Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami Page A

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.
    It eventually dawned on me what was wrong: Naoko was taking great care as she spoke not to touch on certain things. One of those things was Kizuki, of course, but there was more than Kizuki. And though she had certain subjects she was determined to avoid, she went on endlessly and in incredible detail about the most trivial and inane things. I had never heard her speak with such intensity before, and so I did nothing to interrupt her.
    Once the clock hit eleven, though, I began to feel nervous. She had been talking nonstop for over four hours. I had to worry about the last train, and my midnight curfew. I saw my chance