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 sweater. Having worn out one pair of shoes, I bought some new ones, of suede.
I can’t seem to recall what we talked about then. Nothing special, I would guess. We continued to avoid any mention of the past and rarely mentioned 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 classmate (a girl in geography, of course) but came back in the early evening looking glum. “Tell me, Wa-Wa-Watanabe, what do you talk about with gir-gir-girls?” I don’t remember how I answered him, but he had picked the wrong guy 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 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 guess 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 duffle 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 the broad, withered leaves of sycamore on the roads. 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 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 barrette, 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 if I did that. 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 razz 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 color underwear had she been wearing that day? I gave them the answers they wanted.
AND SO I WENT from eighteen to nineteen. Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each 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 in classes, 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 on Saturday nights, 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 favorites again and again. Back then it was Truman Capote, John Updike, Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, but I didn’t see anyone else in my classes 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 eighteen my favorite book was John Updike’s The Centaur, but after I had read it any number of times, it began to lose some of its initial luster 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, if 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 I, and because he was majoring in 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 through,” I said, “and every time I find something new that I like even more than the last time.”
“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 strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty 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 a
dded, “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 the 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 been dead only twenty-eight 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 grades, he would take the Civil Service Exam, join the Foreign Ministry, and become a diplomat. He came from a super 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 his 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 grades, 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 easily, 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 favorable 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 my relationship with 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 through the dorm. According to one, he supposedly once ate three slugs. Another gave him a huge penis and had him sleeping with over a hundred 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 freshmen and the upperclassmen. Started in April and finally came to a head in September. I went to work things out with the upperclassmen as freshman representative. Real right-wing assholes. 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, ‘O.K., let’s see you swallow a couple of slugs.’ ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘let’s have ’em.’ The sons of bitches 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 just 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 bunch 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 upperclassmen. 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 bath with him. He had a big one, all right. But a hundred girls was probably an exaggeration. “Maybe seventy-five,” he said. “I can’t remember them all, but I’m sure it’s at least seventy.” 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 like nothing.”
I didn’t believe him, but he turned out to be right. It was easy. Almost too easy, with all the excitement of stale beer. We went to a bar in Shibuya or Shinjuku (he had his favorites), 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 as fascinating to them as he was. Nagasawa would urge me to talk, and girls would respond to me with the same smiles of admiration they gave him. His magic did it, a real talent he had that impressed me every time. Compared with Nagasawa, Kizuki’s conversational gift was child’s play. This was a whole 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 underwear 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 makeup as 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 seventy 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 Dostoyevsky 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 spigot. 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 of college in the dormitory. Not that it mattered much to Nagasawa himself. He was not going to let a few rules bother him. Whenever he felt like it, he would get overnight permission and go girl hunting or spend the night in his girlfriend’s apartment. 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.