“I started playing the guitar here,” said Reiko. “There are no pianos in the rooms, of course. I’m self-taught, and I don’t have guitar hands, so I’ll never get very good, but I really love the instrument. It’s small and simple and easy, kind of like a warm little room.”
She played one more short Bach piece, something from a suite. Eyes on the candle flame, sipping wine, listening to Reiko’s Bach, I felt the tension inside me slipping away. When Reiko ended the Bach, Naoko asked her to play a Beatles song.
“Request time,” said Reiko, winking at me. “She makes me play Beatles every day, like I’m her music slave.”
Despite her protest, Reiko played a fine “Michelle.”
“That’s a good one,” she said. “I really like that song.” She took a sip of wine and puffed her cigarette. “It makes me feel like I’m in a big meadow in a soft rain.”
Then she played “Nowhere Man” and “Julia.” Now and then as she played, she would close her eyes and shake her head. Afterward she would go back to the wine and the cigarette.
“Play ‘Norwegian Wood,’” said Naoko.
Reiko brought a porcelain beckoning cat from the kitchen. It was a coin bank, and Naoko dropped a hundred-yen piece from her purse into its slot.
“What’s this all about?” I asked.
“It’s a rule,” said Naoko. “When I request ‘Norwegian Wood,’ I have to put a hundred yen into the bank. It’s my favorite, so I make a point of paying for it. I make a request when I really want to hear it.”
“And that way I get my cigarette money!” said Reiko.
Reiko gave her fingers a good flexing and then played “Norwegian Wood.” Again she played with real feeling, but never allowed it to become sentimental. I took a hundred-yen coin from my pocket and dropped it into the bank.
“Thank you,” said Reiko with a sweet smile.
“That song can make me feel so sad,” said Naoko. “I don’t know, I guess I imagine myself wandering in a deep wood. I’m all alone and it’s cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me. That’s why Reiko never plays it unless I request it.”
“Sounds like Casablanca!” Reiko said with a laugh.
She followed “Norwegian Wood” with a few bossa novas while I kept my eyes on Naoko. As she had said in her letter, she looked healthier than before, suntanned, her body firmed up from exercise and outdoor work. Her eyes were the same deep, clear pools they had always been, and her small lips still trembled shyly, but overall her beauty had begun to change to that of a mature woman. Almost gone now was the sharp edge—the chilling sharpness of a thin blade—that could be glimpsed in the shadows of her beauty, in the place of which there hovered now a uniquely soothing, quiet calm. I felt moved by this new, gentle beauty of hers, and amazed to think that a woman could change so much in the course of half a year. I felt as drawn to her as ever, perhaps more than before, but the thought of what she had lost in the meantime also gave me cause for regret. Never again would she have that self-centered beauty that seems to take its own, independent course in adolescent girls and no one else.
Naoko said she wanted to hear about how I was spending my days. I talked about the student strike, and about Nagasawa. This was the first time I had ever said anything to her about him. I found it challenging to give her an accurate account of his odd humanity, his unique philosophy, and his uncentered morality, but Naoko seemed finally to grasp what I was trying to tell her. I hid the fact that I went out hunting girls with him, revealing only that the one person in the dorm I spent any real time with was this unusual guy. All the while, Reiko went through another practice of the Bach fugue she had played before, taking occasional breaks for wine and cigarettes.
“He sounds like a strange person,” said Naoko.
“He is strange,” I said.
“But you like him?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I can’t say I like him. Nagasawa is beyond liking or not liking. He doesn’t try to be liked. In that sense, he’s a very honest guy, even stoic. He doesn’t try to fool anybody.”
“‘Stoic,’ sleeping with all those girls? Now that is weird,” said Naoko, laughing. “How many girls has he slept with?”
“It’s probably up to eighty now,” I said. “But in his case, the higher the numbers go, the less each individual act seems to mean. Which is what I think he’s trying to accomplish.”
“And you call that ‘stoic’?”
“For him it is.”
Naoko thought about my words for a minute. “I think he’s a lot sicker in the head that I am,” she said.
“So do I,” I said. “But he can put all his warped qualities into a logical system. He’s brilliant. If you brought him here, he’d be out in two days. ‘Oh, sure, I know all that,’ he’d say. ‘I understand everything you’re doing here.’ He’s that kind of guy. The kind people respect.”
“I guess I’m the opposite of brilliant,” said Naoko. “I don’t understand anything they’re doing here—any better than I understand myself.”
“It’s not because you’re not smart,” I said. “You’re normal. I’ve got tons of things I don’t understand about myself. We’re both normal: ordinary.”
Naoko raised her feet to the edge of the sofa and rested her chin on her knees. “I want to know more about you,” she said.
“I’m just an ordinary guy—ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary grades, ordinary thoughts in my head.”
“You’re such a big Scott Fitzgerald fan … wasn’t he the one who said you shouldn’t trust anybody who calls himself an ordinary man? You lent me the book!” said Naoko with a mischievous smile.
“True,” I said. “But this is no affectation. I really, truly believe deep down that I’m an ordinary person. Can you find something in me that’s not ordinary?”
“Of course I can!” said Naoko with a hint of impatience. “Don’t you get it? Why do you think I slept with you? Because I was so drunk I would have slept with anyone?”
“No, of course I don’t think that,” I said.
Naoko remained silent for a long time, staring at her toes. At a loss for words, I took another drink of wine.
“How many girls have you slept with, Toru?” Naoko asked in a tiny voice as if the thought had just crossed her mind.
“Eight or nine,” I answered truthfully.
Reiko plopped the guitar into her lap. “You’re not even twenty years old!” she said. “What kind of life are you leading?”
Naoko kept silent and watched me with those clear eyes of hers. I told Reiko about the first girl I’d slept with and how we had broken up. I had found it impossible to love her, I explained. I went on to tell her about my sleeping with one girl after another under Nagasawa’s tutelage.
“I’m not trying to make excuses, but I was in pain,” I said to Naoko. “Here I was, seeing you almost every week, and talking with you, and knowing that the only one in your heart was Kizuki. It hurt. It really hurt. And I think that’s why I slept with girls I didn’t know.”
Naoko shook her head for a few moments, and then she raised her face to look at me. “You asked me that time why I had never slept with Kizuki, didn’t you? Do you still want to know?”
“I guess it’s something I really ought to know,” I said.
“I think so, too,” said Naoko. “The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”
I nodded. Reiko played the same difficult passage over and over, trying to get it right.
“I was ready to sleep with him,” said Naoko, unclasping her barrette and letting her hair down. She toyed with the butterfly shape in her hands. “And of course he wanted to sleep with me. So we tried. We tried a lot. But it never worked. We couldn’t do it. I didn’t know why then, and I still don’t know why. I loved him, and I wasn’t worried about losing my virginity. I would have been glad to do anything he wanted. But it never worked.”
Naoko lifted the hair she had let down and fastened it with the
barrette.
“I couldn’t get wet,” she said in a tiny voice. “I never opened to him. So it always hurt. I was just too dry, it hurt too much. We tried everything we could think of—creams and things—but still it hurt me. So I used my fingers, or my lips. I would always do it for him that way. You know what I mean.”
I nodded in silence.
Naoko cast her gaze through the window at the moon, which looked bigger and brighter now than it had before. “I never wanted to talk about any of this,” she said. “I wanted to shut it up in my heart. I wish I still could. But I have to talk about it. I don’t know the answer. I mean, I was plenty wet the time I slept with you, wasn’t I?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“I was wet from the minute you walked into my apartment the night of my twentieth birthday. I wanted you to hold me. I wanted you to take my clothes off and touch me all over and to get inside me. I had never felt like that before. Why is that? Why do things happen that way? I mean, I really loved him.”
“And not me,” I said. “You want to know why you felt that way about me even though you didn’t love me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Naoko. “I don’t mean to hurt you, but this much you have to understand: Kizuki and I had a truly special relationship. We had been together from the time we were three. It’s how we grew up: always together, always talking, understanding each other perfectly. The first time we kissed—it was in the sixth grade—was just wonderful. The first time I had my period, I ran to him and cried like a baby. We were that close. So after he died, I didn’t know how to relate to other people. I didn’t know what it means to love another person.”
She reached for her wineglass on the table but managed only to knock it onto the floor, spilling the wine on the carpet. I crouched down and retrieved the glass, setting it on the table. Did she want to drink some more? I asked. Naoko remained silent for a while, then suddenly burst into tears, trembling all over. Slumping forward, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed with all the suffocating violence she had had that night with me. Reiko laid her guitar down and sat by Naoko, caressing her back. When she put an arm across Naoko’s shoulders, Naoko pressed her face against Reiko’s chest like a baby.
“You know,” Reiko said to me, “it might be a good idea for you to go out for a little walk. Maybe twenty minutes. Sorry, but I think that would help.”
I nodded and stood, pulling a sweater on over my shirt. “Thanks for stepping in,” I said to Reiko.
“Don’t mention it,” she said with a wink. “This is not your fault. Don’t worry, by the time you come back she’ll be O.K.”
My feet carried me down the road, which was illuminated by the oddly unreal light of the moon, and into the woods. Beneath that moonlight, all sounds bore a strange reverberation. The hollow sound of my own footsteps seemed to come from another direction as if I were hearing someone walking on the bottom of the sea. Behind me, every now and then, I would hear a crack or a rustle. A heavy pall hung over the forest, as if the animals of the night were holding their breath, waiting for me to pass.
Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul’s dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching it the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night.
WHEN I WALKED BACK to the front entrance of the building half an hour later, I could hear Reiko practicing the guitar. I padded up the stairs and tapped on the apartment door. Inside I found no sign of Naoko. Reiko sat alone on the carpet, playing her guitar. She pointed toward the bedroom door to let me know Naoko was in there. Then she set the guitar down on the floor and took a seat on the sofa, inviting me to sit next to her and dividing what wine was left between our two glasses.
“Naoko is fine,” she said, touching my knee. “Don’t worry, all she has to do is rest for a while. She’ll calm down. She was just a little upset. How about taking a walk with me in the meantime?”
“Good,” I said.
Reiko and I ambled down a road illuminated by streetlamps. When we reached the area by the tennis and basketball courts, we sat on a bench. She picked up a basketball from under the bench and turned it in her hands. Then she asked me if I played tennis. I knew how to play, I said, but I was bad at it.
“How about basketball?”
“Not my strongest sport,” I said.
“What is your strongest sport?” Reiko asked, wrinkling the corners of her eyes with a smile. “Aside from sleeping with girls.”
“I’m not so good at that, either,” I said, stung by her words.
“Just kidding,” she said. “Don’t get mad. But really, though, what are you good at?”
“Nothing special. I have things I like to do.”
“For instance?”
“Hiking trips. Swimming. Reading.”
“You like to do things alone, then?”
“I guess so. I could never get excited about games you play with other people. I can’t get into them. I lose interest.”
“Then you have to come here in the winter. We do cross-country skiing. I’m sure you’d like that, tramping around in the snow all day, working up a good sweat.” Under the streetlamp, Reiko stared at her right hand as if she were inspecting an antique musical instrument.
“Does Naoko get like that often?” I asked.
“Every now and then,” said Reiko, now looking at her left hand. “Every once in a while she’ll get worked up and cry like that. But that’s O.K. She’s letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That’s when you’re in big trouble.”
“Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”
“Not a thing. Don’t worry. Just speak your mind honestly. That’s the best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and somebody may get worked up the way Naoko did, but in the long run it’s the best thing. That’s what you should do if you’re serious about making Naoko well again. Like I told you in the beginning, you should think not so much about wanting to help her as wanting to recover yourself by helping her to recover. That’s the way it’s done here. So you have to be honest and say everything that comes to mind while you’re here at least. Nobody does that in the outside world, right?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“I’ve seen all kinds of people come and go in my seven years here,” said Reiko, “maybe too many people. So I can usually tell by looking at a person whether they’re going to get better or not, almost by instinct. But in Naoko’s case, I’m not sure. I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to her. For all I know, she could be a-hundred-percent recovered next month, or she could go on like this for years. So I really can’t tell you what to do aside from the most generalized kind of advice: to be honest, or to help each other.”
“What makes Naoko such a hard case for you?”
“Probably because I like her so much. I think my emotions get in the way and I can’t see her clearly. I mean, I really like her. But aside from that, she has a bunch of different problems that are all tangled up, so it’s hard to unravel any one of them. It may take a very long time to undo them all, or something could trigger them to come unraveled all at once. It’s kind of like that. Which is why I can’t be sure about her.”
She picked up the basketball again, twirled it in her hands, and bounced it on the ground.
“The most important thing is not to let yourself get impatient,” Reiko said. “This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to figure it’s going to b
e a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time. Do you think you can do that?”
“I can try,” I said.
“It may take a very long time, you know, and even then she may not recover completely. Have you thought about that?”
I nodded.
“Waiting is hard,” she said, bouncing the ball. “Especially for someone your age. You just sit and wait for her to get better. Without deadlines or guarantees. Do you think you can do that? Do you love Naoko that much?”
“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “Like Naoko, I’m not really sure what it means to love another person. Though she meant it a little differently. I do want to try my best, though. I have to, or else I won’t know where to go. Like you said before, Naoko and I have to save each other. It’s the only way for either of us to be saved.”
“And are you going to go on sleeping with girls you pick up?”
“I don’t know what to do about that either,” I said. “What do you think? Should I just keep waiting and masturbating? I’m not in complete control there, either.”
Reiko set the ball on the ground and patted my knee. “Look,” she said, “I’m not telling you to stop sleeping with girls. If you’re O.K. with that, then it’s O.K. It’s your life after all, it’s something you have to decide. All I’m saying is you shouldn’t use yourself up in some unnatural form. Do you see what I’m getting at? It would be such a waste. The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older. It’s true. So think about it carefully. If you want to take care of Naoko, take care of yourself, too.”
I said I would think about it.
“I was twenty once myself. Once upon a time. Would you believe it?”
“I believe it. Of course.”
“Deep down?”
“Deep down,” I said with a smile.
“And I was cute, too. Not as cute as Naoko, but pretty damn cute. I didn’t have all these wrinkles.”