Norwegian Wood
- 4 mins"Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life."
I have heard about Norwegian Wood a lot of times by now. I think it’s Murakami’s one of the most, if not the most, famous books. I’ve been meaning to read this for quite a while. So, I bought a paperback version of it in around 2023, but never picked it up until a month ago. I just finished reading the book today.
The story is about death. It begins with a death, ends with one. Death is such an intriguing topic. If you take death at its face value, it’s just the end of a life. An end that was inevitable. Yet, people can’t accept death, rather they fear this inevitability. I’ve always thought that death hurts the people around the dead for a far longer time. This book takes the same path.
It’s a story about a boy, Toru Watanabe, who loses his best friend. Murakami shows how this boy grows up and navigates the world around him, keeping the death of his friend in mind. In his path, Watanabe faces more death around him. Some turn him into a different human being, while others fade away like the mist in the morning. Death lingers around him.
If you stop and think about it, all of us have been through that. We have all seen people die around us. There may be some people who see death every day. Yet, not all deaths matter to them. Only a handful of deaths actually stay with us and we think about them first thing in the morning. However, with time, these deaths also fade away and you realize that that’s what life has been all about. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other and repeating that. Once in a while, you look back and get to see how far you’ve actually come. How you’ve left so many memories behind. How all the people without whom your life would be incomplete are not around you now. Yet, life goes on.
Human is the most mind-bogglingly weird and amazingly wonderful piece of art. They have this strange ability to adapt to life. No matter how hard it gets, humans will always find a way to cope. They only need one thing. Time. With time, humans can achieve a lot of things. If you dig a hole in the ground and leave it like that for a couple of months, little plants will start growing in that hole. The forest embraces this strange gap in the soil and makes it seem like it’s always been there. A similar thing happens to humans. They make the hole in their heart as their own and go on living. Other people rarely realize that the hole wasn’t meant to be there.
Norwegian Wood is also, very intensely, about love. This love is a weird kind of love. The kind that stays with you long after its gone. Watanabe finds love around him. He tries so hard to hold onto that love. Yet, it fades away. In many stories, love is often portrayed as a method of relief or a way out. Here, I think, love is more like a burden in a few instances. Love doesn’t set the characters free, rather it casts a dark shadow over them.
A huge part of this book is about loneliness, which comes hand in hand with death and love. The protagonist spends most of his university life alone, while the people he wanted by him always drifted away. Toru tries to hold every little part of his life together. It’s as if there is a tapestry laid in front of him which is slowly falling apart, but he is desperately holding onto whatever thread he can grab and tries to put them together. He gets to mend some, while others get lost in oblivion.
P.S. If you started reading this thinking that it’s a book review, apologies for the disappointment. This is more like what popped into my head as I went through the book. Almost all the characters in this book have major flaws, which, in some way, is the main theme of the story. The mental health crisis is also vividly present in this story. There is an interesting concept of a facility that helps people with mental health issues. If I ever get to make that kind of wealth, I surely want to create such a beautiful facility.