murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

and yielded first place to The Great Gatsby. Gatsby stayed in first
place for a long time after that. I would pull it off the shelf when the
mood hit me and read a section at random. It never once disappointed
me. There wasn't a boring page in the whole book. I wanted to tell
people what a wonderful novel it was, but no one around me had read
The Great Gatsby or was likely to. Urging others to read F Scott
Fitzgerald, although not a reactionary act, was not something one
could do in 1968.
When I did finally meet the one person in my world who had read
Gatsby, he and I became friends because of it. His name was
Nagasawa. He was two years older than me, and because he was doing
legal studies at the prestigious Tokyo University, he was on the fast
track to national leadership. We lived in the same dorm and knew
each other only by sight, until one day when I was reading Gatsby in a
sunny spot in the dining hall. He sat down next to me and asked what I
was reading. When I told him, he asked if I was enjoying it. "This is
my third time," I said, "and every time I find something new that I like
even more than the last."
"This man says he has read The Great Gatsby three times," he said as
if to himself. "Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine."
And so we became friends. This happened in October.
The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met
a lot of weird people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He
was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never
to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years.
"That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said.
"It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but
I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had
the baptism of time. Life is too short."
"What kind of authors do you like?" I asked, speaking in respectful
tones to this man two years my senior.
"Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens," he answered without
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