NORWEGIAN WOOD — by Haruki Murakami

Chapter 11

REIKO WROTE TO ME SEVERAL TIMES AFTER NAOKO’S DEATH. IT was not my fault, she said. It was nobody’s fault, any more than you could blame someone for the rain. But I never answered her. What could I have said? What good would it have done? Naoko no longer existed in this world; she had become a fistful of ash.

They held a quiet funeral for Naoko in Kobe at the end of August, and when it was over, I went back to Tokyo. I told my landlord I would be away for a while and my boss at the Italian restaurant that I wouldn’t be coming in to work. To Midori I wrote a short note: I couldn’t say anything just yet, but I hoped she would wait for me a little longer. I spent the next three days in movie theaters, and after I had seen every new movie in Tokyo, I packed my knapsack, took all my money out of the bank, went to Shinjuku Station, and took the first express train I could find heading out of town.

Where I went in my travels, it’s impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in which I traveled from place to place. I would move from town to town by train or bus or hitching a ride in a truck, spreading my sleeping bag out in empty lots or stations or parks or on riverbanks or the seashore. I once got them to let me sleep in the corner of a neighborhood police station, and another time slept by the side of a graveyard. I didn’t care where I slept, as long as I was out of people’s way and could stay in my sack as long as I felt like it. Exhausted from walking, I would crawl into my sleeping bag, gulp down some cheap whiskey, and go right to sleep. In nice towns, people would bring me food and mosquito coils, and in not-so-nice towns, people would call the police and have me chased out of parks. It made no difference to me one way or the other. All I wanted was to put myself to sleep in towns I didn’t know.

When I ran low on money, I would work as a laborer for a few days until I had what I needed. There was always some work for me to do. I just kept moving from one town to the next, no destination in mind. The world was big and full of weird things and strange people. One time I called Midori because I had to hear her voice.

“School started a long time ago, you know,” she said. “Some courses are even asking for papers already. What are you going to do? Do you realize you’ve been out of touch for three whole weeks now? Where are you? What are you doing?”

“Sorry, but I can’t go back to Tokyo yet. Not yet.”

“And that’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“There’s really nothing more I can say at this point. Maybe in October …”

Midori hung up without a word.

I went on with my travels. Every once in a while, I’d stay at a flophouse and take a bath and shave. What I saw in the mirror looked terrible. The sun had dried my skin out, my eyes were sunken, and some odd stains and cuts marked my bony cheeks. I looked as if I had just crawled out of a cave somewhere, but it was me after all. It was me.

By that time, I was moving down the coast as far from Tokyo as I could get—maybe in Tottori or the northern shore of Hyogo. Walking along the seashore was easy. I could always find a comfortable place to sleep in the sand. I’d make a fire from driftwood and roast some dried fish I bought from a local fisherman. Then I’d swallow some whiskey and listen to the waves while I thought about Naoko. It was too strange to think that she was dead and no longer part of this world. I couldn’t absorb the truth of it. I couldn’t believe it. I had heard the nails being driven into the lid of her coffin, but I still couldn’t adjust to the fact that she had returned to nothingness.

No, the image of her was still too vivid in my memory. I could still see her enclosing my penis in her mouth, her hair falling across my belly. I could still feel her warmth, her breath against me, and that helpless moment when I could do nothing but come. I could bring all this back as clearly as if it had happened five minutes earlier, and I felt sure that Naoko was still beside me, that I could just reach out and touch her. But no, she was not there; her flesh no longer existed in this world.

Nights when it was impossible for me to sleep, the images of Naoko would come back to me. There was no way I could stop them. Too many memories of her were crammed inside me, and as soon as one of them found the slightest opening, the rest would force their way out in an endless stream, an unstoppable flood: Naoko in her yellow rain cape cleaning the birdhouse and carrying the feed bag that rainy morning; the caved-in birthday cake and the feel of Naoko’s tears soaking through my shirt (yes, it had been raining then, too); Naoko walking beside me in winter wearing her camel’s hair coat; Naoko touching the barrette she always wore; Naoko peering at me with those incredibly clear eyes of hers; Naoko sitting on the sofa, legs drawn up beneath her blue nightgown, chin resting on her knees.

The memories would slam against me like the waves of an incoming tide, sweeping my body along to some strange new place—a place where I lived with the dead. There Naoko lived, and I could speak with her and hold her in my arms. Death in that place was not a decisive element that brought life to an end. There, death was but one of many elements comprising life. There Naoko lived with death inside her. And to me she said, “Don’t worry, it’s only death. Don’t let it bother you.”

I felt no sadness in that strange place. Death was death, and Naoko was Naoko. “What’s the problem?” she asked me with a bashful smile, “I’m here, aren’t I?” Her familiar little gestures soothed my heart and gave me healing. “If this is death,” I thought to myself, “then death is not so bad.” “It’s true,” said Naoko, “death is nothing much. It’s just death. Things are so easy for me here.” Naoko spoke to me in the spaces between the crashing of the dark waves.

Eventually, though, the tide would pull back, and I would be left on the beach alone. Powerless, I could go nowhere; sorrow itself would envelop me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was crying than that the tears were simply oozing out of me like perspiration.

I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.”

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whiskey, bread, and water.

ONE WINDY EVENING, as I lay wrapped in my sleeping bag, weeping, by the side of an abandoned hulk, a young fisherman happened by and offered me a cigarette. I accepted it and had my first smoke in over a year. He asked why I was crying, and almost by reflex I told him that my mother had died. I couldn’t take the sadness, I said, and so I was on the road. He expressed his deep sympathy and brought a big bottle of sake and two glasses from his house.

The wind tore along the sandy beach as we sat there drinking. He told me that he had lost his mother when he was sixteen. Never healthy, she had worn herself out working from morning to night. I half-listened to him, sipping my sake and grunting in response every now and then. I felt as if I were hearing a story from some far-off world. What the hell was this guy talking about? I wondered, and all of a sudden an intense rage struck me; I wanted to wring his neck. Who gives a damn about your mother? I lost Naoko! Her beautiful flesh has vanished from this world! Why the hell are you telling me about your goddamn mother?!

But my rage disappeared as quickly as it had flared up. I closed my eyes and went on half-listening to the fisherman’s endless talk. Eventually he asked me if I had eaten. No, I said, but in my knapsack I had bread and cheese, a tomato, and a piece of chocolate. What had I eaten for lunch? he asked. Bread and cheese, tomato, and chocolate, I answered. “Wait here,” he said, and ran off. I tried to stop him, but he disappeared into the darkness without looking back.

All I could do was go on drinking my sake. The shore was littered with paper flecks from fireworks that had been exploded on the sand, and waves crashed against the beach with a mad roar. A scrawny dog came along wagging its tail and sniffing around my little campfire for something to eat but eventually gave up and wandered off.

The young fisherman came back a half hour later with two boxes of sushi and a new bottle of sake. I should eat the top box right away because that had fish in it, he said, but the bottom box had only nori rolls and deep-fried tofu skins so they would last through tomorrow. He filled both our glasses with sake from the new bottle. I thanked him and polished off the whole top box myself, though it had more than enough for two. After we had drunk as much sake as we could manage, he offered to put me up for the night, but when I said I would rather sleep alone on the beach, he left it at that. As he stood to go, he took a folded five-thousand-yen note from his pocket and shoved it into the pocket of my shirt. “Here,” he said, “get yourself some healthy food. You look awful.” I said he had done more than enough for me and that I couldn’t accept money on top of everything else, but he refused to take it back. “It’s not money,” he said, “it’s my feelings. Don’t think about it too much, just take it.” All I could do was thank him and accept the money.

When he had gone, I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?

A wave of nausea came over me, and I vomited by the old ship. My head hurt from too much sake, and I felt bad about having lied to the fisherman and taken his money. It was time for me to get back to Tokyo, I decided; I couldn’t keep this up forever. I stuffed my sleeping bag into my knapsack, slipped my arms through the straps, and walked to the local railway station. I told the man at the ticket window that I wanted to go to Tokyo as soon as possible. He checked his schedule and said I could make it as far as Osaka by morning if I transferred from one night train to another, then I could take the bullet train from there. I thanked him and used the five-thousand-yen bill I had gotten from the fisherman to buy a ticket to Tokyo. Waiting for the train, I bought a newspaper and checked the date: October 2, 1970. So I had been traveling for a full month. I knew I had to go back to the real world.

The month of traveling neither lifted my spirits nor softened the blow of Naoko’s death. I arrived back in Tokyo in pretty much the same state in which I had left. I couldn’t even bring myself to phone Midori. What could I say to her? How could I begin? “It’s all over now; you and I can be happy together”? No, that was out of the question. However I might phrase it, though, the facts were the same: Naoko was dead, and Midori was still here. Naoko was a pile of white ash, and Midori was a living, breathing human being.

I was overcome with a sense of my own defilement. Though I returned to Tokyo I did nothing for days but shut myself up in my room. My memory remained fixed on the dead rather than the living. The rooms I had set aside in there for Naoko were shuttered, the furniture draped in white, the windowsills dusty. I spent the better part of each day in those rooms. And I thought about Kizuki. “So you finally made Naoko yours,” I heard myself telling him. “Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now, maybe, she’s where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko. I tried to establish a new life for the two of us. But forget it, Kizuki. I’m giving her to you. You’re the one she chose, after all. In woods as dark as the depths of her own heart, she hanged herself. Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another part of me into that world. Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.

THE FOURTH DAY after my return to Tokyo, I got a letter from Reiko. Special delivery. It was a simple note: “I haven’t been able to get in touch with you for weeks, and I’m worried. Please give me a call. At nine A.M. and nine P.M. I will be waiting by the telephone.”

I called her at nine o’clock that night. Reiko picked up after one ring.

“Are you O.K.?” she asked.

“More or less,” I said.

“Do you mind if I come visit you the day after tomorrow?”

“Visit me? You mean here in Tokyo?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. I want to have a good long talk with you.”

“You’re leaving the sanatorium?”

“It’s the only way I can come see you, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s about time for me to get out of this place. I’ve been here eight years, after all. If they keep me any longer, I’ll start to rot.”

I found it difficult to speak. After a short silence, Reiko went on, “I’ll be on the three-twenty bullet train the day after tomorrow. Will you meet me at the station? Do you still remember what I look like? Or have you lost interest in me now that Naoko’s dead?”

“No way,” I said. “See you at Tokyo Station the day after tomorrow at three-twenty.”

“You won’t have any trouble recognizing me. I’m the old lady with the guitar case. There aren’t many of those.”

AND IN FACT, I had no trouble finding Reiko in the crowd. She wore a man’s tweed jacket, white slacks, and red sneakers. Her hair was as short as ever, with the usual clumps sticking up. In her right hand she held a brown leather suitcase, and in her left hand a black guitar case. She gave me a big, wrinkly smile the moment she spotted me, and I found myself smiling back. I took her suitcase and walked beside her to the train for the western suburbs.

“Hey, Watanabe, how long have you been wearing that awful face? Or is that the ‘in’ look in Tokyo these days?”

“I was traveling for a while, ate junk the whole time,” I said. “How’d you like the bullet train?”

“Awful!” she said. “You can’t open the windows. I wanted to buy a boxed lunch from one of the platform vendors.”

“They sell them on board, you know.”

“Yeah, overpriced plastic sandwiches. A starving horse wouldn’t touch that stuff. I always used to enjoy the boxed lunches at Gotenba Station.”

“Once upon a time, before the bullet train.”

“Well, I’m from once upon a time before the bullet train!”

On the way out to Kichijoji, Reiko watched the Musashino landscape passing the train window with all the curiosity of a tourist.

“Has it changed much in eight years?” I asked.

“You don’t know what I’m feeling now, do you, Watanabe?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’m scared,” she said. “So scared, I could go crazy just like that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, flung out here all by myself.” She paused. “But ‘Go crazy just like that.’ Kind of a cool expression, don’t you think?”

I smiled and took her hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re gonna be O.K. Your own strength got you this far.”

“It wasn’t my own strength that got me out of that place,” Reiko said. “It was Naoko and you. I couldn’t stand it there without Naoko, and I had to come to Tokyo to talk with you. That’s all. If nothing had happened I probably would’ve spent the rest of my life there.”

I nodded.

“What’re you planning to do from now on?” I asked Reiko.

“I’m going to Asahikawa,” she said. “Way up in the wilds of Hokkaido! An old college friend of mine runs a music school there, and she’s been asking me for two or three years now to help her out. I told her it was too cold for me. I mean, I finally get my freedom back and I’m supposed to go to Asahikawa? It’s kinda hard to get excited about a place like that—some hole in the ground.”

“It’s not so awful,” I said, laughing. “I’ve been there. It’s not a bad little town. Got its own special atmosphere.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. It’s way better than staying in Tokyo.”

“Oh, well,” she said. “I don’t have anyplace else to go, and I’ve already sent my stuff there. Hey, Watanabe, promise me you’ll come and visit me in Asahikawa.”

“Sure I will. But do you have to leave right away? Can’t you stay in Tokyo awhile?”

“I’d like to hang around here a few days if I can. Can you put me up? I won’t get in your way.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’ve got a big closet I can sleep in, in my sleeping bag.”

“I can’t do that to you.”

“No, really. It’s a huge closet.”

Reiko tapped out a rhythm on the guitar case between her legs. “I’m probably going to have to condition myself a little before I go to Asahikawa. I’m just not used to being in the outside world. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get, and I’m nervous. Think you can help me out a little? You’re the only one I can ask.”

“I’ll do anything I can to help you,” I said.

“I hope I’m not getting in your way,” she said.

“I don’t have any way for you to get in,” I said.

She looked at me and turned up the corners of her mouth in a smile, but said nothing.