murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

I said I liked him and thought he was a nice person but that, for certain
reasons, I couldn't marry him. He wanted to know what those reasons
were, so I explained everything to him with complete honesty - that I
had been hospitalized twice for mental breakdowns. I told him
everything - what the cause had been, my condition, and the
possibility that it could happen again. He said he needed time to think,
and I encouraged him to take all the time he needed. But when he
came for his lesson a week later, he said he still wanted to marry me. I
asked him to wait three months. We would see each other for three
months, I said, and if he still wanted to marry me at that point, we
would talk about it again.
"We dated once a week for three months. We went everywhere, and
talked about everything, and I got to like him a lot. When I was with
him, I felt as if my life had finally come back to me. It gave me a
wonderful sense of relief to be alone with him: I could forget all those
terrible things that had happened. So what if I hadn't been able to
become a concert pianist? So what if I had spent time in mental
hospitals? My life hadn't ended. Life was still full of wonderful things
I hadn't experienced. If only for having made me feel that way, I felt
tremendously grateful to him. After three months went by, he asked
me again to marry him. And this is what I said to him: "If you want to
sleep with me, I don't mind. I've never slept with anybody, and I'm
very fond of you, so if you want to make love to me, I don't mind at
all. But marrying me is a whole different matter. If you marry me, you
take on all my troubles, and they're a lot worse than you can imagine.
"He said he didn't care, that he didn't just want to sleep with me, he
wanted to marry me, to share everything I had inside me. And he
meant it. He was the kind of person who would only say what he
really meant, and do anything he said. So I agreed to marry him. It
was all I could do. We got married, let's see, four months later I think
it was. He fought with his parents over me, and they disowned him.
He was from an old family that lived in a rural part of Shikoku. They
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