murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

their garden for summer guests. This one made it over here."
Storm Trooper was busy stuffing clothes and notebooks into his black
Boston bag as he spoke.
We were several weeks into the summer holidays, and he and I were
almost the only ones left in the dorm. I had carried on with my jobs
rather than go back to Kobe, and he had stayed on for a practical
training session. Now that the training had ended, he was going back
to the mountains of Yamanashi.
"You could give this to your girlfriend," he said. "I'm sure she'd love
it."
"Thanks," I said.
After dark the dorm was hushed, like a ruin. The flag had been
lowered and the lights glowed in the windows of the dining hall. With
so few students left, they turned on only half the lights in the place,
keeping the right half dark and the left lighted. Still, the smell of
dinner drifted up to me - some kind of cream stew.
I took my bottled firefly to the roof. No one else was up there. A white
vest hung on a clothesline that someone had forgotten to take in,
waving in the evening breeze like the discarded shell of some huge
insect. I climbed a steel ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of
the dormitory's water tank. The tank was still warm with the heat of
the sunlight it had absorbed during the day. I sat in the narrow space
above the tank, leaning against the handrail and coming face-to-face
with an almost full white moon. The lights of Shinjuku glowed to the
right, Ikebukuro to the left. Car headlights flowed in brilliant streams
from one pool of light to the other. A dull roar of jumbled sounds
hung over the city like a cloud.
The firefly made a faint glow in the bottom of the jar, its light all too
weak, its colour all too pale. I hadn't seen a firefly in years, but the
ones in my memory sent a far more intense light into the summer
darkness, and that brilliant, burning image was the one that had stayed
with me all that time.
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