Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online

“and every time I find something new that I like even more than the last time.”
    “This man says he has read
The Great Gatsby
three times,” he said as if to himself. “Well, any friend of
Gatsby
is a friend of mine.”
    And so we became friends. This happened in October.
    The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. “That’s the only kind of book I can trust,” he said.
    “It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”
    “What kind of authors
do
you like?” I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior.
    “Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,” he answered without hesitation.
    “Not exactly fashionable.”
    “That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”
    This took me off guard. “How can you say that?”
    “’Cause it’s true. I know. I can see it. It’s like we have marks on our foreheads. And besides, we’ve both read
The Great Gatsby.”
    I did some quick calculating. “But Fitzgerald’s been dead only twenty-eight years,” I said.
    “So what? Two years? Fitzgerald’s advanced.”
    No one else in the dorm knew that Nagasawa was a secret reader of classic novels, nor would it have mattered if they had. Nagasawa was known for being smart. He breezed into Tokyo University, he got good grades, he would take the Civil Service Exam, join the Foreign Ministry, and become a diplomat. He came from a super family. His father owned a big hospital in Nagoya, and his brother had also graduated from Tokyo, gone on to medical school, and would one day inherit the hospital. Nagasawa always had plenty of money in his pocket, and he carried himself with real dignity. People treated him with respect, even the dorm head. When he asked someone to do something, the person would do it without protest. There was no choice in the matter.
    Nagasawa had a certain inborn quality that drew people to him and made them follow him. He knew how to stand at the head of the pack, to assess the situation, to give precise and tactful instructions that others would obey. Above his head hung an aura that revealed his powers like an angel’s halo, the mere sight of which would inspire awe in people for this superior being. Which is why it shocked everyone that Nagasawa chose me, a person with no distinctive qualities, to be his special friend. People I hardly knew treated me with a certain respect because of it, but what they did not seem to realize was that the reason for my having been chosen was a simple one, namely that I treated Nagasawa with none of the adulation he received from other people. I had a definite interest in the strange, complex aspects of his nature, but none of those other things—his grades,his aura, his looks—impressed me. This must have been something new for him.
    There were sides to Nagasawa’s personality that conflicted in the extreme. Even I would be moved by his kindness at times, but he could, just as easily, be malicious and cruel. He was both a spirit of amazing loftiness and an irredeemable man of the gutter. He could charge forward, the optimistic leader, even as his heart writhed in a swamp of loneliness. I saw these paradoxical qualities of his from the start, and I could never understand why they weren’t just as obvious to everyone else. He lived in his own special hell.
    Still, I think I always