Norwegian Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

AOKO MIGHT HAVE BEEN ANGRY with me because I, and not she, had been the last one to see Kizuki alive. That may not be the best way to putit, but I more or less understood how she felt. I would have traded places with her if I could have, but finally what had happened had happened, and there was nothing I could do about it.
    It had been a nice afternoon in May. After lunch, Kizuki suggested we cut classes and go play pool or something. I had no special interest in my afternoon classes, so together we left school, ambled down the hill to a billiards parlor on the harbor, and shot four games. When I won the first, easygoing game, he got serious and won the other three. This meant that I paid, according to our custom. Kizuki made not a single wisecrack as we played, which was most unusual. We had a smoke afterward.
    “Why so serious?” I asked.
    “I didn’t want to lose today,” said Kizuki with a satisfied smile.
    He died that night in his garage. He led a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe of his N-360 to a window, taped over the gap in the window, and revved the engine. I have no idea how long it took him to die. His parents had been out visiting a sick relative, and when they opened the garage to put their car away, he was already dead. His radio was going, and a gas station receipt was tucked under the windshield wiper.
    Kizuki had left no suicide note, and had no motive that anyone could think of. Because I had been the last one to see him, I was called in for questioning by the police. I told the investigating officer that Kizuki had given no indication of what he was about to do, that he had been exactly the same as always. The policeman had obviously formed a poor impression of both Kizuki and of me, as if it was perfectly natural for the kind of person who would skip classes and shoot pool to commit suicide. A small article in the paper brought the affair to a close. Kizuki’s parents got rid of his red N-360. For a time, a white flower marked his homeroom desk.
    In the ten months between Kizuki’s death and graduation, I was unable to find a place for myself in the world around me. I started sleeping with one of the girls at school, but that didn’t last six months. Nothing about her really got to me. I applied to a private university in Tokyo, the kind of school with an entrance exam for which I wouldn’t have to study much, and I passed without exhilaration. The girl asked me not to go to Tokyo—“It’s five hundred miles from here!” she pleaded—but I had to get away from Kobe at any cost. I wanted to begin a new life where I didn’t know a soul.
    “You don’t give a damn about me anymore, now that you’ve slept with me,” she said, crying.
    “That’s not true,” I insisted. “I just need to get away from this town.” But she was not prepared to understand me. And so we parted. Thinking about all the things that made her so much nicer than the other girls at home, I sat on the bullet train to Tokyo feeling terrible about what I’d done, but there was no way to undo it. I would try to forget her.
    There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:
    Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life
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    Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into