murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

nothing under the gown. All she had on was the butterfly hairslide.
Naked now, and still kneeling by the bed, she looked at me. Bathed in
the soft light of the moon, Naoko's body had the heartbreaking lustre
of newborn flesh. When she moved - and she did so almost
imperceptibly - the play of light and shadow on her body shifted
subtly. The swelling roundness of her breasts, her tiny nipples, the
indentation of her navel, her hipbones and pubic hair, all cast grainy
shadows, the shapes of which kept changing like ripples spreading
over the calm surface of a lake.
What perfect flesh! I thought. When had Naoko come to possess such
a perfect body? What had happened to the body I held in my arms that
night last spring?
A sense of imperfection had been what Naoko's body had given me
that night as I tenderly undressed her while she cried. Her breasts had
seemed hard, the nipples oddly jutting, the hips strangely rigid. She
was a beautiful girl, of course, her body marvellous and alluring. It
aroused me that night and swept me along with a gigantic force. But
still, as I held her and caressed her and kissed her naked flesh, I felt a
strange and powerful awareness of the imbalance and awkwardness of
the human body. Holding Naoko in my arms, I wanted to explain to
her, "I am having sex with you now. I am inside you. But really this is
nothing. It doesn't matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies.
All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by
the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh. By doing this,
we are sharing our imperfection." But of course I could never have
said such a thing with any hope of being understood. I just went on
holding her tightly. And as I did so, I was able to feel inside her body
some kind of stony foreign matter, something extra that I could never
draw close to. And that sensation both filled my heart for Naoko and
gave my erection a terrifying intensity.
The body that Naoko revealed before me now, though, was nothing
like the one I had held that night. This flesh had been through many
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