Free Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami Page B

replaced it with Jim Morrison and Miles Davis. This made the room seem a little more like my own. I used some of the money I had saved from work to buy a small stereo. At night I would drink alone and listen to music. I thought about Storm Trooper every now and then, but I enjoyed living alone.
    A T ELEVEN-THIRTY one Monday, after a lecture on Euripides in History of Drama, I took a ten-minute walk to a little restaurant and had an omelette and salad for lunch. The place was on a quiet back street and it had somewhat higher prices than the student dining hall, but you could relax there, and they knew how to make a good omelette. “They” were a married couple who rarely spoke to each other, and they had one part-time waitress. As I sat there eating by the window, a group of four students came in, two men and two women, all rather neatly dressed. They took the table near the door, spent some time looking over the menu and discussing their options, until one of them reported their choices to the waitress.
    Before long I noticed that one of the girls kept glancing in my direction. She had extremely short hair and wore dark sunglasses and a white cotton minidress. I had no idea who she was, so I went on with my lunch, but she soon slipped out of her seat and came over to where I was sitting. With one hand on the edge of my table, she said, “You’re Watanabe, aren’t you?”
    I raised my head and looked at her more closely. Still I could not recall ever having seen her. She was the kind of girl you notice, so if I had met her before I should have been able to recognize her immediately, and there weren’t that many people in my university that knew me by name.
    “Mind if I sit down?” she asked. “Or are you expecting somebody?”
    Still uncertain, I shook my head. “No, nobody’s coming. Please.”
    With a wooden clunk, she dragged a chair out and sat down across from me, staring straight at me through her sunglasses, then glancing down at my plate.
    “Looks good,” she said.
    “It is good. Mushroom omelette and green pea salad.”
    “Damn,” she said. “Oh, well, I’ll get it next time. I already ordered something else.”
    “What’d you order?”
    “Macaroni and cheese.”
    “Their macaroni and cheese is not bad, either,” I said. “By the way, do I know you? I can’t seem to remember.”
    “Euripides,” she said
“Electra
. ‘No god hearkens to my helpless cry.’ You know—the class just ended.”
    I stared at her hard. She took off her sunglasses. At last I remembered her—a freshman I had seen in History of Drama. A striking change in hairstyle had kept me from recognizing her.
    “Oh,” I said, touching a spot a few inches below my shoulder, “your hair was down to here before summer break.”
    “You’re right,” she said. “I had a perm this summer, and it was
just awful
. I was ready to kill myself. I looked like a corpse on the beach with seaweed stuck to my head. So I figured as long as I was ready to die, I might as well cut it all off. At least it’s cool in the summer.” She ran her hand through her pixie cut and gave me a smile.
    “It looks good, though,” I said, still munching on my omelette. “Let me see your profile.”
    She turned away and held the pose for a few seconds.
    “Yeah, I thought so. It really looks good on you. Nicely shaped head. Pretty ears, too, uncovered like that.”
    “So I’m
not
crazy after all! I thought I looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first-grader or a concentration camp survivor. What’s this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty
un
classy girls with long hair. Really.”
    “I think you look better now than you did before,” I said. And I meant it. As far as I could recall, with