murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

the way, when you went to Tokyo?"
"Hmm, let's see," he said, cocking his head, "was it the time His
Majesty the Crown prince got married? My son was in Tokyo and said
I ought to see the place at least once. That must have been 1959."
"Oh, well then, sure, pork must have been good in Tokyo back then," I
said.
"How about these days?" he asked.
I wasn't sure, I said, but I hadn't heard anything special about it. This
seemed to disappoint him. He gave every sign of wanting to continue
our conversation, but I told him I had to catch a bus and started
walking in the direction of the road. Patches of fog remained floating
on the path where it skirted the stream, but the breeze carried them
over to the steep flanks of a nearby mountain. Every now and then as I
walked along I would stop, turn, and heave a deep sigh for no
particular reason. I felt as though I had arrived on a planet where the
gravity was a little different. Yes, of course, I told myself, feeling sad:
I was in the outside world now.
Back at the dorm by 4.30, I changed straight away and left for the
record shop in Shinjuku to put in my hours. I looked after the shop
from six o'clock to 10.30 and sold a few records, but mainly I sat there
in a daze, watching an incredible variety of people streaming by
outside. There were families and couples and drunks and gangsters
and lively-looking girls in short skirts and bearded hippies and bar
hostesses and some indefinable types. Whenever I put on hard rock,
hippies and runaway kids would gather outside to dance and sniff
paint thinner or just sit on the ground doing nothing in particular, and
when I put on Tony Bennett, they would disappear.
Next door was a shop where a middle-aged, sleepy-eyed man sold
"adult toys". I couldn't imagine why anyone would want the kind of
sex paraphernalia he had there, but he seemed to do a roaring trade. In
the alley diagonally across from the record shop I saw a drunken
student vomiting. In the game arcade across from us at another angle,
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