murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

Saturdays and Sundays: waiting on tables at a smallish Italian
restaurant. The conditions were pretty poor, but travel
and lunch expenses were included. And whenever somebody on the
late shift took the day off on a Monday, Wednesday or Thursday
(which happened often) I could take their place. This was perfect for
me. The manager said they would raise my pay when I had stayed for
three months, and they wanted me to start that Saturday. He was a
much more decent guy than the idiot who ran the record shop in
Shinjuku.
I tried phoning Midori's flat again, and again her sister answered.
Midori hadn't come back since yesterday, she said, sounding tired, and
now she herself was beginning to worry: did I have any idea where
she might have gone? All I knew was that Midori had her pyjamas and
a toothbrush in her bag.
I saw Midori at the lecture on Wednesday. She was wearing a deep
green pullover and the dark sunglasses she had often worn that
summer. She was seated in the last row, talking with a thin girl with
glasses I had seen once before. I approached her and said I'd like to
talk afterwards. The girl with glasses looked at me first, and then
Midori looked at me. Her hairstyle was, in fact, somewhat more
feminine than it had been before: more mature.
"I have to meet someone," she said, cocking her head slightly.
"I won't take up much of your time," I said. "Five minutes."
Midori removed her sunglasses and narrowed her eyes. She might just
as well have been looking at a crumbling, abandoned house some
hundred yards in the distance.
"I don't want to talk to you. Sorry," she said.
The girl with glasses looked at me with eyes that said: She says she
doesn't want to talk to you. Sorry.
I sat at the right end of the front row for the lecture (an overview of
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