupation, the first ones to take their seats in the classrooms were those arseholes who had led the strike. As if nothing had ever happened, they sat there taking notes and answering "present" when the register was taken. I found this incredible. After all, the strike was still in effect. There had been no declaration bringing it to an end. All that had happened was that the university had called in the riot police and torn down the barricades, but the strike itself was supposed to be continuing. The arseholes had screamed their heads off at the time of the strike, denouncing students who opposed it (or just expressed doubts about it), at times even trying them in their own kangaroo courts. I made a point of visiting those former leaders and asking why they were attending lectures instead of continuing to strike, but they couldn't give me a straight answer. What could they have said? That they were afraid of losing marks through lack of attendance? To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke. The wind changes direction a little, and their cries become whispers. Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you're not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The arseholes are getting good marks and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image. For a while I attended lectures but refused to answer when they took the register. I knew it was a pointless gesture, but I felt so bad I had no choice. All I managed to do was isolate myself more than ever from the other students. By remaining silent when my name was called, I made everyone uncomfortable for a few seconds. None of the other students spoke to me, and I spoke to none of them. By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a university education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of t raining in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to abandon my studies straight away, and so I went to my lectures each day, took notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up. And though that second week in September had rolled around, there was no sign of Storm Trooper. More than unusual, this was an earth- shattering development. University had started up again, and it was inconceivable that Storm Trooper would miss lectures. A thin layer of dust covered his desk and radio. His plastic cup and toothbrush, tea tin, insecticide spray and so on stood in a neat row on his shelf. I kept the room clean in his absence. I had picked up the habit of neatness over the past year and a half, and without him there to take care of the room, I had no choice but to do it. I swept the floor each day, wiped the window every third day, and aired my mattress once a week, waiting for him to come back and tell me what a great job I had done. But he never came back. I returned from lectures one day to find all his stuff gone and his name tag removed from the door. I went to the dorm Head's room and asked what had happened. "He's withdrawn from the dormitory," he said. "You'll be alone in the room for the time being." I couldn't get him to tell me why Storm Trooper had disappeared. This was a man whose greatest joy in life was to control everything and keep others in the dark. Storm Trooper's iceberg poster stayed on the wall for a time, but I eventually took it down and replaced it with Jim Morrison and Miles Davis. This made the room seem a little more like my own. I used some of the money I had saved from work to buy a small stereo. At night I would drink alone and listen to music. I thought about Storm Trooper every now and then, but I enjoyed living alone. At 11.30 a.m. one Monday, after a lecture on Euripides in History of Drama, I took a ten-minute walk to a little restaurant and had an omelette and salad for lunch. The place was on a quiet backstreet and was slightly more expensive than the student dining hall, but you could relax there, and they knew how to make a good omelette. "They" were a married couple who rarely spoke to each other, plus one part-time waitress. As I sat there eating by the window, a group of four students came in, two men and two women, all rather neatly dressed. They took the table near the door, spent some time looking over the menu and discussing their options, until one of them reported their choices to the waitress. Before long I noticed that one of the girls kept glancing in my direction. She had extremely short hair and wore dark sunglasses and a white cotton mini-dress. I had no idea who she was, so I went on with my lunch, but she soon slipped out of her seat and came over to where I was sitting. With one hand on the edge of my table, she said, "You're Watanabe, aren't you?" I raised my head and looked at her more closely. Still I could not recall ever having seen her. She was the kind of girl you notice, so if I had met her before I should have been able to recognize her immediately, and there weren't that many people in my university who knew me by name. "Mind if I sit down?" she asked. "Or are you expecting somebody?" Still uncertain, I shook my head. "No, nobody's coming. Please." With a wooden clunk, she dragged a chair out and sat down opposite, staring straight at me through her sunglasses, then glancing at my plate. "Looks good," she said. "It is good. Mushroom omelette and green pea salad." "Damn," she said. "Oh, well, I'll get it next time. I've already ordered something else." "What are you having?" "Macaroni and cheese." "Their macaroni and cheese isn't bad, either," I said. "By the way, do I know you? I don't recall..." "Euripides," she said. "Electra. "No god hearkens to the voice of lost Electra.' You know - the class just ended." I stared hard at her. She took off her sunglasses. At last I remembered her - a first-year I had seen in History of Drama. A striking change in hairstyle had prevented me recognizing her. "Oh," I said, touching a point a few inches below my shoulder, "your hair was down to here before the summer holidays." "You're right," she said. "I had a perm this summer, and it was just awful. I was ready to kill myself. I looked like a corpse on the beach with seaweed stuck to my head. So I decided as long as I was ready to die, I might as well cut it all off. At least it's cool in the summer." She ran her hand through her pixie cut and gave me a smile. "It looks good, though," I said, still munching my omelette. "Let me see your profile." She turned away and held the pose a few seconds. "Yeah, I thought so. It really looks good on you. Nicely shaped head. Pretty ears, too, uncovered like that." "So I'm not mad after all! I thought I looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a concentration camp survivor. What's this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least 250 unclassy girls with long hair. Really." "I think you look better now than you did before," I said. And I meant it. As far as I could recall, with long hair she had been just another cute student. A fresh and physical life force surged from the girl who sat before me now. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move. "Do you mean it?" she asked. I nodded, still munching on my salad. She put on her sunglasses and looked at me from behind them. "You're not lying, are you?" "I like to think of myself as an honest man," I said. "Far out." "So tell me: why do you wear such dark glasses?" "I felt defenceless when my hair got short all of a sudden. As if somebody had thrown m e into a crowd all naked." "Makes sense," I said, eating the last of my omelette. She watched me with intense interest. "You don't have to go back to them?" I asked, indicating her three companions. "Nah. I'll go back when they serve the food. Am I interrupting your meal?" "There's nothing left to interrupt," I said, ordering coffee when she showed no sign of leaving. The wife took my dishes and brought milk and sugar. "Now you tell me," she said. "Why didn't you answer today when they called the register? You are Watanabe, aren't you? Toru Watanabe?" "That's me." "So why didn't you answer?" "I just didn't feel like it today." She took off her sunglasses again, set them on the table, and looked at me as if she were staring into the cage of some rare animal at a zoo. "I just didn't feel like it today." You talk like Humphrey Bogart. Cool. Tough." "Don't be silly. I'm just an ordinary guy like everybody else." The wife brought my coffee and set it on the table. I took a sip without adding sugar or milk. "Look at that. You drink it black." "It's got nothing to do with Humphrey Bogart," I explained patiently. "I just don't happen to have a sweet tooth. I think you've got me all wrong." "Why are you so tanned?" "I've been hiking around the last couple of weeks. Rucksack. Sleeping bag." "Where'd you go?" "Kanazawa. Noto Peninsula. Up to Niigata." "Alone?" "Alone," I said. "Found some company here and there." "Some romantic company? New women in far-off places." "Romantic? Now I know you've got me wrong. How's a guy with a sleeping bag on his back and his face all stubbly supposed to have romance?" "Do you always travel alone like that?" "Uh-huh." "You enjoy solitude?" she asked, resting her cheek on her hand. "Travelling alone, eating alone, sitting by yourself in lecture halls..." "Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment." The tip of one earpiece in her mouth, sunglasses dangling down, she mumbled, " "Nobody likes being alone. I just hate to be disappointed.' You can use that line if you ever write your autobiography." "Thanks," I said. "Do you like green?" "Why do you ask?" "You're wearing a green polo shirt." "Not especially. I'll wear anything." "Not especially. I'll wear anything.' I love the way you talk. Like spreading plaster, nice and smooth. Has anybody ever told you that?" "Nobody," I said. "My name's Midori," she said. " "Green'. But green looks terrible on me. Weird, huh? It's like I'm cursed, don't you think? My sister's name is Momoko: "Peach girl'." "Does she look good in pink?" "She looks great in pink! She was born to wear pink. It's totally unfair." The food arrived at Midori's table, and a guy in a madras jacket called out to her, "Hey, Midori, come 'n' get it!" She waved at him as if to say "I know". "Tell me," she said. "Do you take lecture notes? In drama?" "I do." "I hate to ask, but could I borrow your notes? I've missed twice, and I don't know anybody in the class." "No problem," I said, pulling the notebook from my bag. After checking to make sure I hadn't written anything personal in it, I handed it to Midori. "Thanks," she said. "Are you coming to lectures the day after tomorrow?" "Yeah." "Meet me here at noon. I'll give you back your notebook and buy you lunch. I mean... it's not as if you get an upset stomach or anything if you don't eat alone, right?" "No," I said. "But you don't have to buy me lunch just because I'm lending you my notebook." "Don't worry," she said. "I like buying people lunch. Anyway, shouldn't you write it down somewhere? You won't forget?" "I won't forget. Day after tomorrow. Twelve o'clock. Midori. Green." From the other table, somebody called out, "Hurry up, Midori, your food's getting cold!" She ignored the call and asked me, "Have you always talked like that?" "I think so," I said. "Never noticed before." And in fact no one had ever told me there was anything unusual about the way I spoke. She seemed to be mulling something over for a few seconds. Then she stood up with a smile and went back to her table. She waved to me as I walked past their table, but the three others barely glanced in my direction. At noon on Wednesday there was no sign of Midori in the restaurant. I thought I might wait for her over a beer, but the place started to fill up as soon as the drink arrived, so I ordered lunch and ate alone. I finished at 12.35, but still no Midori. Paying my bill, I went outside and crossed the street to a little shrine, where I waited on the stone steps for my head to clear and Midori to come. I gave up at one o'clock and went to read in the library. At two I went to my German lecture. When it was over I went to the student affairs office and looked for Midori's name in the class list for History of Drama. The only Midori in the class was Midori Kobayashi. Next I flipped through the cards of the student files and found the address and phone number of a Midori Kobayashi who had entered the university in 1969. She lived in a north-west suburb, Toshima, with her family. I slipped into a phone box and dialled the number. A man answered: "Kobayashi Bookshop." Kobayashi Bookshop? "Sorry to bother you," I said, "but I wonder if Midori might be in?" "No, she's not," he said. "Do you think she might be on campus?" "Hmm, no, she's probably at the hospital. Who's calling, please?" Instead of answering, I thanked him and hung up. The hospital? Could she have been injured or fallen ill? But the man had spoken without the least sense of emergency. "She's probably at the hospital," he had said, as easily as he might have said "She's at the fish shop". I thought about a few other possibilities until thinking itself became too problematic, then I went back to the dorm and stretched out on my bed reading Lord Jim, which I'd borrowed from Nagasawa. When I had finished it, I went to his room to give it back. Nagasawa was on his way to the dining hall, so I went with him for dinner. "How'd the exams go?" I asked. The second round of upper level exams for the Foreign Ministry had been held in August. "Same as always," said Nagasawa as if it had been nothing. "You take 'em, you pass. Group discussions, interviews... like screwin' a chick." "In other words, easy," I said. "When do they let you know?" "First week of October. If I pass, I'll buy you a big dinner." "So tell me, what kind of guys make it to round two? All superstars like you?" "Don't be stupid. They're a bunch of idiots. Idiots or weirdos. I'd say 95 per cent of the guys who want to be bureaucrats aren't worth shit. I'm not kidding. They can barely read." "So why are you trying to join the Foreign Ministry?" "All kinds of reasons," said Nagasawa. "I like the idea of working overseas, for one. But mainly I want to test my abilities. If I'm going to test myself, I want to do it in the biggest field there is - the nation. I want to see how high I can climb, how much power I can exercise in this insanely huge bureaucratic system. Know what I mean?" "Sounds like a game." "It is a game. I don't give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don't. I may be a selfish bastard, but I'm incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world." "And you have no use for "ideals', I suppose?" "None. Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action." "But there are lots of other ways to live, aren't there?" I asked. "You like the way I live, don't you?" "That's beside the point," I said. "I could never get into Tokyo University; I can't sleep with any girl I want whenever I want to; I'm no great talker; people don't look up to me; I haven't got a girlfriend; and the future's not going to open up to me when I get a literature BA from a second-rate private university. What does it matter if I like the way you live?" "Are you saying you envy the way I live?" "No, I don't," I said. "I'm too used to being who I am. And I don't really give a damn about Tokyo University or the Foreign Ministry. The one thing I envy you for is having a terrific girlfriend like Hatsumi." Nagasawa shut up and ate. When dinner was over he said, "You know, Watanabe, I have this feeling like, maybe 10 years or 20 years after we get out of this place, we're going to meet again somewhere. And one way or another, I think we're going to have some connection." "Sounds like Dickens," I said with a smile. "I guess it does," he said, smiling back. "But my hunches are usually right." The two of us left the dining hall and went out to a bar. We stayed there drinking until after nine. "Tell me, Nagasawa," I asked, "what is the "standard of action' in your life?" "You'll laugh if I tell you," he said. "No I won't." "All right," he said. "To be a gentleman." I didn't laugh, but I nearly fell off my chair. "To be a gentleman? A gentleman?" "You heard me." "What does it mean to be a gentleman? How do you define it?" "A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do." "You're the weirdest guy I've ever met," I said. "You're the straightest guy I've ever met," he said. And he paid for us both. I went to the following week's drama lecture, but still saw no sign of Midori Kobayashi. After a quick survey of the room convinced me she wasn't there, I took my usual seat in the front row and wrote a letter to Naoko while I waited for the lecturer to arrive. I wrote about my summer travels - the roads I had walked, the towns I had passed through, the people I had met. And every night I thought of you. Now that I can no longer see you, I realize how much I need you. University is incredibly boring, but as a matter of self-discipline I am going to all my lectures and doing all the assignments. Everything seems pointless since you left. I'd like to have a nice, long talk with you. If possible, I'd like to visit your sanatorium and see you for several hours. And, if possible, I'd like to go out walking with you side by side the way we used to. Please try to answer this letter - even a short note. I won't mind. I filled four sheets, folded them, slipped them into an envelope, and addressed it to Naoko care of her family. By then the lecturer had arrived, wiping the sweat from his brow as he took the register. He was a small, mournfullooking man who walked with a metal cane. While not exactly fun, the lectures in his course were always well prepared and worthwhile. After remarking that the weather was as hot as ever, he began to talk about the use of the deus ex machina in Euripides and explained how the concept of "god" was different in Euripides than in Aeschylus or Sophocles. He had been talking for some 15 minutes when the lecture-hall door opened and in walked Midori. She was wearing a dark blue sports shirt, cream- coloured cotton trousers and her usual sunglasses. After flashing a "sorry I'm late" kind of smile at the professor, she sat down next to me. Then she took a notebook - my notebook - from her shoulder bag, and handed it to me. Inside, I found a note: Sorry about Wednesday. Are you angry? The lecture was about half over and the professor was drawing a sketch of a Greek stage on the blackboard when the door opened again and two students in helmets walked in. They looked like some kind of comedy team, one tall, thin and pale, the other short, round and dark with a long beard that didn't suit him. The tall one carried an armful of political agitation handbills. The short one walked up to the professor and said, with a degree of politeness, that they would like to use the second half of his lecture for political debate and hoped that he would cooperate, adding, "The world is full of problems far more urgent and relevant than Greek tragedy." This was more an announcement than a request. The professor replied, "I rather doubt that the world has problems far more urgent and relevant than Greek tragedy, but you're not going to listen to anything I have to say, so do what you like." Grasping the edge of the table, he set his feet on the floor, picked up his cane and limped out of the classroom. While the tall student passed out his handbills, the round one went to the podium and started lecturing. The handbills were full of the usual simplistic sloganeering: "SMASH FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS FOR UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT!", "MARSHAL ALL FORCES FOR NEW ALL-CAMPUS STRIKE!", "CRUSH THE IMPERIAL-EDUCATIONAL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!" I had no problem with what they were saying, but the writing was lame. It had nothing to inspire confidence or arouse the passions. And the round man's speech was just as bad - the same old tune with different words. The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination. "Let's get out of here," said Midori. I nodded and stood, and the two of us made for the door. The round man said something to me at that point, but I couldn't catch it. Midori waved to him and said, "See ya later." "Hey, are we counter-revolutionaries?" Midori asked me when we were outside. "Are we going to be strung upon telephone poles if the revolution succeeds?" "Let's have lunch first, just in case." "Good. There's a place I want to take you to. It's a bit far, though. Can you spare the time?" "Yeah, I'm free until my two o'clock class." Midori took me by bus to Yotsuya and showed me to a fancy boxed- lunch speciality shop in a sheltered spot just behind the station. The minute we sat down they served us soup and the lunch of the day in square, red-lacquered boxes. This was a place worth a bus ride to eat at. "Great food," I said. "And cheap, too. I've been coming here since school. My old school's just down the street. They were so strict, we had to sneak out to eat here. They'd suspend you if they caught you eating out." Without the sunglasses, Midori's eyes looked somewhat sleepier than they had the last time. When she was not playing with the narrow silver bracelet on her left wrist, she would be rubbing at the corners of her eyes with the tip of her little finger. "Tired?" I asked. "Kind of. I'm not getting enough sleep. But I'm OK, don't worry," she said. "Sorry about the other day. Something important came up and I just couldn't get out of it. All of a sudden, in the morning. I thought about calling you at the restaurant, but I couldn't remember the name, and I didn't know your home number. Did you wait long?" "No big deal. I've got a lot of time on my hands." A lot?" "Way more than I need. I wish I could give you some to help y ou sleep." Midori rested her cheek on her hand and smiled at me. "What a nice guy you are." "Not nice. I just have time to kill," I said. "By the way, I called your house that day and somebody told me you were at the hospital. Something wrong?" "You called my house?" she asked with a slight wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. "How did you get my number?" "Looked it up in the student affairs office. Anyone can do that." She nodded once or twice and started playing with the bracelet again. "I never would have thought of that. I suppose I could have looked up your number. Anyway, about the hospital, I'll tell you next time. I don't feel like it now. Sorry." "That's OK. I didn't mean to pry." "No, you're not prying. I'm just kind of tired. Like a monkey in the rain." "Shouldn't you go home and get some sleep?" "Not now. Let's get out of here." She took me to her old school, a short walk from Yotsuya. Passing the station, I thought about Naoko and our endless walking. It had all started from there. I realized that if I hadn't run into Naoko on the train that Sunday in May, My life would have been very different from what it was now. But then I changed my mind: no, even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We were supposed to meet. If not then, some other time. I didn't have any basis for thinking this: it was just a feeling. Midori Kobayashi and I sat on a park bench together, looking at her old school. Ivy clung to the walls, and pigeons huddled under the gables, resting their wings. It was a nice, old building with character. A great oak tree stood in the playground, and a column of white smoke rose straight up beside it. The fading summer light gave the smoke a soft and cloudy look. "Do you know what that smoke is?" Midori asked me all of a sudden. "No idea," I said. "They're burning sanitary towels." "Really?" I couldn't think of anything else to say. "Sanitary towels, tampons, stuff like that," she said with a smile. "It is a girls' school. The old caretaker collects them from all the receptacles and burns them in the incinerator. That's the smoke." "Whoa." "Yeah, that's what I used to say to myself whenever I was in class and saw the smoke outside the window. "Whoa'. Think about it: the school had almost a thousand girls. So, say 900 of them have started their periods, and maybe a fifth of them are menstruating at any one time: 180 girls. That's 180 girls' worth of towels in the receptacles every day." "I bet you're right - though I'm not sure about the maths." "Anyway, it's a lot .180 girls. What do you think it feels like to collect and burn that much stuff?" "Can't imagine," I said. How could I have imagined what the old man was going through? Midori and I went on watching the smoke. "I really didn't want to go to this school," Midori said. She gave her head a little shake. "I wanted to go to an absolutely ordinary State school with ordinary people where I could relax and have fun like an ordinary teenager. But my parents thought it would look good for me to go to this fancy place. They're the ones who stuck me in here. You know: that's what happens when you do well in primary school. The teacher tells your parents "With marks like hers, she ought to go there.' So that's where I ended up. I went for six years and I never liked it. All I could think about was getting out. And you know, I've got certificates of merit for never having been late or missed a day of school. That's how much I hated the place. Get it?" "No, I don't get it." "It's because I hated the place so much. I wasn't going to let it beat me. If I'd let it get to me once I'd be finished. I was scared I'd just keep slipping down and down. I'd crawl to school with a temperature of 103. The teacher would ask me if I was sick, but I'd say no. When I left they gave me certificates for perfect attendance and punctuality, plus a French dictionary. That's why I'm taking German now. I didn't want to owe this school anything. I'm not kidding." "Why did you hate it so much? "Did you like your school?" "Well, no, but I didn't especially hate it, either. I went to an ordinary State school but I never thought about it one way or another." "Well, this school," Midori said, scratching the corner of her eye with her little finger, "had nothing but upper-class girls - almost a thousand girls with good backgrounds and good exam results. Rich girls. They had to be rich to survive. High tuition, endless contributions, expensive school trips. For instance, if we went to Kyoto, they'd put us up in a first-class inn and serve us tea ceremony food on lacquer tables, and they'd take us once a year to the most expensive hotel in Tokyo to study table manners. I mean, this was no ordinary school. Out of 160 girls in my class, I was the only one from a middle-class neighbourhood like Toshima. I looked at the school register once to see where the others lived, and every single one of them was from a rich area. Well, no, there was one girl from way out in Chiba with the farmers, so I got kind of friendly with her. And she was really nice. She invited me to her house, though she apologized for how far I'd have to travel to get there. I went and it was incredible, this giant piece of land you'd have to walk 15 minutes to get around. It had this amazing garden and two dogs like compact cars they fed steaks to. But still, this girl felt embarrassed about living out in Chiba. This is a girl who would be driven to school in a Mercedes Benz if she was late! By a chauffeur! Like right out of the Green Hornet: the hat, the white gloves, the whole deal. And still she had this inferiority complex. Can you believe it?" I shook my head. "I was the only one in the whole school who lived in a place like Kita- Otsuka Toshima. And under "parent's profession' it said "bookshop owner'. Everybody in my class thought that was so neat: "Oh, you're so lucky, you can read any book you like' and stuff. Of course, they were thinking of some monster bookshop like Kinokuniya. They could never have imagined the poor, little Kobayashi Bookshop. The door creaks open and you see nothing but magazines. The steady sellers are the women's glossies with illustrated pull-out sections on the latest sexual techniques. The local housewives buy them and sit at the kitchen table reading them from cover to cover, and give 'em a try when their husbands get home. And they've got the most incredible positions! Is this what housewives have on their minds all day? The comics are the other big-seller: Magazine, Sunday, Jump. And of course the weeklies. So this "bookshop' is almost all magazines. Oh, there are a few books, paperbacks, mysteries and swashbucklers and romances. That's all that sells. And How-To books: how to win at Go, how to raise bonsai, how to give wedding speeches, how to have sex, how to stop smoking, you name it. We even sell writing supplies - stacks of ballpoint pens and pencils and notebooks next to the till. But that's it. No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe, no Catcher in the Rye. That's the Kobayashi Bookshop. That's how "lucky' I am. Do you think I'm lucky?" "I can just see the place." "You know what I mean. Everybody in the neighbourhood comes there, some of them for years, and we deliver. It's a good business, more than enough to support a family of four; no debts, two daughters in college, but that's it. Nothing to spare for extras. They should never have sent me to a school like that. It was a recipe for heartache. I had to listen to them grumble to me every time the school asked for a contribution, and I was always scared to death I'd run out of money if I went out with my school friends and they wanted to eat somewhere expensive. It's a miserable way to live. Is your family rich?" "My family? No, my parents are absolutely ordinary working people, not rich, not poor. I know it's not easy for them to send me to a private university i n Tokyo, but there's just me, so it's not that big a deal. They don't give me much to live on, so I work part-time. We live in a typical house with a little garden and our car is a Toyota Corolla." "What's your job like?" "I work in a Shinjuku record shop three nights a week. It's easy. I just sit there and mind the shop." "You're joking?" said Midori. "I don't know, just looking at you I sort of assumed you'd never been hard up." "It's true. I have never been hard up. Not that I have tons of money, either. I'm like most people." "Well, "most people' in my school were rich," said Midori, palms resting on her lap. "That was the problem." "So now you'll have plenty of chances to see a world without that problem. More than you want to, maybe." "Hey, tell me, what do you think the best thing is about being rich?" "I don't know." "Being able to say you don't have any money. Like, if I suggested to a school friend we do something, she could say, 'Sorry, I don't have any money'. Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If said "I don't have any money', it would I really mean "I don't have any money'. It's sad. Like, if a pretty girl says "I look terrible today, I don't want to go out,' that's OK, but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her. That's what the world was like for me. For six years, until last year." "You'll get over it." "I hope so. University is such a relief! It's full of ordinary people." She smiled with the slightest curl of her lip and smoothed her short hair with the palm of her hand. "Do you have a job?" I asked. "Yeah, I write map notes. You know those little pamphlets that come with maps? With descriptions of the different neighbourhoods and population figures and points of interest. Here there's so-and-so hiking trail or such-and-such a legend, or some special flower or bird. I write the texts for those things. It's so easy! Takes no time at all. I can write a whole booklet with a day of looking things up in the library. All you have to do is master a couple of secrets and all kinds of work comes your way." "What kind of secrets?" "Like you put in some little something that nobody else has written and the people at the map company think you're a literary genius and send you more work. It doesn't have to be anything at all, just some tiny thing. Like, say, when they built a dam in this particular valley, the water covered over a village, but still every spring the birds come up from the south and you can see them flying over the lake. Put in one little episode like that and people love it, it's so graphic and sentimental. The usual part-timer doesn't bother with stuff like that, but I can make decent money with what I write." "Yeah, but you have to find those "episodes'." "True," said Midori with a tilt of her head. "But if you're looking for them, you usually find them. And if you don't, you can always make up something harmless." "Aha!" "Peace," said Midori. She said she wanted to hear about my dormitory, so I told her the usual stories about the raising of the flag and Storm Trooper's radio callisthenics. Storm Trooper especially made Midori laugh, as he seemed to do with everyone. She said she thought it would be fun to have a look at the dorm. There was nothing fun about the place, I told her: "Just a few h undred guys in grubby rooms, drinking and wanking." "Does that include you?" "It includes every man on the face of the earth," I explained. "Girls have periods and boys wank. Everybody." "Even ones with girlfriends? I mean, sex partners." "It's got nothing to do with that. The Keio student living next door to me has a wank before every date. He says it relaxes him." "I don't know much about that stuff. I was in a girls' school so long." "I guess the glossy women's magazines don't go into that." "Not at all!" she said, laughing. "Anyway, Watanabe, would you have some time this Sunday? Are you free?" "I'm free every Sunday. Until six, at least. That's when I go to work." "Why don't you visit me? At the Kobayashi Bookshop. The shop itself will be closed, but I have to hang around there alone all day. I might be getting an important phone call. How about lunch? I'll cook for you." "I'd like that," I said. Midori tore a page from a notebook and drew a detailed map of the way to her place. She used a red pen to make a large X where the house stood. "You can't miss it. There's a big sign: 'Kobayashi Bookshop'. Come at noon. I'll have lunch ready." I thanked her and put the map in my pocket. "I'd better get back to campus now," I said. "My German lecture starts at two." Midori said she had somewhere to go and took the train from Yotsuya. Sunday morning I got up at nine, shaved, did my laundry and hung out the clothes on the roof. It was a beautiful day. The first smell of autumn was in the air. Red dragonflies flitted around the quadrangle, chased by neighbourhood kids swinging nets. With no wind, the Rising Sun flag hung limp on its pole. I put on a freshly ironed shirt and walked from the dorm to the tram stop. A student neighbourhood on a Sunday morning: the streets were dead, virtually empty, most shops closed. What few sounds there were echoed with special clarity. A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the tram shelter four or five kids were throwing rocks at a row of empty cans. A florist's was open, so I went in and bought some daffodils. Daffodils in autumn: that was strange. But I had always liked that particular flower. Three old women were the only passengers on the Sunday morning tram. They all looked at me and my flowers. One of them gave me a smile. I smiled back. I sat in the last seat and watched the ancient houses passing close to the window. The tram almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the garden of another house, a little girl was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from somewhere, and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The tram snaked its way through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on at stops along the way, but the three old women went on talking intently about something, huddled together face-to-face. I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori's map down a broad street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs. Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or repaired in places, and it was these additions that tended to look shabbier than the old buildings themselves. The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the original residents had become fed up with the cars, the filthy air, the noise and high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap flats and company apartments and hard-to-sell shops and a few stubborn people who clung to old family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as though wrapped in a haze of exhaust fumes. Ten minutes' walk down this street brought me to a corner petrol station, where I turned right into a small block of shops, in the middle of which hung the sign for the Kobayashi Bookshop. True, it was not a big shop, but neither was it as small as Midori's description had led me to believe. It was just a typical neighbourhood bookshop, the same kind I used to run to on the very day the boys' comics came out. A nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place. The whole front of the shop was sealed off by a big, rolldown metal shutter inscribed with a magazine advertisement: "WEEKLY BUNSHUN SOLD HERE THURSDAYS". I still had 15 minutes before noon, but I didn't want to kill time wandering through the block with a handful of daffodils, so I pressed the doorbell beside the shutter and stepped a few paces back to wait. Fifteen seconds went by without an answer, and I was debating with myself whether to ring again when I heard a window clatter open above me. I looked up to see Midori leaning out and waving. "Come in," she yelled. "Lift the shutter." "Is it OK? I'm kind of early," I shouted back. "No problem. Come upstairs. I'm busy in the kitchen." She pulled the window closed. The shutter made a terrific grinding noise as I raised it three feet from the ground, ducked under, and lowered it again. The shop was pitch black inside. I managed to feel my way to the back stairway, tripping over bound piles of magazines. I unlaced my shoes and climbed the stairs to the living area. The interior of the house was dark and gloomy. The stairs led to a simple parlour with a sofa and easy chairs. It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films. There was a kind of storage area on the left and what looked like the door to a bathroom. I had to climb the steep stairway with care to reach the second floor, but once I got there, it was so much brighter than the first that I felt greatly relieved. "Over here," called Midori's voice. To the right at the top of the stairs was what looked like a dining room, and beyond that a kitchen. The house itself was old, but the kitchen seemed to have been refitted recently with new cabinets and a bright, shiny sink and taps. Midori was preparing food. A pot was bubbling, and the air was filled with the smell of grilled fish. "There's beer in the fridge," she said with a glance in my direction. "Have a seat while I finish this." I took a can and sat at the kitchen table. The beer was so cold it might have been in the fridge for the best part of a year. On the table lay a small, white ashtray, a newspaper, and a soy sauce dispenser. There was also a notepad and pen, with a phone number and some figures on the pad that seemed to be calculations connected with shopping. "I should have this done in ten minutes," she said. "Can you stand the wait?" "Of course I can," I said. "Get good and hungry, then. I'm making a lot." I sipped my beer and focused on Midori as she went on cooking, her back to me. She worked with quick, nimble movements, handling no fewer than four cooking procedures at once. Over here she tasted a boiled dish, and the next second she was at the cutting board, rat-tat- tatting, then she took something out of the fridge and piled it in a bowl, and before I knew it she had washed a pot she had finished using. From the back she looked like an Indian percussionist - ringing a bell, tapping a block, striking a water-buffalo bone, each movement precise and economical, with perfect balance. I watched in awe. "Let me know if there's something I can do," I said, just in case. "That's OK," said Midori with a smile in my direction. "I'm used to doing everything alone." She wore slim blue jeans and a navy T-shirt. An Apple Records logo nearly covered the back of the shirt. She had extremely narrow hips, as if she had somehow skipped puberty when the hips grow fuller, and this gave her a far more androgynous look than most girls have in slim jeans. The light pouring in from the kitchen window gave her figure a kind of vague outline. "You really didn't have to put together such a feast," I said. "It's no feast," answered Midori without turning my way. "I was too busy to do any real shopping yesterday. I'm just throwing together a few things I had in the fridge. Really, don't worry. Besides, it's Kobayashi family tradition to treat guests well. I don't know what it is, but we like to entertain. It's inborn; a kind of sickness. Not that we're especially nice or people love us or anything, but if somebody shows up we have to treat them well no matter what. We've all got the same personality flaw, for better or worse. Take my father, for example. He hardly drinks, but the house is full of alcohol. What for? To serve guests! So don't hold back: drink all the beer you want." "Thanks," I said. It suddenly dawned on me that I had left the daffodils downstairs. I had set them aside while unlacing my shoes. I slipped back downstairs and found the ten bright blossoms lying in the gloom. Midori took a tall, slim glass from the cupboard and arranged the flowers in it. "I love daffodils," said Midori. "I once sang "Seven Daffodils' in the school talent contest. Do you know it?" "Of course." "We had a folk group. I played guitar." She sang "Seven Daffodils' as she arranged the food on plates. Midori's cooking was far better than I had expected: an amazing assortment of fried, pickled, boiled and roasted dishes using eggs, mackerel, fresh greens, aubergine, mushrooms, radishes, and sesame seeds, all cooked in the delicate Kyoto style. "This is great," I said with my mouth full. "OK, tell me the truth now," Midori said. "You weren't expecting my cooking to be very good, were you - judging from the way I look?" "Not really," I said honestly. "You're from the Kansai region, so you like this kind of delicate flavouring, right?" "Don't tell me you changed style especially for me?" "Don't be ridiculous! I wouldn't go to that much trouble. No, we always eat like this." "So your mother - or your father - is from Kansai?" "Nope. My father was born in Tokyo and my mother's from Fukushima. There's not a single Kansai person among my relatives. We're all from Tokyo or northern Kanto." "I don't get it," I said. "How can you make this 100 per cent authentic Kansai-style food? Did somebody teach you?" "Well, it's kind of a long story," she said, eating a slice of fried egg. "My mother hated housework of any kind, and she almost never cooked anything. And we had the business to think about, so it was always "Today we're so busy, let's get a take-away' or "Let's just buy some croquettes at the butcher's' and so on. I hated that even when I was little, I mean like cooking a big pot of curry and eating the same thing three days in a row. So then one day - I was in the fifth year of school - I decided I was going to cook for the family and do it right. I went to the big Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and bought the biggest, handsomest cookbook I could find, and I mastered it from cover to cover: how to choose a cutting board, how to sharpen knives, how to bone a fish, how to shave fresh bonito flakes, everything. It turned out the author of the book was from the Kansai, so all my cooking is Kansai style." "You mean you learned how to make all this stuff from a book?!" "I saved my money and went to eat the real thing. That's how I learned flavourings. I've got pretty good intuition. I'm hopeless as a logical thinker, though." "It's amazing you could teach yourself to cook so well without having anyone to show you." "It wasn't easy," said Midori with a sigh, "growing up in a house where nobody gave a damn about food. I'd tell them I wanted to buy decent knives and pots and they wouldn't give me the money. "What we have now is good enough,' they'd say, but I'd tell them that was crazy, you couldn't bone a fish with the kind of flimsy knives we had at home, so they'd say, "What the hell do you have to bone a fish for?' It was hopeless trying to communicate with them. I saved up my allowance and bought real professional knives and pots and strainers and stuff. Can you believe it? Here's a 15-year-old girl pinching pennies to buy strainers and whetstones and tempura pots when all the other girls at school are getting huge allowances and buying beautiful dresses and shoes. Don't you feel sorry for me?" I nodded, swallowing a mouthful of clear soup with fresh junsai greens. "When I was in the sixth-form, I had to have an egg fryer - a long, narrow pan for making this dashimaki-style fried egg we're eating. I bought it with money I was supposed to use for a new bra. For three months I had to live with one bra. Can you believe it? I'd wash my bra at night, go crazy trying to dry it, and wear it the next day. And if it didn't dry right, I had a tragedy to deal with. The saddest thing in the world is wearing a damp bra. I'd walk around with tears pouring from my eyes. To think I was suffering this for an egg fryer!" "I see what you mean," I said with a laugh. "I know I shouldn't say this, but actually it was kind of a relief to me when my mother died. I could run the family budget my way. I could buy what I liked. So now I've got a relatively complete set of cooking utensils. My father doesn't know a thing about the budget." "When did your mother die?" "Two years ago. Cancer. Brain tumour. She was in the hospital a year and a half. It was terrible. She suffered from beginning to end. Finally lost her mind; had to be doped up all the time, and still she couldn't die, though when she did it was practically a mercy killing. It's the worst kind of death - the person's in agony, the family goes through hell. It took every yen we had. I mean, they'd give her these shots - bang, bang, x"20,000 a pop, and she had to have round-the-clock care. I was so busy with her, I couldn't study, had to delay university for a year. And as if that weren't bad enough - " She stopped in mid- sentence, put her chopsticks down and sighed. "How did this conversation turn so dark all of a sudden?" "It started with the business about the bras," I said. "So anyway, eat your eggs and think about what I just told you," Midori said with a solemn expression. Eating my portion filled me up, but Midori ate far less. "Cooking ruins my appetite," she said. She cleared the table, wiped up the crumbs, brought out a box of Marlboro, put one in her mouth and lit up with a match. Taking hold of the glass with the daffodils, she studied the blooms for a while. "I don't think I'll put them in a vase," she said. "If I leave them like this, it's like I just happened to pick them by a pond somewhere and threw them into the first thing that came to hand." "I did pick them by the pond at Otsuka Station," I said. She chuckled. "You are a weird one. Making jokes with a perfectly straight face." Chin in hand, she smoked half her cigarette, then crushed it out in the ashtray. She rubbed her eyes as if smoke had got into them. "Girls are supposed to be a little more elegant when they put out their cigarettes. You did that like a lumberjack. You shouldn't just cram it down in the ashtray but press it lightly around the edges of the ash. Then it doesn't get all bent up. And girls are never supposed to blow smoke through their noses. And most girls wouldn't talk about how they wore the same bra for three months when they're eating alone with a man." "I am a lumberjack," Midori said, scratching next to her nose. "I can never manage to be chic. I try it as a joke sometimes, but it never sticks. Any more critiques for me?" "Girls don't smoke Marlboro," I said. "What's the difference? One tastes as bad as another." She turned the red Marlboro packet over and over in her hand. "I started smoking last month. It's not as if I was dying for tobacco or anything. I just sort of felt like it." "Why's that?" I asked. She pressed her hands together on the table and thought about it for a while. "What's the difference? You don't smoke?" "Stopped in June," I said. "How come?" "It was a pain. I hated running out of smokes in the middle of the night. I don't like having something control me that way." "You're very clear about what you like and what you don't like," she said. "Maybe so," I said. "Maybe that's why people don't like me. Never have." "It's because you show it," she said. "You make it obvious you don't care whether people like you or not. That makes some people angry." She spoke in a near mumble, chin in hand. "But I like talking to you. The way you talk is so unusual. "I don't like having something control me that way'." I helped her wash the dishes. Standing next t o her, I wiped as she washed, and stacked everything on the worktop. "So," I said, "your family's out today?" "My mother's in her grave. She died two years ago." "Yeah, I heard that part." "My sister's on a date with her fiancProbably on a drive. Her boyfriend works for some car company. He loves cars. I don't love cars." Midori stopped talking and washed. I stopped talking and wiped. "And then there's my father," she said after some time had gone by. "Right," I said. "He went off to Uruguay in June last year and he's been there ever since." "Uruguay?! Why Uruguay?" "He was thinking of settling there, believe it or not. An old army buddy of his has a farm there. All of a sudden, my father announces he's going, too, that there's no limit to what he can do in Uruguay, and he gets on a plane and that's that. We tried hard to stop him, like, "Why do you want to go to a place like that? You can't speak the language, you've hardly ever left Tokyo.' But he wouldn't listen. Losing my mother was a real shock to him. I mean, it made him a little cuckoo. That's how much he loved her. Really." There was not much I could say in reply. I stared at Midori with my mouth open. "What do you think he said to my sister and me when our mother died? "I would much rather have lost the two of you than her.' It knocked the wind out of me. I couldn't say a word. You know what I mean? You just can't say something like that. OK, he lost the woman he loved, his partner for life. I understand the pain, the sadness, the heartbreak. I pity him. But you don't tell the daughters you fathered "You should have died in her place'. I mean, that's just too terrible. Don't you agree?" "Yeah, I see your point." "That's one wound that will never go away," she said, shaking her head. "But anyway, everyone in my family's a little different. We've all got something just a little bit strange." "So it seems," I said. "Still, it is wonderful for two people to love each other, don't you think? I mean, for a man to love his wife so much he can tell his daughters they should have died in her place "Maybe so, now that you put it that way." "And then he dumps the two of us and runs off to Uruguay." I wiped another dish without replying. After the last one, Midori put everything back in the cabinets. "So, have you heard from your father?" I asked. "One postcard. In March. But what does he write? "It's hot here' or "The fruit's not as good as I expected'. Stuff like that. I mean, give me a break! One stupid picture of a donkey! He's lost his marbles! He didn't even say whether he'd met that guy - that friend of his or whatever. He did add near the end that once he's settled he'll send for me and my sister, but not a word since then. And he never answers our letters." "What would you do if your father said "Come to Uruguay'?" "I'd go and have a look around at least. It might be fun. My sister says she'd absolutely refuse. She can't stand dirty things and dirty places." "Is Uruguay dirty?" "Who knows? She thinks it is. Like the roads are full of donkey shit and it's swarming with flies, and the toilets don't work, and lizards and scorpions crawl all over the place. She maybe saw a film like that. She can't stand flies, either. All she wants to do is drive through scenic places in fancy cars." "No way." "I mean, what's wrong with Uruguay? I'd go." "So who's running the shop?" "My sister, but she hates it. We have an uncle in the neighbourhood who helps out and makes deliveries. And I help when I have time. A bookshop's not exactly hard labour, so we can manage. If it gets to be too much, we'll sell the place." "Do you like your father?" Midori shook her head. "Not especially." "So how can you follow him to Uruguay?" "I believe in him." "Believe in him?" "yeah, I'm not that fond of him, but I believe in my father. How can I not believe in a man who gives up his house, his kids, his work, and runs off to Uruguay from the shock of losing his wife? Do you see what I mean?" I sighed. "Sort of, but not really." Midori laughed and patted me on the back. "Never mind," she said. "It really doesn't matter." One weird thing after another came up that Sunday afternoon. A fire broke out near Midori's house and, when we went up to the third-floor laundry deck to watch, we sort of kissed. It sounds stupid when I put it like that, but that was how things worked out. We were drinking coffee after the meal and talking about the university when we heard sirens. They got louder and louder and seemed to be increasing in number. Lots of people ran past the shop, some of them shouting. Midori went to a room facing the street, opened the window and looked down. "Wait here a minute," she said and disappeared; after which I heard feet pounding up stairs. I sat there drinking coffee alone and trying to remember where Uruguay was. Let's see, Brazil was over here, and Venezuela there, and Colombia somewhere over here, but I couldn't recall the location of Uruguay. A few minutes later Midori came down and urged me to hurry somewhere with her. I followed her to the end of the hall and climbed a steep, narrow stairway to a wooden deck with bamboo laundry poles. The deck was higher than most of the surrounding rooftops and gave a good view of the neighbourhood. Huge clouds of black smoke shot up from a place three or four houses away and flowed with the breeze out towards the high street. A burning smell filled the air. "It's Sakamoto's place," said Midori, leaning over the railing. "They used to make traditional door fittings and stuff. They went out of business some time ago, though." I leaned over the railing with her and strained to see what was going on. A three-storey building blocked our view of the fire, but there seemed to be three or four fire engines over there working on the blaze. No more than two of them could squeeze into the narrow lane where the house was burning, the rest standing by on the high street. The usual crowd of gawkers filled the area. "Hey, maybe you should gather your valuables together and get ready to evacuate this place," I said to Midori. "The wind's blowing the other way now, but it could change any time, and you've got a petrol station right there. I'll help you pack." "What valuables?" said Midori. "Well, you must have something you'd want to save - bankbooks, seals, legal papers, stuff like that. Emergency cash." "Forget it. I'm not running away." "Even if this place burns?" "You heard me. I don't mind dying." I looked her in the eye, and she looked straight at me. I couldn't tell if she was serious or joking. We stayed like that for a while, and soon I stopped worrying. "OK," I said. "I get it. I'll stay with you." "You'll die with me?" Midori asked with shining eyes. "No way," I said. "I'll run if it gets dangerous. If you want to die, you can do it alone." "Cold-hearted bastard!" "I'm not going to die with you just because you made lunch for me. Of course, if it had been dinner..." "Oh, well... Anyway, let's stay here and watch for a while. We can sing songs. And if something bad happens, we can think about it then." "Sing songs?" Midori brought two floor pillows, four cans of beer and a guitar from downstairs. We drank and watched the black smoke rising. She strummed and sang. I asked her if she didn't think this might anger the neighbours. Drinking beer and singing while you watched a local fire from the laundry deck didn't seem like the most admirable behaviour I could think of. "Forget it," she said. "We never worry about what the neighbours might think." She sang some of the folk songs she had played with her group. I would have been hard pressed to say she was good, but she did seem to enjoy her own music.