Norwegian Wood (3 page)

The filth of these all-male rooms was horrifying. Moldy mandarin orange skins clung to the bottoms of wastebaskets. Empty cans used for ashtrays held mounds of cigarette butts, and when these started to smolder 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
ramen
wrappers and empty beer cans and lids from one thing or another. It never occurred to anyone to sweep up and throw these things in a wastebasket. Any wind that blew through would raise clouds of dust. Each room had its own horrendous smell, but the components of that smell were the same: sweat and body odor and garbage. 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 odors beyond redemption. In retrospect, it seems amazing that these shit piles 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 laundered once a month. My roommate was clean crazy. None of the others in the dorm believed me when I told them about the curtains. They didn’t know that curtains
could
be laundered. They believed, rather, that curtains were semipermanent parts of the window. “There’s something wrong with that guy,” they’d say, labeling him a Nazi or a storm trooper.

We didn’t even have pinups. No, we had a photo of an Amsterdam canal. I had put up a nude shot, but my roommate 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 jerk off to 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 pulled Storm Trooper as a roommate, 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 roommate made things easier for me in many ways. He did all the cleaning, he took care of sunning the mattresses, he threw out the trash. 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 nose hair. The one thing that bothered me was the way he’d spray clouds of insecticide if he noticed a single bug in the room, because then I had to take refuge in a neighboring shit pile.

Storm Trooper was majoring in geography at a national university.

As he said it the first time we met, “I’m studying muh-muh-maps.”

“You like maps?” I asked.

“Yup. When I graduate, I’m going to work for the Geographical Survey Institute and make muh-muh-maps.”

I was impressed anew 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 map making. 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-percent certainty.

“Wha-what are
you
going to major in?” he asked me.

“Drama,” I said.

“Gonna put on plays?”

“Nah, just read scripts and do research. Racine, Ionesco, Shakespeare, like that.”

He said he had heard of Shakespeare but not the others. I hardly knew anything about the others myself, had just seen their names in lecture handouts.

“You like plays?” he asked.

“Not especially,” I said.

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 muh-muh-maps, so I decided to come to Tokyo and get my parents to se-send me money so I could study muh-muh-maps. But not you, huh?”

His approach made more sense than mine. I gave up trying to explain myself to him. Then we drew lots (matchsticks) to choose bunks. He got the upper bunk, I got the lower.

Tall, with a crewcut and high cheekbones, he always wore the same outfit: white shirt, black pants, black shoes, navy blue sweater. To these he would add a uniform jacket and black briefcase when he went to his school: a typical right-wing student. Which is why everybody called him Storm Trooper. But in fact he was 100-percent 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 rail 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—forever. 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 Calisthenics 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 stayed unconscious—until the part where the jumping started. 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 anymore.

“Hey, can you do that on the roof or someplace?” I said. “I can’t sleep.”

“But it’s already six-thirty!” he said, open-mouthed.

“Yeah, I
know
it’s six-thirty. I’m still supposed to be asleep. I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but that’s how it works for me.”

“Anyhow, 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 Calisthenics 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.

“O.K., let’s compromise,” I said. “Do your exercises but cut out the jumping part. It’s so damned noisy. Whaddya say?”

“Juh-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 at least I wanted to finish making my point. I got out of bed and started bouncing up and down and singing the opening melody of NHK’s Radio Calisthenics. “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 he tried to comfort me.

“Gee, Watanabe, why don’t you just get up and exercise with me?” And he went off to breakfast.

N
AOKO CHUCKLED
when I told her the story of Storm Trooper and his Radio Calisthenics. 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 off-and-on showers of the morning had cleared up before noon, and a south wind had swept away the low-hanging clouds. The cherry trees’ brilliant green leaves stirred in the air and splashed sunlight in all directions. This was an early summer day. The people we passed had their sweaters 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 short pants. 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 gray sweatshirt up to her elbows. The shirt was nicely faded, having obviously been laundered 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. I guess 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 pants pocket. Then she bent over and carefully retied her shoes.

“Do you think I could do it?”

“What? Live in a dorm?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I guess it’s all a matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to—the rules, the jerks who think they’re hot shit, the roommates doing Radio Calisthenics at six-thirty in the morning. But if you figure 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 movie by herself, and I was headed for the bookstores 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 yard 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 barrette, 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 sometimes it would be something to which I had no way 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 Iidabashi, 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 trolley 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. From the time we gave our order until the time we finished eating, neither of us said a word. 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.