Midori

Taken from Haruki Murakami book, Norwegian Wood.

Sunday morning I got up at nine, shaved, did my laundry, and hung the clothes on the roof. It was a beautiful day. The first smell of autumn was in the air. Red dragonflies were flitting around the quadrangle, chased by neighborhood kids swinging nets. With no wind, the Rising Sun hung limp on its pole. I put a freshly ironed shirt and walked from the dorm to the streetcar stop. A student neighborhood on a Sunday morning: the streets were dead, virtually empty, most stores closed. What few sounds there were echoed with special clarity. A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at a line of empty cans. A flower store was open, so I went in and bought some daffodils. Daffodils in the autumn: that was strange. But I had always liked that particular flower.

Three old women were the only passengers on the Sunday morning streetcar. They all looked at me and my flowers. One of them gave me a smile. I smiled back. I sat in the last seat and watched the old houses passing close by the window. The streetcar almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the yard of another house, a little kid was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from someplace and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The street-car snaked its way through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on at stops along the way but the three old women went on talking intently about something huddled together face-to- face. 

I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori's map down a broad street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs. Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or repaired in spots, and it was those additions that tended to look far more shabby than the old buildings themselves.

The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the people who used to live here had become fed up with the cars and the filthy air and the noise and high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap apartments and company flats and hard-to-move shops and a few stubborn holdouts who clung to old family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as if wrapped in a haze of exhaust gas.

Ten minutes' walk down this street brought me to a corner gas station where I turned right into a short block of shops in the middle of which hung the sign for Kobayashi Bookstore. True, it was not a big store, but neither was it as small as Midori's description had led me to imagine. It was just a typical neighborhood bookstore, the same kind I used to run to on the very day the boys' magazine came out. A nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place.

The whole front of the store was sealed off by a big, roll down metal shutter inscribed with a magazine advertisement : "Weekly Bunshun Sold Here Thursdays." I still had fifteen minutes to noon, but I didn't want to kill time wandering through the block with a handful of daffodils, so I pressed the doorbell beside the shutter and stepped a few paces back to wait. Fifteen seconds went by without an answer, and I was debating myself whether to ring again when I heard a window clatter open above me. I looked up to find Midori leaning out and waving.


"Come in," she yelled. "Lift the shutter."
"Is it O.K.? I'm kind of early," I shouted back.
"No problem. Come upstairs. I'm busy in the kitchen." She pulled the window closed.

The shutter made a terrific grinding noise as I raised it three feet from the ground, ducked under, and lowered it again. The shop was pitch black inside. I managed to feel my way to the back stairway, tripping over bound piles of magazines. There I untied my shoes and climbed up to the living area. The interior of the house was dark and gloomy. Where the stairs came up was a simple parlor with a sofa and easy chairs. It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish movies. There was a kind of storage area on the left and what looked like the door to a bathroom. I had to climb the steep stairway with care to reach the second floor, but once I got there, it was so much brighter than the first floor that I felt a good deal of relief.

"Over here," called Midori's voice. To the right at the top of the stairs was what looked to be a dining room, and beyond that a kitchen. The house itself was old, but the kitchen seemed to have been remodeled recently with new cabinets and a bright, shiny sink and faucet. There I found Midori preparing food. She had a pot bubbling, and the smell of broiled fish filled the air.
"There's beer in the refrigerator," said Midori with a glance in my direction. "Have a seat while I finish this." I took a can and sat at the kitchen table. The beer was so cold it might have been in the refrigerator for the better part of a year. On the table lay a small white ashtray, a newspaper and a soy sauce dispenser. There was also a notepad and pen with a phone number and some figures on the pad that seemed to be calculations connected with shopping.

"I should have this done in ten minutes," she said. "Can you stand the wait?"
"Of course I can," I said.
"Get good and hungry, then. I'm making a lot."

I sipped my bear and focused on Midori as she went on cooking, her back to me. She worked with quick, nimble movements, handling no fewer than four cooking procedures at once. Over here she tested the taste of a boiled dish, and the next second she was at the cutting board, rat-tat-tatting, then she took something out of the refrigerator and piled it in a dish, and before I knew it she had washed a pot she was finished using. From the back, she looked like an Indian percussionist – ringing a bell, tapping a block, striking a water buffalo bone, each movement precise and economical, with perfect balance. I watched in awe.

"Let me know if there's something I can do," I said just in case.
"That's O.K.," said Midori with a smile in my direction. "I'm used to doing everything alone." She wore slim blue jeans and a navy T-shirt. An Apple Records logo nearly covered the back of the shirt. She had incredibly narrow hips, as if she had somehow skipped the growth stage in which the hips are solidified, and this gave here a far more neutral look than most girls have in slim jeans. The light pouring in from the kitchen window gave her shape a kind of vague outline.

"You really didn't have to put together such a feast," I said.
"It's no feast," answered Midori without turning my way. "I was too busy to do any real shopping yesterday. I'm just slapping together a few things I had in the fridge. Really, don't worry. Besides, it's Kobayashi family tradition to treat guests well. I don't know what it is, but we like to entertain. It's inborn, a kind of sickness. Not that we're especially nice or people love us or anything, but if somebody shows up we have to treat them well no matter what. We've all got the same personality flaw, for better or worse. Take my father, for example. He himself hardly drinks, but the house is full of alcohol. What for? To serve guests! So don't hold back : drink all the beer you want."

"Thanks," I said.

It suddenly dawned on me that I had left the flowers downstairs. I had set them aside when untying my shoes and forgotten to bring them up with me. I slipped back down stairs and found the ten bright blossoms lying in the gloom. Midori took a tall, slim glass from the cupboard and arranged the flowers in it.

"I love daffodils,"said Midori. 
"I once sang 'Seven Daffodils' in the high school talent show. Do you know the song?"
"Of course I do."
"We had a folk group. I played guitar."

She sang "Seven Daffodils" as she arranged the food on the plates.

***

Midori's cooking was far better than I had imagined it would be, an amazing assortment of fried, pickled, boiled and roasted dishes using eggs, mackerel, fresh greens, egg plant, mushrooms, radishes and sesame seeds, all done in the delicate Kyoto style.
"This is great," I said with my mouth full
"O.K., tell me the truth now," Midori said. "You weren't expecting my cooking to be very good, were you – judging from my looks."
"I guess not," I said honestly.
"You're from Kansai region, so you like this kind of delicate flavoring, right?"
"Don't tell me you changed style especially for me?"
"Don't be ridiculous! I wouldn't go that much trouble. No, we always eat like this."
"So your mother - or your father - is from the Kansai?"

"Nope, my father was born in Tokyo and my mother's from Fukushima. There's not a single Kansai person among my relatives. We're all from Tokyo or the northern Kanto."

"I don't get it," I said. "How come you can make this hundred-percent-authentic Kansai-style food? Did somebody teach you?"

"Well, its kind of a long story," she said, eating a slice of fried egg. "My mother hated housework of any kind, and she almost never cooked anything. And we had the business to think about, so it was always like 'Today we're so busy, let's order out' or 'Let's just buy some croquettes at the butcher shop' and stuff. I hated that even when I was a little kid, I mean like cooking a big pot of curry and eating the same thing three days in a row. So then one day – I was in the third year of middle school – I decided I was going to cooking for the family and do it right. I went to the big Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and bought the biggest, handsomest cookbook I could find, and I mastered it from cover to cover: how to choose a cutting board, how to sharpen knives, how to bone a fish, how to shave fresh bonito flakes, everything. It turned out the author of the book was from the Kansai, so all my cooking is Kansai style."

"You mean you learned how to make all this stuff from a book?!"

"I saved my money and went to eat the real thing. That's how I learned flavorings. I've got a pretty good intuition. I'm hopeless as a logical thinker, though."

"It's amazing you could teach yourself to cook so well without having anyone show you."

"It wasn't easy," said Midori with a sigh, "growing up in a house where nobody gave a damn about food. I'd tell them I wanted to buy decent knives and pots and they wouldn't give me the money. 'What we have now is good enough,' they'd say, but I'd tell them that was crazy, you couldn't bone a fish with the kind of flimsy knives we had at home, so they'd say, 'What the hell do you have to bone a fish for?' It was hopeless trying to communicate with them. I saved up my allowance and bought real professional knives and pots and strainers and stuff. Can you believe it? Here's a fifteen-year-old girl pinching pennies to buy strainers and whetstones and tempura pots when all the other girls at school are getting huge allowances and buying beautiful dresses and shoes. Don't you feel sorry for me?"

I nodded, swallowing a mouthful of clear soup with fresh junsai greens.

"When I was in my first year of high school, I had to have an egg fryer – a long, narrow pan for making this dashimaki style of fried egg we're eating. I bought it with money I was supposed to use for a new bra. For three months I had to live with one bra. Can you believe it? I'd wash my bra at night, go crazy trying to dry it, and wear it the next day. And if it didn't dry right, I had tragedy to deal with. The saddest thing in the world is wearing damp bra. I'd walk around with tears pouring from my eyes. To think I was suffering this for an egg fryer!"
"I see what you mean," I said with a laugh.

"I know I shouldn't say this, but actually it was kind of relief to me when my mother died. I could run the family budget my way. I could buy what I liked. So now, I've got a relatively complete set of cooking utensils. My father doesn't know a thing about the budget."

"When did your mother die?
"Two years ago. Cancer. Brain tumor. She was in the hospital a year and a half. It was terrible. She suffered from beginning to end. Finally lost her mind, had to be doped up all the time, and still she couldn't die, though when she did it was practically a mercy killing. It's the worst kind of death – the person's in agony, the family goes through hell. It took every cent we had. I mean, they'd give her these shots – bang, bang, twenty thousands yen a pop, and she had to have round-the-clock care. I was so busy with her, I couldn't study, had to delay college for a year. And as if that weren't bad enough –" She stopped herself in midsentence, put her chopsticks down, and sighed. "How did this conversation turn so dark all of sudden?"


"It started with the business about the bras." I said.
"So anyway, eat your eggs and think about what I just told you," Midori said with a solemn expression.

Eating my portion filled me up, but Midori ate far less. "Cooking ruins my appetite," she said. She cleared the table, wiped up the crumbs, brought out a box of Marlboros, 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 guess I won't switch them to a vase," she said. "If I leave them like this, it's like I just happened to pick them by pond somewhere and threw them into the first thing I got my hands on."

"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 an ashtray. She rubbed her eyes as if smoke had gotten into them.

"Girls are supposed to be a little more elegant when they put their cigarettes out. 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 Marlboros," I said.
"What's the difference? One tastes as bad as another." She turned the red Marlboro package over and over in her hand. "I just started smoking last month. It's not like I was dying for tobacco or anything. I just sort of felt like it."
"Why's that" I asked.

She pressed her hands together atop the table and thought about it awhile. "What's the difference? You don't smoke?"
"Quit 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."

"You're very clear about what you like and what you don't like," she said.
"Maybe so," I said. "Maybe that's why people don't like me. Never have."

"It's cause you show it," she said. "You make it obvious you don't care whether people like you or not. That makes some people mad." She spoke in a near mumble, chin in hand. "But I like talking to you. The way you talk is so unusual. 'I don't like having something control me that way'".

******