“Now you tell me,” she said. “Why didn’t you answer today when they called the roll? 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 her sunglasses off again, set them on the table, and looked at me as if she were staring into the cage of some rare animal at the 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 cream.
“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 like sweets. I think you’ve got me all wrong.”
“Why are you so tanned?”
“I’ve been hiking around the last couple of weeks. Backpack. 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, leaning her cheek on her hand. “Traveling alone, eating alone, sitting off 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.”
“Say, tell me,” she said, “do you take lecture notes? In drama?”
“Sure 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, and pulled the notebook from my bag. After checking to make sure I hadn’t written anything in it I didn’t want seen, I handed it to Midori.
“Thanks,” she said. “Are you coming to school the day after tomorrow?”
“Sure am.”
“Meet me here at noon. I’ll give you back your notebook and buy you lunch. I mean … it’s not like you get an upset stomach or anything if you don’t eat alone, right?”
“No way,” I said. “But you don’t have to buy me lunch just ’cause I’m lending you my notebook.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I like to buy people lunch. But anyhow, 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 a few minutes later, 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 came, 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 the beer buzz 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 class.
When the lecture ended, 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 northwest suburb, Toshima, with her family. I slipped into a phone booth and dialed the number.
A man answered: “Kobayashi Bookstore.” Kobayashi Bookstore?
“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 taken sick? 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 store.” I thought about a few other possibilities until thinking itself became a bother, then I went back to the dorm and stretched out on my bed, finishing a copy of Conrad’s Lord Jim that I had borrowed from Nagasawa. When I was through, I went to Nagasawa’s room to give it back.
Nagasawa was on his way out to the dining hall, so I went with him and ate supper.
“How’d the exams go?” I asked. The second round of upper-level exams for the Foreign Ministry had been held in August.
“Like 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 ninety-five percent 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. See 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.
r /> “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 B.A. from a second-rate private college. 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 we were finished with supper, he said, “You know, Watanabe, I have this feeling like, maybe ten years or twenty years after we get out of this place, we’re going to meet up 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 was not there, I took my usual seat in the front row and wrote a letter to Naoko while I waited for the professor to come. 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 would think of you. Now that I can no longer see you, I realize how much I needed you. School is incredibly boring, but as a matter of self-discipline I am going to all my classes 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 don’t care.”
I filled four sheets of letter paper, folded it, slipped it into an envelope, and addressed it to Naoko care of her family.
By then the professor had arrived, wiping the sweat from his brow as he took the roll. He was a small, mournful-looking 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, the professor 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 it was in Aeschylus or Sophocles. He had been talking for some fifteen minutes when the classroom door opened and in walked Midori. She was wearing a dark blue sport shirt, cream-colored cotton slacks, and her usual sunglasses. After flashing a “sorry I’m late” kind of smile toward 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 mad?”
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 and thin and pale, the other short and round and dark and totally unsuited to the long beard he wore. The tall one carried an armload 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 period 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 his 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 guy’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 guy said something to me at that point, but I couldn’t catch it. Midori waved to him and said, “See ya later.”
“Gee, are we counterrevolutionaries?” Midori asked me when we were outside. “Are we going to be strung up on telephone poles if the revolution succeeds?”
“Let’s have lunch first, just in case.”
“Good. There’s a place I want to take you. It’s kinda far, though. Can you spare the time?”
“Sure, I’m O.K. until my two o’clock class.”
Midori took me to Yotsuya by bus and showed me to a fancy boxed-lunch specialty 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 high school. My old school’s right 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 scratching at the corners of her eyes with the tip of her little finger.
“Tired?” I asked.
“Kinda. I’m not getting enough sleep. But I’m O.K., 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 you sleep.”
Midori rested her cheek on her hand and smiled at me. “What a nice guy you are.”
“Not nice. Just got 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. Anybody can do that.”
She nodded once or twice and started playing with the bracelet again. “I never would have thought of that. I guess I could have looked your number up. Anyhow, about the hospital, I’ll tell you next time. I don’t feel like it now. Sorry.”
“That’s O.K. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, you’re not pryi
ng. I’m just kinda tired. Like a monkey in the rain.”
“Don’t you think you ought to go home and get some sleep?”
“Not now. Let’s get out of here.”
SHE TOOK ME to her old high 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 had met that day because we were supposed to meet. If we hadn’t met then and there, we would have met somewhere else sometime. 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 the building where she used to go to high school. Ivy clung to the walls, and pigeons huddled beneath the gables, resting their wings. It was a nice old building with character. A great oak tree stood in the schoolyard, 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 without warning.
“No idea,” I said.
“They’re burning sanitary napkins.”
“No kidding.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Sanitary napkins, tampons, stuff like that,” Midori said with a smile. “It is a girls’ school. The old janitor 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 in junior and senior high. So figure nine hundred of them have started their periods, and maybe a fifth of those are having their periods at any one time: one hundred and eighty girls. That’s a hundred and eighty girls’ worth of napkins in the receptacles every day.”
“I bet you’re right—though I’m not so sure about the figures.”
“Anyhow, it’s a lot. One hundred and eighty girls. What do you think it feels like to collect and burn that much stuff?”