Norwegian Wood (15 page)

I read Naoko’s letter all the way through, and then I read it again. After that I went downstairs, bought a Coke from the vending machine, and drank it while reading the letter one more time. I put the seven pages of letter paper back into the envelope and laid it on my desk. My name and address had been written on the pink envelope in perfect, tiny characters that were just a bit too precisely formed for those of a girl. I sat at my desk, studying the envelope. The return address on the back said “Ami Hostel.” An odd name. I thought about it for a few minutes, concluding that the “ami” must be from the French word for “friend.”

After putting the letter away in my desk drawer, I changed clothes and went out. I was afraid that if I stayed near the letter I would end up reading it ten, twenty, who knew how many times? I walked the streets of Tokyo on Sunday without a destination, as I had always done with Naoko. I wandered from one street to the next, recalling her letter line by line and mulling each sentence over as best I could. When the sun went down, I returned to my dorm and placed a long-distance call to the Ami Hostel. A woman receptionist answered. I asked her if it might be possible for me to visit Naoko the following afternoon. She took my name and said I should call back in half an hour.

The same woman answered when I called back after eating. It would indeed be possible for me to see Naoko, she said. I thanked her, hung up, and put a change of clothes and a few toilet articles in my knapsack. Then I picked up
The Magic Mountain
again, reading and sipping brandy and waiting to get sleepy. Even so, I didn’t fall asleep until after one o’clock in the morning.

A
S SOON AS
I
WOKE UP AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON
M
ONDAY MORNING
, I washed my face, shaved, and went straight to the dorm head’s room without eating breakfast to say that I was going to be gone for two days hiking in the hills. He was used to my taking short trips when I had free time, and reacted without surprise. I took a crowded commuter train to Tokyo Station and bought a bullet-train ticket to Kyoto, literally jumping onto the first
Hikari
express to pull out. I made do with coffee and a sandwich for breakfast and dozed for an hour.

I arrived in Kyoto a few minutes before eleven. Following Naoko’s instructions, I took a city bus to a small terminal serving the northern suburbs. The next bus to my destination would not be leaving until 11:35, I was told, and the trip would take a little over an hour. I bought a ticket and went to a bookstore across the street for a map. Back in the waiting room, I studied the map to see if I could find exactly where the Ami Hostel was located. It turned out to be much farther into the mountains than I had imagined. The bus would have to cross several hills in its trek north, then turn around where the canyon road dead-ended and return to the city. My stop would be just before the end of the line. There was a trailhead near the bus stop, according to Naoko, and if I followed the trail for twenty minutes I would reach Ami Hostel. If it was that deep in the mountains, no wonder it was a quiet place!

The bus pulled out with twenty passengers aboard, following the Kamo River through the north end of Kyoto. The tightly packed city streets gave way to more sparse housing, then fields and vacant land. Black tile roofs and vinyl-sided hothouses caught the early autumn sun and sent it back with a glare. When the bus entered the canyon, the driver had to start
hauling the steering wheel back and forth to follow the twists and curves of the road, and I began to feel queasy. I could still taste my morning coffee. By the time the number of curves began to decrease to the point where I felt some relief, the bus plunged into a chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way they towered over the road, blocking out the sun and covering everything in gloomy shadows. The breeze flowing into the bus’s open windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin. The valley road hugged the riverbank, continuing so long through the trees it began to seem as if the whole world had been buried forever in cedar forest—at which point the forest ended, and we came out to an open basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Broad, green farmland spread out in all directions, and the river by the road looked bright and clear. A single thread of white smoke rose in the distance. Some houses had laundry drying in the sun, and dogs were howling. Each farmhouse had firewood out front piled up to the eaves, usually with a cat resting somewhere on the pile. The road was lined with such houses for a time, but I saw not a single person.

The scenery repeated this pattern any number of times. The bus would enter cedar forest, come out to a village, then go back into forest. It would stop at a village to let people off, but no one ever got on. Forty minutes after leaving the city, the bus reached a mountain pass with a wide-open view. The driver stopped the bus and announced that we would be waiting there for five or six minutes: people could step down from the bus if they wished. There were only four passengers left now, including me. We all got out and stretched or smoked and looked down at the panorama of Kyoto far below. The driver went off to the side for a pee. A suntanned man in his early fifties who had boarded the bus with a big, rope-tied cardboard carton asked me if I was going out to hike in the mountains. I said yes to keep it simple.

Eventually another bus came climbing up from the other side of the pass and stopped next to ours. The driver got out, had a short talk with our driver, and the two men climbed back into their buses. The four of us returned to our seats, and the buses pulled out in opposite directions. It was not immediately clear to me why our bus had had to wait for the other one, but a short way down the other side of the mountain the road narrowed suddenly. Two big buses could never have passed each other on the road, and in fact passing ordinary cars coming in the other direction required a
good deal of maneuvering, with one or the other vehicle having to back up and squeeze into the overhang of a curve.

The villages along the road were far smaller now, and the level areas under cultivation far more narrow. The mountain was steeper, its walls pressed closer to the bus windows. They seemed to have just as many dogs as the other places, though, and the arrival of the bus would set off a howling competition.

At the stop where I got off, there was nothing—no houses, no fields, just the bus stop sign, a little stream, and the trail opening. I slung my knapsack over my shoulder and started up the track. The stream ran along the left side of the trail, and a forest of deciduous trees lined the right side. I had been climbing the gentle slope for some fifteen minutes when I came to a road leading into the woods on the right, the opening barely wide enough to accommodate a car. “Ami Hostel. Private. No Trespassing,” read the sign by the road.

Sharply etched tire tracks ran up the road through the trees. The occasional flapping of wings echoed in the woods. The sound came through with strange clarity, as if amplified above the other voices of the forest. Once, from far away, I heard what might have been a rifle shot, but it was a small and muffled sound, as if it had passed through several filters.

Beyond the woods I came to a white stone wall. It was no higher than my own height and, lacking additional barriers on top, would have been easy for me to scale. The black iron gate looked sturdy enough, but it was wide open, and there was no one manning the guardhouse. Another sign like the last one stood by the gate: “Ami Hostel. Private. No Trespassing.” A few clues suggested the guard had been there until some moments before: the ashtray held three butts, a teacup stood there half empty, a transistor radio sat on a shelf, and the clock on the wall ticked off the time with a dry sound. I waited a while for the person to come back, but when that showed no sign of happening, I gave a few pushes to something that looked as if it might be a bell. The area just inside the gate was a parking lot. In it stood a minibus, a four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, and a dark blue Volvo. The lot could have held thirty cars, but only those three were parked there now.

Two or three minutes went by, and then a gatekeeper in a navy blue uniform came down the forest road on a yellow bicycle. He was a tall man in his early sixties with a receding hairline. He leaned the yellow bike against
the guardhouse and said, “I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting,” though he didn’t sound sorry at all. The number 32 was painted on the bike’s fender in white. When I gave him my name, he picked up the phone and repeated it twice to someone on the other end. Replying, “Yes, uh-huh, I see” to the other person, he hung up.

“Go to the main building, please, and ask for Doctor Ishida,” he said to me. “You take this road through the trees to a rotary. Then take your second left—got that? Your
second
left—from the rotary. You’ll see an old house. Turn right and go through another bunch of trees to a concrete building. That’s the main building. It’s easy, just watch for the signs.”

I took the second left from the rotary as instructed, and where that leg ended I came to an interesting old building that had obviously been someone’s country house once upon a time. It had a manicured garden with well-shaped rocks and a stone lantern. This property must once have been a country estate. Turning right through the trees, I saw a three-story concrete building. It stood in a hollowed-out area, and so there was nothing overpowering about its three stories. It was simple in design and gave a strong impression of cleanliness.

The entrance was on the second floor. I climbed the stairs and went in through a big glass door to find a young woman in a red dress at the reception desk. I gave her my name and said I had been instructed to ask for Doctor Ishida. She smiled and gestured toward a brown sofa, suggesting in low tones that I wait there for the doctor to come. Then she dialed the telephone. I lowered my knapsack from my back, sank down into the deep cushions of the sofa, and surveyed the place. It was a clean, pleasant lobby, with ornamental potted plants, tasteful abstract paintings, and a polished floor. As I waited, I kept my eyes on the floor’s reflection of my shoes.

At one point the receptionist assured me, “The doctor will be here soon.” I nodded. What an incredibly quiet place! There were no sounds of any kind. You would have thought everyone was taking a siesta. People, animals, bugs, plants must all be sound asleep, I thought, it was such a quiet afternoon.

Before long, though, I heard the soft padding of rubber soles, and a mature, bristly haired woman appeared. She swept across the lobby, sat down next to me, crossed her legs, and took my hand. Instead of just shaking it, she turned my hand over, examining it front and back.

“You haven’t played a musical instrument, at least not for some years now, have you?” were the first words out of her mouth.

“No,” I said, taken aback. “You’re right.”

“I can tell from your hands,” she said with a smile.

There was something almost mysterious about this woman. Her face had lots of wrinkles. These were the first thing to catch your eye, but they didn’t make her look old. Instead, they emphasized a certain youthfulness in her that transcended age. The wrinkles
belonged
where they were, as if they had been part of her face since birth. When she smiled, the wrinkles smiled with her; when she frowned, the wrinkles frowned, too. And when she was neither smiling nor frowning, the wrinkles lay scattered over her face in a strangely warm, ironic way. Here was a woman in her late thirties who seemed not merely a nice person but whose niceness drew you to her. I liked her from the moment I saw her.

Wildly chopped, her hair stuck out in patches and the bangs lay crooked against her forehead, but the style suited her perfectly. She wore a blue work shirt over a white T-shirt, baggy, cream-colored pants, and tennis shoes. Long and slim, she had almost nothing for breasts. Her lips moved constantly to one side in a kind of ironic curl, and the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes moved in tiny twitches. She looked like a kindly, skilled, but somewhat world-weary woman carpenter.

Chin drawn in and lips curled, she took some time to look me over from head to toe. I imagined that any minute now she was going to whip out her tape measure and start measuring me everywhere.

“Can
you play an instrument?” she asked.

“Sorry, no,” I said.

“Too bad,” she said. “It would have been fun.”

“I guess it would have been,” I said. Why all this talk about musical instruments?

She took a pack of Seven Stars from her breast pocket, put one between her lips, lit it with a cigarette lighter, and began puffing away with obvious pleasure.

“It crossed my mind that I should tell you about this place, Mr.— Watanabe, wasn’t it?—before you see Naoko. So I arranged for the two of us to have this little talk. Ami Hostel is kind of unusual—enough so that you might find it a little confusing without any background knowledge. I’m right, aren’t I, in supposing that you don’t know anything about this place?”

“Almost nothing.”

“Well, then, first of all—” she began, then snapped her fingers. “Come to think of it, have you had lunch? I’ll bet you’re hungry.”