murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

Naoko remained silent for a long time, staring at her toes. At a loss for
words, I took another sip of wine.
"How many girls have you slept with, Toru?" Naoko asked in a tiny
voice as if the thought had just crossed her mind.
"Eight or nine," I answered truthfully.
Reiko plopped the guitar into her lap. "You're not even 20 years old!"
she said. "What kind of life are you leading?"
Naoko kept silent and watched me with those clear eyes of hers. I told
Reiko about the first girl I'd slept with and how we had broken up. I
had found it impossible to love her, I explained. I went on to tell her
about my sleeping with one girl after another under Nagasawa's
tutelage.
"I'm not trying to make excuses, but I was in pain," I said to Naoko.
"Here I was, seeing you almost every week, and talking with you, and
knowing that the only one in your heart was Kizuki. It hurt. It really
hurt. And I think that's why I slept with girls I didn't know."
Naoko shook her head for a few moments, and then she raised her face
to look at me. "You asked me that time why I had never slept with
Kizuki, didn't you? Do you still want to know?"
"I suppose it's something I really ought to know," I said.
"I think so, too," said Naoko. "The dead will always be dead, but we
have to go on living."
I nodded. Reiko played the same difficult passage over and over,
trying to get it right.
"I was ready to sleep with him," said Naoko, unclasping her hairslide
and letting her hair down. She toyed with the butterfly shape in her
hands. "And of course he wanted to sleep with me. So we tried. We
tried a lot. But it never worked. We couldn't do it. I didn't know why
then, and I still don't know why. I loved him, and I wasn't worried
about losing my virginity. I would have been glad to do anything he
wanted. But it never worked."
Naoko lifted the hair she had let down and fastened it with the slide.
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