a few relevant things from my short-lived reading of norwegian wood.

(page 50)

there was something strange about naoko’s becoming twenty. i felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. after eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. of course. but she turned twenty. and in the fall, i would do the same. only the dead stay seventeen forever.

(page 68)

“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 think that girls with long hair are the classiest, sweetest, most feminine? i mean, i myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. really.”

(page 75)

“tell me, nagasawa,” i asked, “what is the ‘standard of action’ in your life?”
“you’ll laugh if i tell you,” he said.
“no, i won’t.”
“all right,” he said, “to be a gentleman.”
i didn’t laugh, but i nearly fell off my chair. “‘to be a gentleman’? a gentleman?”
“you heard me.”
“what does it mean to be a gentleman? how do you define it?”
“a gentleman is someone who does not do what he wants to do but what he should do.”
“you’re the weirdest guy i ever met,” i said.
“you’re the straightest guy i ever met,” he said.