murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

ought out a box of Marlboro, put one in her mouth and lit up with a
match. Taking hold of the glass with the daffodils, she studied the
blooms for a while.
"I don't think I'll put them in a vase," she said. "If I leave them like
this, it's like I just happened to pick them by a pond somewhere and
threw them into the first thing that came to hand."
"I did pick them by the pond at Otsuka Station," I said.
She chuckled. "You are a weird one. Making jokes with a perfectly
straight face."
Chin in hand, she smoked half her cigarette, then crushed it out in the
ashtray. She rubbed her eyes as if smoke had got into them.
"Girls are supposed to be a little more elegant when they put out their
cigarettes. You did that like a lumberjack. You shouldn't just cram it
down in the ashtray but press it lightly around the edges of the ash.
Then it doesn't get all bent up. And girls are never supposed to blow
smoke through their noses. And most girls wouldn't talk about how
they wore the same bra for three months when they're eating alone
with a man."
"I am a lumberjack," Midori said, scratching next to her nose. "I can
never manage to be chic. I try it as a joke sometimes, but it never
sticks. Any more critiques for me?"
"Girls don't smoke Marlboro," I said.
"What's the difference? One tastes as bad as another." She turned the
red Marlboro packet over and over in her hand. "I started smoking last
month. It's not as if I was dying for tobacco or anything. I just sort of
felt like it." "Why's that?" I asked.
She pressed her hands together on the table and thought about it for a
while. "What's the difference? You don't smoke?" "Stopped in June," I
said.
"How come?"
"It was a pain. I hated running out of smokes in the middle of the
night. I don't like having something control me that way."
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