挪威之恋 英文名著｜第4章（1）

DURING SUMMER BREAK THE UNIVERSITY CALLED IN THE RIOT police, who broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside. This was nothing special. It’s what all the schools were doing at the time. The universities were not so easily “dismantled.” Massive amounts of capital had been invested in them, and they were not about to dissolve just because a few students had gone wild. And in fact those students who had sealed the campus had not wanted to dismantle the university either. All they had really wanted was to shift the balance of power within the university structure, a matter about which I could not have cared less. And so, when the strike was crushed, I felt nothing.

I went to the campus in September expecting to find rubble. The place was untouched. The library’s books had not been carted off, the professors’ offices had not been destroyed, the student affairs office had not been burned to the ground. I was thunderstruck. What the hell had those guys been doing behind the barricades?

When the strike was defused and lectures started up again under police occupation, the first ones to take their seats in the classrooms were those assholes who had led the strike. As if nothing had ever happened, they sat there taking notes and answering “here” when roll was called. I found this incredible. After all, the strike resolution was still in effect. There had been no declaration bringing it to an end. All that had happened was that the university had called in the riot police and torn down the barricades, but the strike itself was supposed to be continuing. The assholes had screamed their heads off at the time of the strike resolution, denouncing students who opposed the strike (or even expressed their doubts about it), at times even trying them in their own kangaroo courts. I made a point of visiting those former leaders and asking why they were attending classes instead of continuing the strike, but they couldn’t give me a straight answer. What could they have said? That they were afraid of losing college credits through inadequate attendance? To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke. Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.

Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you’re not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The assholes are earning their college credits and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image.

For a while I attended classes but refused to answer when they called the roll. I knew it was a pointless gesture, but I felt so bad I had no choice. All I managed to do was to isolate myself more than ever from my classmates. By remaining silent when my name was called, I made everyone uncomfortable for a few seconds. None of the other students spoke to me, and I spoke to none of them.

By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a college education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to quit school right away, and so I went to my classes each day, took lecture notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.

AND THOUGH THAT SECOND WEEK in September had rolled around, there was no sign of Storm Trooper. More than unusual, this was an earth-shaking development. His university had started up again, and it was inconceivable that Storm Trooper would cut classes. A thin layer of dust clung to his desk and radio. His plastic cup and toothbrush, tea can, insecticide spray, and such stood in a neat row on his shelf.

I kept the room clean in his absence. I had picked up the habit of neatness over the past year and a half, and without him there to take care of the room, I had no choice but to do it. I swept the floor each day, wiped the window every third day, and aired my mattress once a week, waiting for him to come back and tell me what a great job I had done.

But he never came back. I returned from classes one day to find all his stuff gone and his name tag removed from the door. I went to the dorm head’s room and asked what had happened.

“He’s withdrawn from the dormitory,” he said. “You’ll be alone in the room for the time being.”

I couldn’t get him to tell me why Storm Trooper had disappeared. This was a man whose greatest joy in life was to control everything and keep others in the dark.

Storm Trooper’s iceberg poster stayed on the wall for a time, but I eventually took it down and replaced it with Jim Morrison and Miles Davis. This made the room seem a little more like my own. I used some of the money I had saved from work to buy a small stereo. At night I would drink alone and listen to music. I thought about Storm Trooper every now and then, but I enjoyed living alone.

AT ELEVEN-THIRTY one Monday, after a lecture on Euripides in History of Drama, I took a ten-minute walk to a little restaurant and had an omelette and salad for lunch. The place was on a quiet back street and it had somewhat higher prices than the student dining hall, but you could relax there, and they knew how to make a good omelette. “They” were a married couple who rarely spoke to each other, and they had one part-time waitress. As I sat there eating by the window, a group of four students came in, two men and two women, all rather neatly dressed. They took the table near the door, spent some time looking over the menu and discussing their options, until one of them reported their choices to the waitress.

Before long I noticed that one of the girls kept glancing in my direction. She had extremely short hair and wore dark sunglasses and a white cotton minidress. I had no idea who she was, so I went on with my lunch, but she soon slipped out of her seat and came over to where I was sitting. With one hand on the edge of my table, she said, “You’re Watanabe, aren’t you?”

I raised my head and looked at her more closely. Still I could not recall ever having seen her. She was the kind of girl you notice, so if I had met her before I should have been able to recognize her immediately, and there weren’t that many people in my university that knew me by name.

“Mind if I sit down?” she asked. “Or are you expecting somebody?”

Still uncertain, I shook my head. “No, nobody’s coming. Please.”

With a wooden clunk, she dragged a chair out and sat down across from me, staring straight at me through her sunglasses, then glancing down at my plate.

“Looks good,” she said.

“It is good. Mushroom omelette and green pea salad.”

“Damn,” she said. “Oh, well, I’ll get it next time. I already ordered something else.”

“What’d you order?”

“Macaroni and cheese.”

“Their macaroni and cheese is not bad, either,” I said. “By the way, do I know you? I can’t seem to remember.”

“Euripides,” she said “Electra. ‘No god hearkens to my helpless cry.’ You know—the class just ended.”

I stared at her hard. She took off her sunglasses. At last I remembered her—a freshman I had seen in History of Drama. A striking change in hairstyle had kept me from recognizing her.

“Oh,” I said, touching a spot a few inches below my shoulder, “your hair was down to here before summer break.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I had a perm this summer, and it was just awful. I was ready to kill myself. I looked like a corpse on the beach with seaweed stuck to my head. So I figured as long as I was ready to die, I might as well cut it all off. At least it’s cool in the summer.” She ran her hand through her pixie cut and gave me a smile.

“It looks good, though,” I said, still munching on my omelette. “Let me see your profile.”

She turned away and held the pose for a few seconds.

“Yeah, I thought so. It really looks good on you. Nicely shaped head. Pretty ears, too, uncovered like that.”

“So I’m not crazy after all! I thought I looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first-grader or a concentration camp survivor. What’s this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.”

“I think you look better now than you did before,” I said. And I meant it. As far as I could recall, with long hair she had been just another cute coed. From the girl who sat before me now, though, surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn’t seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.

“Do you mean it?” she asked.

I nodded, still munching on my salad.

She put her dark sunglasses on and looked at me from behind them.

“You’re not lying, are you?”

“I like to think of myself as an honest man,” I said.

“Far out.”

“So tell me: why do you wear such dark glasses?”

“I felt defenseless when my hair got short all of a sudden. Like somebody threw me into a crowd all naked.”

“Makes sense,” I said, eating the last of my omelette. She watched me with intense interest.

“You don’t have to go back to them?” I asked, motioning toward her three companions.

“Nah. I’ll go back when they serve the food. Am I interrupting your meal?”

“There’s nothing left to interrupt,” I said, ordering coffee when she showed no sign of leaving. The wife took my dishes and brought cream and sugar.

“Now you tell me,” she said. “Why didn’t you answer today when they called the roll? You are Watanabe, aren’t you? Toru Watanabe?”

“That’s me.”

“So why didn’t you answer?”

“I just didn’t feel like it today.”

She took her sunglasses off again, set them on the table, and looked at me as if she were staring into the cage of some rare animal at the zoo. “‘I just didn’t feel like it today.’ You talk like Humphrey Bogart. Cool. Tough.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m just an ordinary guy. Like everybody else.”

The wife brought my coffee and set it on the table. I took a sip without adding sugar or cream.

“Look at that. You drink it black.”

“It’s got nothing to do with Humphrey Bogart,” I explained patiently, “I just don’t happen to like sweets. I think you’ve got me all wrong.”

“Why are you so tanned?”

“I’ve been hiking around the last couple of weeks. Backpack. Sleeping bag.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Kanazawa. Noto Peninsula. Up to Niigata.”

“Alone?”

“Alone,” I said. “Found some company here and there.”

“Some romantic company? New women in far-off places.”

“Romantic? Now I know you’ve got me wrong. How’s a guy with a sleeping bag on his back and his face all stubbly supposed to have romance?”

“Do you always travel alone like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You enjoy solitude?” she asked, leaning her cheek on her hand. “Traveling alone, eating alone, sitting off by yourself in lecture halls …”

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.”

The tip of one earpiece in her mouth, sunglasses dangling down, she mumbled, “‘Nobody likes being alone. I just hate to be disappointed.’ You can use that line if you ever write your autobiography.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Do you like green?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re wearing a green polo shirt.”

“Not especially. I’ll wear anything.”

“‘Not especially. I’ll wear anything.’ I love the way you talk. Like spreading plaster nice and smooth. Has anybody ever told you that?”

“Nobody,” I said.

“My name’s Midori,” she said. “‘Green.’ But green looks terrible on me. Weird, huh? It’s like I’m cursed, don’t you think? My sister’s name is Momoko: ‘Peach Girl.’”

“Does she look good in pink?”

“She looks great in pink! She was born to wear pink. It’s totally unfair.”

The food arrived at Midori’s table, and a guy in a madras jacket called out to her, “Hey, Midori, come ’n’ get it!” She waved at him as if to say “I know.”

“Say, tell me,” she said, “do you take lecture notes? In drama?”

“Sure do.”

“I hate to ask, but could I borrow your notes? I’ve missed twice, and I don’t know anybody in the class.”

“No problem,” I said, and pulled the notebook from my bag. After checking to make sure I hadn’t written anything in it I didn’t want seen, I handed it to Midori.

“Thanks,” she said. “Are you coming to school the day after tomorrow?”

“Sure am.”

“Meet me here at noon. I’ll give you back your notebook and buy you lunch. I mean … it’s not like you get an upset stomach or anything if you don’t eat alone, right?”

“No way,” I said. “But you don’t have to buy me lunch just ’cause I’m lending you my notebook.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I like to buy people lunch. But anyhow, shouldn’t you write it down somewhere? You won’t forget?”

“I won’t forget. Day after tomorrow. Twelve o’clock. Midori. Green.”

From the other table, somebody called out, “Hurry up, Midori, your food’s getting cold!”

She ignored the call and asked me, “Have you always talked like that?”

“I think so,” I said. “Never noticed before.” And in fact no one had ever told me there was anything unusual about the way I spoke.

She seemed to be mulling something over for a few seconds. Then she stood up with a smile and went back to her table. She waved to me as I walked past a few minutes later, but the three others barely glanced in my direction.

At noon on Wednesday there was no sign of Midori in the restaurant. I thought I might wait for her over a beer, but the place started to fill up as soon as the drink came, so I ordered lunch and ate alone. I finished at 12:35, but still no Midori. Paying my bill, I went outside and crossed the street to a little shrine, where I waited on the stone steps for the beer buzz to clear and Midori to come. I gave up at one o’clock and went to read in the library. At two I went to my German class.

When the lecture ended, I went to the student affairs office and looked for Midori’s name in the class list for History of Drama. The only Midori in the class was Midori Kobayashi. Next I flipped through the cards of the student files and found the address and phone number of a Midori Kobayashi who had entered the university in 1969. She lived in a northwest suburb, Toshima, with her family. I slipped into a phone booth and dialed the number.

A man answered: “Kobayashi Bookstore.” Kobayashi Bookstore?

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I wonder if Midori might be in?”

“No, she’s not,” he said.

“Do you think she might be on campus?”

“Hmm, no, she’s probably at the hospital. Who’s calling, please?”

Instead of answering, I thanked him and hung up. The hospital? Could she have been injured or taken sick? But the man had spoken without the least sense of emergency. “She’s probably at the hospital,” he had said, as easily as he might have said, “She’s at the fish store.” I thought about a few other possibilities until thinking itself became a bother, then I went back to the dorm and stretched out on my bed, finishing a copy of Conrad’s Lord Jim that I had borrowed from Nagasawa. When I was through, I went to Nagasawa’s room to give it back.

Nagasawa was on his way out to the dining hall, so I went with him and ate supper.

“How’d the exams go?” I asked. The second round of upper-level exams for the Foreign Ministry had been held in August.

“Like always,” said Nagasawa as if it had been nothing. “You take ’em, you pass. Group discussions, interviews … like screwin’ a chick.”

“In other words, easy,” I said. “When do they let you know?”

“First week of October. If I pass, I’ll buy you a big dinner.”

“So tell me, what kind of guys make it to round two? All superstars like you?”

“Don’t be stupid. They’re a bunch of idiots. Idiots or weirdos. I’d say ninety-five percent of the guys who want to be bureaucrats aren’t worth shit. I’m not kidding. They can barely read.”

“So why are you trying to join the Foreign Ministry?”