murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

make people get really vicious all of a sudden. It was the same with
my mother. What do you think she said to me? "You're not my
daughter! I hate your guts!' The whole world turned black for me for a
second when she said that. But that kind of thing is one of the features
of this particular sickness. Something presses on a part of the brain
and makes people say all kinds of nasty things. You know it's just part
of the sickness, but still, it hurts. What do you expect? Here I am,
working my fingers to the bone for them, and they're saying all this
terrible stuff to me-"
"I know what you mean," I said. Then I remembered the strange
fragments that Midori's father had mumbled to me.
"Ticket? Ueno Station?" Midori said. "I wonder what that's all about?"
"And then he said, Please, and Midori.", "Please take care of
Midori?"'
"Or maybe he wants you to go to Ueno and buy a ticket. The order of
the four words is such a mess, who knows what he means? Does Ueno
Station mean anything special to you?"
"Hmm, Ueno Station." Midori thought about it for a while. "The only
thing I can think of is the two times I ran away, when I was eight and
when I was ten. Both times I took a train from Ueno to Fukushima.
Bought the tickets with money I took from the till. Somebody at home
made me really angry, and I did it to get even. I had an aunt in
Fukushima, I kind of liked her, so I went to her house. My father was
the one who brought me home. Came all the way to Fukushima to get
me - a hundred miles! We ate boxed lunches on the train to Ueno. My
father told me all kinds of stuff while we were travelling, just little bits
and pieces with long spaces in between. Like about the big earthquake
of 1923 or about the war or about the time I was born, stuff he didn't
usually talk about. Come to think of it, those were the only times my
father and I had something like a good, long talk, just the two of us.
Hey, can you believe this? - my father was smack bang in the middle
of Tokyo during one of the biggest earthquakes in history and he
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