murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

the far side.
"Tell me, Watanabe, do you get hard watching this kind of stuff?"
"Well, yeah, sometimes," I said. "That's why they make these films."
"So what you're saying is, every time one of those scenes starts, every
man in the cinema has his thing standing to attention? Thirty or forty
of them sticking up all at once? It's so weird if you stop and think
about it, don't you think?"
"Yeah, I guess so, now you mention it."
The second feature was a fairly normal porn flick, which meant it was
even more boring than the first. It had lots of oral sex scenes, and
every time they started doing fellatio or cunnilingus or sixty-nine the
soundtrack would fill the cinema with loud sucking or slurping sound
effects. Listening to them, I felt strangely moved to think that I was
living out my life on this bizarre planet of ours.
"Who comes up with these sounds, I wonder," I said to Midori.
"I think they're great!" she said.
There was also a sound for a penis moving in and out of a vagina. I
had never realized that such sounds even existed. The man was into a
lot of heavy breathing, and the woman came up with the usual sort of
expressions - "Yes!" or "More!" - as she writhed under him. You
could also hear the bed creaking. These scenes just went on and on.
Midori seemed to be enjoying them at first, but even she got bored
after a while and suggested we leave. We went outside and took a few
deep breaths. This was the first time in my life the outside air of
Shinjuku felt healthy to me.
"That was fun," said Midori. "Let's try it again sometime."
"They just keep doing the same things," I said.
"Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things."
She had a point there.
We found another bar and ordered drinks. I had more whisky, and
Midori drank three or four cocktails of some indefinable kind. Outside
again, Midori said she wanted to climb a tree.
269