Naoko exists at a certain remove for the entire length of Norwegian Wood, even in the scenes where she's standing right in front of Toru. Murakami keeps her half in the present and half somewhere else, first in Tokyo, later in a sanatorium deep enough in the mountains that snow becomes the book's dominant weather. She writes long, careful letters instead of speaking. When she does speak, it's often to describe a field with a well hidden somewhere in it, a hole a person could fall into and never be found, which is as close as the novel comes to explaining her directly. Murakami never explains her the rest of the way. He just keeps the reader listening at the same careful distance Toru does.
I know that particular cold, or a version of it. I spent a season somewhere far enough from home that the wind actually meant something, and I remember a friend telling me that winter sometimes refuses to leave on schedule, jealous of spring, and that's supposedly why the wind reverses direction at the season's end. I never checked if that was true. I only remember standing against it, hand out of my pocket a second too long, thinking how strange it was to feel foreign to the weather when every other kind of foreignness had worn off months before.
The scenes I remember best from that time weren't the ones I expected to keep. Not the landmarks. A closed bar. A handful of students behind a café window. The particular quiet of a street that hadn't woken up yet. Small, unremarkable things that turned out, later, to be the whole memory.
The scent is built for that kind of quiet: iris held cool rather than sweet, the smell of fresh paper before anything's written on it, white tea, a cold musk underneath that only softens once the room, and the person wearing it, warms up enough to let it.