Norwegian Wood (6 page)

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.

Nagasawa did have a steady girlfriend, one he’d been going out with since his freshman year. Her name was Hatsumi, and she was the same age as Nagasawa. I had met her a few times and found her to be a very nice girl. She didn’t have the kind of looks that immediately attracted attention, and in fact she was so ordinary that when I first met her I had to wonder why Nagasawa couldn’t do better, but anyone who talked to her took an immediate liking to her. Quiet, intelligent, funny, caring, she always dressed with wonderful good taste. I liked her a lot and knew that if I could have a girlfriend like Hatsumi, I wouldn’t be sleeping around with a bunch of easy marks. She liked me, too, and tried hard to fix me up with a freshman in her club so we could go out on double dates, but I would make up excuses to keep from repeating my past mistakes. Hatsumi went to the absolute top girls’ college in the country, and there was no way I was going to be able to talk to one of those super-rich princesses.

Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands.

“I don’t deserve a girl like Hatsumi,” Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.

T
HAT WINTER
I
FOUND
a part-time job in a little record store in Shinjuku. It didn’t pay much, but the work was easy—just watching the place three nights a week—and they let me buy records cheap. For Christmas I bought Naoko a Henry Mancini record with a track of her favorite, “Dear Heart.” I wrapped it myself and added a bright red ribbon. She gave me a pair of woolen gloves that she had knitted herself. The thumbs were a little short, but the gloves did keep my hands warm.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “What a bad job!”

“Don’t worry, they fit fine,” I said, holding my gloved hands out to her.

“Well, at least you won’t have to shove your hands in your pockets, I guess.”

Naoko didn’t go home to Kobe for break that winter. I sort of stuck around Tokyo, too, working in the record store right up to the end of the year. I didn’t have anything especially fun to do in Kobe or anyone I wanted to see. With the dorm’s dining hall closed for the holiday, I went to Naoko’s apartment for my meals. On New Year’s Eve we had rice cakes and soup like everybody else.

A lot happened in late January and February that year, 1969.

At the end of January, Storm Trooper went to bed with a raging fever, which meant I had to stand Naoko up that day. I had gone to a lot of trouble to get my hands on some free tickets for a concert. Naoko had been especially eager to go because the orchestra was performing one of her favorites, Brahms’s fourth symphony. But with Storm Trooper tossing around in bed on the verge of what looked like an agonizing death, I couldn’t just go off and leave him, and I couldn’t find anyone crazy enough to nurse him in my place. I bought some ice and used several layers of vinyl bags to hold it on his forehead, wiped his sweat with cold towels, took his temperature every hour, and even changed his undershirt for him. The fever stayed high for a full day, but on the morning of the second day he jumped out of bed and started exercising as if nothing had happened, and his temperature was absolutely normal. It was hard to believe he was a human being.

“Weird,” said Storm Trooper. “I’ve never run a fever in my life.” It was almost as if he were blaming me.

This made me mad. “But you
did
have a fever,” I insisted, showing him the two wasted tickets.

“Good thing they were free,” he said. I wanted to grab his radio and throw it out the window, but instead I went back to bed with a headache.

It snowed several times in February.

Near the end of the month I got into a stupid fight with one of the upperclassmen on my floor and took a punch at him. He hit his head against the concrete wall, but he wasn’t badly injured, and Nagasawa straightened things out for me. Still, I was called into the dorm head’s office and given a warning, after which I grew increasingly uncomfortable living in the dormitory.

The academic year ended in March, but I came up a few credits short.
My grades were mediocre—mostly Cs and Ds with a few Bs. Naoko had all the credits she needed to begin the spring term as a full-fledged sophomore. We had completed one full cycle of the seasons.

H
ALFWAY THROUGH
A
PRIL
Naoko turned twenty. She was seven months older than I was, my own birthday being in November. There was something strange about Naoko’s becoming twenty. I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the dead stay seventeen forever.

It rained on her birthday. After classes I bought a cake nearby and took the streetcar to her apartment. We ought to have a celebration, I had said. I probably would have wanted the same thing if our positions had been reversed. It must be hard to pass your twentieth birthday alone. The streetcar had been packed, and it had pitched wildly, so that by the time I arrived at Naoko’s room the cake was looking more like the Roman Colosseum than anything. Still, once I had managed to stand up the twenty candles I had brought along, light them, close the curtains, and turn out the lights, we had the makings of a birthday party. Naoko opened a bottle of wine. We drank, had some cake, and enjoyed a simple dinner.

“I don’t know, it’s stupid being twenty,” she said. “I’m just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody’s pushing me from behind.”

“I’ve got seven months to get ready,” I said with a laugh.

“You’re so lucky! Still nineteen!” said Naoko with a hint of envy.

While we ate I told her about Storm Trooper’s new sweater. Until then he had had only one, a navy blue high school sweater, so two was a big move for him. The sweater itself was a nice one, red and black with a knitted deer motif, but on him it made everybody laugh. He couldn’t figure out what was going on.

“Wha-what’s so funny, Watanabe?” he asked, sitting next to me in the dining hall. “Is something stuck to my forehead?”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “There’s nothing funny. Nice sweater.”

“Thanks,” he said, beaming.

Naoko loved the story. “I
have
to meet him,” she said. “Just once.”

“No way,” I said. “You’d laugh in his face.”

“You think so?”

“I’d bet on it. I see him every day, and still I can’t help laughing sometimes.”

We cleared the table and sat on the floor, listening to music and drinking the rest of the wine. She drank two glasses in the time it took me to finish one.

Naoko was unusually talkative that night. She told me about her childhood, her school, her family. Each episode was a long one, done with the painstaking detail of a miniature. I was amazed at the power of her memory, but as I sat listening it began to dawn on me that there was something wrong with the way she was telling these stories: something strange, even warped. Each tale had its own internal logic, but the link from one to the next was odd. Before you knew it, story A had turned into story B contained in A, and then came C from something in B, with no end in sight. I found things to say in response at first, but after a while I stopped trying. I put on a record, and when it ended I lifted the needle and put on another one. After the last record I went back to the first. She had only six all together. The cycle started with
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and ended with Bill Evans’s
Waltz for Debbie
. Rain fell past the window. Time moved slowly. Naoko went on talking by herself.