Norwegian Wood
Before anything, I would like to attach this song. Just listen to it, close your eyes and imagine yourself in a forest. What do you see? Who do you see?
“That song can make me feel so sad,” said Naoko. “I don’t know, I guess I imagine myself wandering in a deep wood. I’m all alone and it’s cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me…”
When I set down the book Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森), I had to take some time just to think about it. How it began, how it ended, how it made me feel throughout.
It seems like death has been a common theme in the books I’ve been reading lately. Shortly before reading this book, I read Yoshimoto Banana’s Asleep, which also discussed death in an utterly open and honest manner. (I talked about it in my last post here, actually.)
Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森)
Title: Norwegian Wood (Japanese Title: Noruwei no Mori ノルウェイの森)
Author: Murakami Haruki 村上春樹
Genre: Novel
Written: 1987
Translated: 2000
This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student’s romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love.
The book is a melancholy tale of a late 60s Tokyo love story, about what was then and what could have been. Murakami’s prose is slow, elegiac, beautiful and realistic, and brought me to a new level of understanding of love, death, and life.
Books touch each individual in different ways, and I’m not good with words so I won’t try to convince anyone else to read it and appreciate it the same way I did. I just want to say that it touched me deeply.
It is tragic. But tragically beautiful. It is solemn. But stunningly elegant.
I can’t give spoilers, so I won’t go into any details, but if you ever happen to read it, I’d gladly talk about the smallest thing with you all night. I would very much like that. We can talk until two.
I also found some time to watch the film adaptation of it a couple of days after I finished the book, just to see how well they adapted it. Of course, the book is much better, and the film left out so many little touching details that left me stunned. The ending of the book is vague, and the film adaptation only reflected one interpretation, but I was quite satisfied.
I also quite liked the soundtracks:
Winter and Death
I don’t think it’s a pessimistic subject to think about. Death.
We don’t think about death enough in our culture, and a lot of us don’t recognize how losses impact our lives.
Winter freezes life, sending us into hibernation until spring arrives with the sun to thaw out our world. Death is a perpetual coldness of the winter.
It’s like the “field well” that Naoko described to Toru:
It lay precisely on the border where the meadow ended and the woods began – a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by grass. Nothing marked its perimeter – no fence, no stone curb (at least not one that rose above ground level). It was nothing but a hole, a wide-open mouth… All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density.
Life and death are not polar ends of each other. Death is a facet of life and has always been among us.
We may all be too scared to confront it and look at death straight in the eye, but there is no avoiding it. We can never forget the losses even if we go on living, because what death leaves behind is neither a scar that requires time to heal, nor a lesson that requires time to learn.
When we suffer losses, we mourn, we reflect, we struggle to continue our lives, but we will always carry death with us wherever we go, “and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.”