Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online Page B

talents he had he would share with Naoko and me alone, while Nagasawa was bent on disseminating his considerable gifts to all around him. Not that he was dying to sleep with the girls he found: it was just a game to him.
    I was not too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn’t know. It was an easy way to take care of my sex drive, of course, and I did enjoy all theholding and touching, but I hated the morning after. I’d wake up and find this strange girl sleeping next to me, and the room would reek of alcohol, and the bed and the lighting and the curtains had that special “love hotel” garishness, and my head would be in a hungover fog. Then the girl would wake up and start groping around for her underwear and while she was putting on her stockings she’d say something like, “I hope you used one last night. It’s the worst day of the month for me.” Then she’d sit in front of a mirror and start grumbling about her aching head or her uncooperative makeup as she redid her lipstick or attached her false eyelashes. I would have preferred not to spend the whole night with them, but you can’t worry about a midnight curfew while you’re seducing women (which runs counter to the laws of physics anyway), so I’d go out with an overnight pass. This meant I had to stay put until morning and go back to the dorm filled with self-loathing and disillusionment, sunlight stabbing my eyes, mouth coated with sand, head belonging to someone else.
    When I had slept with three or four girls this way, I asked Nagasawa, “After you’ve done this seventy times, doesn’t it begin to seem kind of pointless?”
    “That proves you’re a decent human being,” he said. “Congratulations. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from sleeping with one strange woman after another. It just tires you out and makes you disgusted with yourself. It’s the same for me.”
    “So why the hell do you keep it up?”
    “Hard to say. Hey, you know that thing Dostoyevsky wrote on gambling? It’s like that. When you’re surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up. See what I mean?”
    “Sort of.”
    “Look. The sun goes down. The girls come out and drink. They wander around, looking for something. I can give them that something. It’s the easiest thing in the world, like drinking water from a spigot. Before you know it, I’ve got ’em down. It’s what they expect. That’s what I mean by possibility. It’s all around you. How can you ignore it? You have a certain ability and the opportunity to use it: can you keep your mouth shut and let it pass?”
    “I don’t know, I’ve never been in a situation like that,” I said with a smile. “I can’t imagine what it’s like.”
    “Count your blessings,” Nagasawa said.
    His womanizing was the reason Nagasawa lived in a dorm despite hisaffluent background. Worried that Nagasawa would do nothing else if allowed to live alone in Tokyo, his father had compelled him to live all four years of college in the dormitory. Not that it mattered much to Nagasawa himself. He was not going to let a few rules bother him. Whenever he felt like it, he would get overnight permission and go girl hunting or spend the night in his girlfriend’s apartment. These permissions were not easy to get, but for him they were like free passes—and for me, too, as long as he did the asking.
    Nagasawa did have a steady girlfriend, one he’d been going out with since his freshman year. Her name was Hatsumi, and she was the same age as Nagasawa. I had met her a few times and found her to be a very nice girl. She didn’t have the kind of looks that immediately attracted attention, and in fact she was so ordinary that when I first met her I had to wonder why Nagasawa couldn’t do better, but anyone who talked to her took an immediate liking to her. Quiet, intelligent, funny, caring, she always dressed with wonderful good taste. I liked her a lot and knew that if I could