Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

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.