Haruki Murakami: Norwegian wood
21.04.2003
[8] Maybe you will have to help me. We're not running our lives according to some account book. If you need me, use me. Don't you see?
[47] There was something strange about her becoming 20. I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between 18 and 19. After 18 would come 19, and after 19, 18, of course. But she turned 20. And in the autumn, I would do the same. Only the dead stay 17 for ever.
[51] Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard.
[91] "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.
[98] "I'm sure you have your reasons."
[159] "But after a certain age you have to start performing for yourself. That's what music is. I had to drop out of the elite course and pass my thirty-first birthday before I was finally able to see that."
[224] "You mean, if you
knew me better, you'd force stuff on me like everyone
else?"
"It's possible," I said. "That's how people live in the
real world: forcing stuff on each other."
[296] "That was fun,"
said Midori. "Let's try it again sometime."
"They just keep doing the same things," I said.
"Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things."
She had a point there.
[305] I sat at the kitchen table, drinking my beer and reading Beneath the Wheel. I had first read the novel the year I entered school. And now, about eight years later, here I was, reading the same book in a girls's kitchen, wearing the undersized pyjamas of her dead father. Funny. If it hadn't been for these strange circumstances, I would probably never have reread Beneath the Wheel.
[316] "Mind if I give
you one piece of advice?"
"Go ahead."
"Don't feel sorry for yourself," he said. "Only arseholes
do that."
[345-346] "Why?"
"'Why?'!" she screamed. "Are you crazy?"
You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can
read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that?
Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl say
something like this? I like you more than I like him,
that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome,
of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!"
I tried to speak but I felt the words catching in my throat. Midori threw her cigarette into a puddle. "Will you please get that look off your face? You're gonna make me cry."
