挪威之恋 英文名著｜第3章（3）

THE RAIN HAD STOPPED when morning came. Naoko was sleeping with her back to me. Or maybe she hadn’t slept at all. Whether she was awake or asleep, all words had left her lips, and her body now seemed stiff, almost frozen. I tried several times to talk to her, but she would not answer or move. I stared for a long time at her naked shoulder, but in the end I lost all hope of eliciting a response and decided to get up.

The floor was still littered with record jackets and glasses and wine bottles and the ashtray I had been using. Half the caved-in birthday cake remained on the table. It was as if time had come to a sudden stop here. I picked up the things off the floor and drank two glasses of water at the sink. On Naoko’s desk lay a dictionary and a French verb chart. On the wall above the desk hung a calendar, one without an illustration or photo of any kind, just the numbers of the days of the month. Neither were there memos or marks written next to any of the figures.

I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them on. The front of my shirt was still damp and chilly. It had Naoko’s smell. On the notepad lying on the desk I wrote, “I’d like to have a good, long talk with you once you’ve calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.” I took one last look at Naoko’s shoulder, stepped outside, and quietly shut the door.

A WEEK WENT BY, but no call came. Naoko’s apartment house had no system for summoning people to the phone, and so on Sunday morning I took the train out to Kokubunji. She was not there, and the name had been removed from her door. The windows and storm shutters were closed up tight. The manager told me that Naoko had moved out three days earlier. Where she had moved to, he had no idea.

I went back to the dorm and wrote a long letter addressed to Naoko at her home in Kobe. Wherever she was, they would forward it to her at least.

I gave her an honest account of my feelings. There was a lot I still didn’t understand, I said, and though I was trying hard to understand, it would take time. Where I would be once that time had gone by, it was impossible for me to say now, which is why it was impossible for me to make promises or demands, or to set down pretty words. For one thing, we knew too little of each other. If, however, she would grant me the time, I would give it my best effort, and the two of us would come to know each other better. In any case, I wanted to see her once again and have a good, long talk. When I lost Kizuki, I lost the one person to whom I could speak honestly of my feelings, and I imagined it had been the same for Naoko. She and I had probably needed each other more than either of us knew, which was probably why our relationship had taken such a major detour and become, in a sense, warped. “I probably should not have done what I did, and yet I believe that it was all I could do. The warmth and closeness I felt for you at that moment was something I had never experienced before. I need you to answer this letter. Whatever that answer may be, I need to have it.”

The answer did not come.

Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern. There was an abnormal lightness to my body, and sounds had a hollow echo to them. I went to classes more faithfully than ever. The lectures were boring, and I never talked to my classmates, but I had nothing else to do. I would sit by myself in the very front row of the lecture hall, speak to no one, and eat alone. I quit smoking.

The student strike started at the end of May. “Dismantle the university,” they all screamed. Go ahead, do it, I thought. Dismantle it. Tear it apart. Crush it to bits. I don’t give a damn. A breath of fresh air for me. I’m ready for anything. I’ll help if you need it. Just go ahead and do it.

With the campus blockaded and lectures suspended, I started to work at a trucking company. Riding shotgun, loading and unloading trucks, that kind of stuff. It was tougher than I thought. At first I could hardly get out of bed in the morning with the pain. The money was good, though, and as long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside. I worked on the truck five days a week, and three nights a week I continued my job at the record store. Nights without work I spent with whiskey and books. Storm Trooper wouldn’t touch whiskey and couldn’t stand the smell, so when I was sprawled on my bed chugging it down straight, he would complain that the fumes made it impossible for him to study and ask me to take my bottle outside.

“You get the hell out,” I growled at him.

“But you know drinking in the dorm is a-a-against the rules.”

“I don’t give a shit. You get out.”

He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.

In June I wrote Naoko another long letter, addressing it again to her house in Kobe. It said pretty much the same thing as the first letter, but at the end I added this: “Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.” When I dropped it in the mail, I felt as if the cavern inside me had grown again.

Also during June I went out with Nagasawa twice again to sleep with girls. It was easy both times. The first girl put up a terrific struggle when I tried to get her undressed and into the hotel bed, but when I began reading alone in bed because it just wasn’t worth it, she came over and started nuzzling me. And after I had done it with the second one, she started asking me all kinds of personal questions—how many girls had I slept with? Where was I from? Which school did I go to? What kind of music did I like? Had I ever read any novels by Osamu Dazai? Where would I like to go if I could travel abroad? Did I think her nipples were too big? I made up some answers and went to sleep, but next morning she said she wanted to have breakfast with me, and she kept up the stream of questions over the tasteless eggs and toast and coffee. What kind of work did my father do? Did I have good grades in high school? What month was I born? Had I ever eaten frogs? She was giving me a headache, so as soon as we had finished eating I said I had to go to work.

“Will I ever see you again?” she asked with a sad look.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll meet again somewhere before long,” I said, and left. What the hell am I doing? I started wondering as soon as I was alone and feeling disgusted with myself. And yet it was all I could do. My body was hungering for women. All the time I was sleeping with those girls, I thought about Naoko, about the white shape of her naked body in the darkness, her sighs, the sound of the rain. The more I thought about these things, the hungrier my body grew. I went up to the roof with my whiskey and asked myself where I thought I was heading.

Finally, at the beginning of July, a letter came from Naoko. A short letter.

Please forgive me for not answering sooner. But try to understand. It took me a very long time before I was in any condition to write, and I have started this letter at least ten times. Writing is a painful process for me.

Let me begin with my conclusion. I have decided to take a year off from school. Officially, it’s a leave of absence, but I suspect that I will never be going back. This will no doubt come as a surprise to you, but in fact I had been thinking about doing this for a very long time. I tried a few times to mention it to you, but I was never able to make myself begin. I was afraid even to pronounce the words.

Try not to be so worked up about things. Whatever happened—or didn’t happen—the end result would have been the same. This may not be the best way to put it, and I’m sorry if it hurts you. What I am trying to tell you is, I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened with me. It is something I have to take on all by myself. I had been putting it off for more than a year, and so I ended up making things very difficult for you. There is probably no way to put it off any longer.

After I moved out of my apartment, I came back to my family’s house in Kobe and was seeing a doctor for a while. He tells me there is a place in the hills outside Kyoto that would be perfect for me, and I’m thinking of spending a little time there. It’s not exactly a hospital, more a sanatorium kind of thing with a far freer style of treatment. I’ll leave the details for another letter. What I need now is to rest my nerves in a quiet place cut off from the world.

I feel grateful in my own way for the year of companionship you gave me. Please believe that much even if you believe nothing else. You are not the one who hurt me. I myself am the one who did that. This is truly how I feel.

For now, however, I am not prepared to see you. It’s not that I don’t want to see you: I’m simply not prepared for it. The moment I feel ready, I will write to you. Perhaps then we can get to know each other better. As you say, this is probably what we should do: get to know each other better.

Good-bye

I read Naoko’s letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with that same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko herself stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it. Objects in the scene would drift past me, but the words they spoke never reached my ears.

I continued to spend my Saturday nights in the lobby. There was no hope of a phone call, but I didn’t know what else to do with the time. I would switch on the baseball game and pretend to watch it as I cut the empty space between me and the television set in two, then cut each half in two again, over and over, until I had fashioned a space small enough to hold in my hand.

I would switch the set off at ten, go back to my room, and go to sleep.

AT THE END OF THE MONTH, Storm Trooper gave me a firefly. It was in an instant coffee jar with air holes in the lid and containing some blades of grass and a little water. In the bright room the firefly looked like an ordinary black bug you’d find by a pond somewhere, but Storm Trooper insisted that it was the real thing. “I know a firefly when I see one,” he said, and I had no reason or basis to dispute him.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s a firefly.” It had a sleepy look on its face, but it kept trying to climb up the slippery glass walls of the jar and falling back.

“I found it in the quad,” he said.

“Here? By the dorm?”

“Sure. You know the hotel down the street? They release fireflies in their garden for summer guests. This one made it over here.”

Storm Trooper was busy stuffing clothes and notebooks into his black Boston bag as he spoke.

We were several weeks into summer vacation, and Storm Trooper and I were almost the only ones left in the dorm. I had continued my jobs rather than go back to Kobe, and he had stayed on for a practical training session. Now that the training had ended, he was going back to the mountains of Yamanashi.

“You could give this to your girlfriend,” he said. “I’m sure she’d love it.”

“Thanks,” I said.

After dark the dorm was hushed, like a ruin. The flag had been lowered and the lights glowed in the windows of the dining hall. With so few students left, they turned on only half the lights in the place, keeping the right half dark and the left half lighted. Still, the smell of dinner drifted up to us—some kind of cream stew.

I took my bottled firefly to the roof. No one else was up there. A white undershirt hung on a clothesline where someone had forgotten to take it in, waving in the evening breeze like the discarded shell of some huge insect. I climbed a steel ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of the dormitory’s water tank. The tank was still warm with the heat of the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. I sat in the narrow space atop the tank, leaning against the handrail and coming face-to-face with a white moon only slightly short of full. The lights of Shinjuku glowed to the right, and Ikebukuro to the left. Car headlights flowed in brilliant streams from one pool of light to the other. A dull roar of jumbled sounds hung over the city like a cloud.

The firefly made a faint glow in the bottom of the jar, its light too weak, its color too pale. I hadn’t seen a firefly in years, but the ones in my memory sent a far more intense light into the summer darkness, and that brilliant, burning image was the one that had stayed with me all that time.

Maybe this firefly was on the verge of death. I gave the jar a few shakes. The firefly bumped against the glass walls and tried to fly, but its light remained dim.

I tried to recall when I had last seen fireflies, and where it might have been. I could see the scene in my mind, but was unable to recall the time or place. I could hear the sound of water in the darkness and see an old-fashioned brick sluice. It had a handle you could turn to open and close the gate. The stream it controlled was small enough to be hidden by the grass on its banks. The night was dark, so dark I couldn’t see my feet when I turned out my flashlight. Hundreds of fireflies drifted over the pool of water held back by the sluice gate, their hot glow reflected in the water like a shower of sparks.

I closed my eyes and steeped myself in that long-ago darkness. I heard the wind with unusual clarity. Far from strong, the wind swept past me, leaving strangely brilliant trails in the darkness. I opened my eyes to find the darkness of the summer night a few degrees deeper than it had been.

I twisted open the lid of the jar and took the firefly out, setting it on the two-inch lip of the water tank. It seemed not to grasp its new surroundings. It hobbled around the head of a steel bolt, catching its legs on curling scabs of paint. It moved to the right until it found its way blocked, then circled back to the left. Finally, with some effort, it mounted the head of the bolt and crouched there for a while, unmoving, as if it had taken its last breath.

Still leaning against the handrail, I studied the firefly. Neither I nor it made a move for a very long time. The wind continued sweeping past the two of us while the numberless leaves of the zelkova tree rustled in the darkness.

I waited forever.

Only much later did the firefly take to the air. As if some thought had suddenly come to it, the firefly spread its wings, and in a moment it had flown past the handrail to float in the pale darkness. It traced a swift arc by the side of the water tank as if trying to bring back a lost interval in time. And then, after hovering there for a few seconds as if to watch its curved line of light blend into the wind, it finally flew off to the east.

Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.

More than once I tried stretching my hand out in that darkness. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond their grasp.