Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

pencils and notebooks next to the cash register. But that’s it. No
War and Peace
, no Kenzaburo Oe, no
Catcher in the Rye
. That’s the Kobayashi Bookstore. That’s how ‘lucky’ I am. Do you think I’m lucky?”
    “I can just see the place.”
    “You know what I mean. Everybody in the neighborhood comes there, some of them for years, and we deliver. It’s a good business, more than enough to support a family of four, no debts, two daughters in college, but that’s it. Nothing to spare for extras. They should never have sent me to a school like that. It was a recipe for heartache. I had to listen to them grumble to me every time the school asked for a contribution, and I was always scared to death I’d run out of money if I went out with my classmates and they wanted to eat someplace expensive. It’s a miserable way to live. Is your family rich?”
    “My family? No, my parents are absolutely ordinary working people, not rich, not poor. I know it’s not easy for them to send me to a private college in Tokyo, but there’s just me, so it’s not that big a deal. They don’t give me much to live on, so I work part-time. We live in a typical house with a little garden and drive a Toyota Corolla.”
    “What’s your job like?”
    “I work in a Shinjuku record shop three nights a week. It’s easy. I just sit there and mind the store.”
    “No kidding,” said Midori. “I don’t know, just looking at you, I kinda figured you had never been hard up for money.”
    “It’s true. I never
have
been hard up for money. Not that we have tons of it, either. I’m like most people.”
    “Well, ‘most people’ in my school were
rich,”
said Midori, palms up on her lap. “That was the problem.”
    “So now you’ll have plenty of chances to see a world without that problem. More than you want to, maybe.”
    “Hey, tell me, what d’you think the best thing is about being rich?”
    “Beats me.”
    “Being able to say you don’t have any money. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we do something, she could say, ‘Sorry, I don’t have any money.’ Which is something I could
never
say if the situation was reversed. If
I
said ‘I don’t have any money,’ it would
really mean
‘I don’t have any money.’ It’s sad. Like if a pretty girl says ‘I look terrible today, I don’t want to go out,’ that’s O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her. That’s what the world was like for me. For six years, until last year.”
    “You’ll get over it.”
    “I hope so. College is such a relief! It’s full of ordinary people.”
    She smiled with the slightest curl of her lip and smoothed her short hair with the palm of her hand.
    “Do you have a job?” I asked.
    “Yeah, I write map notes. You know those little pamphlets that come with maps? With descriptions of the different neighborhoods and population figures and points of interest. Here there’s so-and-so hiking trail or such-and-such a legend, or some special flower or bird. I write the texts for those things. It’s
so
easy! Takes no time at all. I can write a whole booklet with a day of looking things up in the library. All you have to do is master a couple of secrets and all kinds of work comes your way.”
    “What kind of secrets?”
    “Like you put in some little something that nobody else has written and the people at the map company think you’re a literary genius and send you more work. It doesn’t have to be anything at all, just some tiny thing. Like, say, when they made a dam in this particular valley, the watercovered over a village, but still every spring the birds come up from the south and you can see them flying over the lake. Put in one little episode like that and people love it, it’s so graphic and sentimental. The usual part-timer doesn’t bother with stuff like that, but I can make myself decent money with what I write.”
    “Yeah, but you have to find those ‘episodes.’”
    “True,” said Midori