murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

answers they wanted.
And so I went from 18 to 19. Each day the sun would rise and set, the
flag would be raised and lowered. Every Sunday I would have a date
with my dead friend's girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I
was going to do. For my courses I would read Claudel and Racine and
Eisenstein, but they meant almost nothing to me. I made no friends at
the lectures, and hardly knew anyone in the dorm. The others in the
dorm thought I wanted to be a writer because I was always alone with
a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
I tried to talk about this feeling with Naoko. She, at least, would be
able to understand what I was feeling with some degree of precision, I
thought. But I could never find the words to express myself. Strange, I
seemed to have caught her word-searching sickness.
On Saturday nights I would sit by the phone in the lobby, waiting for
Naoko to call. Most of the others were out, so the lobby was usually
deserted. I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent
space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And
what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers.
Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but
my fingers touched nothing.
I read a lot, but not a lot of different books: I like to read my
favourites again and again. Back then it was Truman Capote, John
Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, but I didn't see
anyone else in my lectures or the dorm reading writers like that. They
liked Kazumi Takahashi, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, or
contemporary French novelists, which was another reason I didn't
have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With
my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance
deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.
At 18 my favourite book was John Updike's The Centaur, but after I
had read it a number of times, it began to lose some of its initial lustre
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