Highlights from Norwegian Wood by Haruki-Murakami Last read on January 8, 2023
Highlights from this book
-
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.
Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. The smell of the grass, the faint chill of the wind, the line of the hills, the barking of a dog: these are the first things, and they come with absolute clarity. I feel as if I can reach out and trace them with a fingertip. And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then—Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It’s true, I can’t even bring —Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It’s true, I can’t even bring back Naoko’s face—not right away, at least. All I’m left holding is a background, sheer scenery, with no people up front.
-
Now we were walking through the frightful silence of a pine wood. The desiccated corpses of cicadas that had died at the end of the summer littered the surface of the path, crunching beneath our shoes. As if searching for something we’d lost, Naoko and I continued slowly down the path in the woods.
-
“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
“Always,” I said. “I’ll always remember.”
“Even so, my memory has grown increasingly distant, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?”
-
Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about Naoko. But I was never able to produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start—the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.
-
He was up at six each morning with the strains of “May Our Lord’s Reign.” Which is to say that that ostentatious flag-raising ritual was not entirely useless. He’d get dressed, go to the bathroom, and wash his face—forever. I sometimes got the feeling he must be taking out each tooth and washing it, one at a time.
-
I can never say what I want to say,” continued Naoko. “It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words—the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.
-
It had been a nice afternoon in May. After lunch, Kizuki suggested we cut classes and go play pool or something. I had no special interest in my afternoon classes, so together we left school, ambled down the hill to a billiards parlor on the harbor, and shot four games. When I won the first, easygoing game, he got serious and won the other three. This meant that I paid, according to our custom. Kizuki made not a single wisecrack as we played, which was most unusual. We had a smoke afterward.
“Why so serious?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to lose today,” said Kizuki with a satisfied smile.
He died that night in his garage. He led a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe of his N-360 to a window, taped over the gap in the window, and revved the engine.
-
There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:
Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.
Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.
I lived through the following spring, at eighteen, with that knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
-
“This man says he has read The Great Gatsby three times,” he said as if to himself. “Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine.”
-
To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke. Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.
-
“It is a game. I don’t give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don’t. I may be a selfish bastard, but I’m incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world.”
“And you have no use for ‘ideals,’ I suppose.”
“None. Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.”
-
“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.”
-
“Each scene felt unreal and strangely distanced, as if I were viewing it through two or three layers of glass, but the events had undoubtedly happened to me. The beer glasses were still sitting on the table, and a used toothbrush lay by the sink.”
-
This may be an overanalytical way of looking at things. Don’t you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not overanalytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. “This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which thus-and-such.” Like that. I can’t tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or subdivide it.
-
Sleeping soundly in this apartment of hers, I wrung the fatigue from every cell of my body, drop by drop. I dreamed of a butterfly dancing in the half-light.
-
When the record ended, Reiko brought a guitar out from under her bed, and after tuning it with a look of fondness for the instrument, she began to play a slow Bach fugue. She missed her fingering every now and then, but it was real Bach, with real feeling—warm, intimate, and filled with the joy of performance.
-
“And you call that ‘stoic’?”
“For him it is.”
Naoko thought about my words for a minute. “I think he’s a lot sicker in the head that I am,” she said.
“So do I,” I said. “But he can put all his warped qualities into a logical system.”
-
“I’m sorry,” said Naoko. “I don’t mean to hurt you, but this much you have to understand: Kizuki and I had a truly special relationship. We had been together from the time we were three. It’s how we grew up: always together, always talking, understanding each other perfectly. The first time we kissed—it was in the sixth grade—was just wonderful. The first time I had my period, I ran to him and cried like a baby. We were that close. So after he died, I didn’t know how to relate to other people. I didn’t know what it means to love another person.”
-
“That’s why I loved being with the two of you. His best side was all that I could see then, too. I could relax and stop worrying when the three of us were together. Those were my favorite times. I don’t know how you felt about it.”
“I used to worry about what you were thinking,” I said, giving my head a shake.
“The problem was that that kind of thing couldn’t go on forever,” said Naoko. “Such perfect little circles are impossible to maintain. Kizuki knew it, and I knew it, and so did you. Am I right?”
“Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it,” she said, raising her eyes to mine. “The pain of growing up. We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I’m in here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island”. If we got hungry, we’d just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we’d go to sleep in each other’s arms. But that kind of thing doesn’t last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn’t work, of course.”
-
“I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.”
-
“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” “Nothing special. I just called.” “I see.” “You see what?” “Nothing. Just ‘I see,’” I said. “Any fires lately?” “That was fun, wasn’t it? It didn’t do much damage, but all that smoke made it kind of like reality. Great stuff.” Midori chugged down another glass of water, took a breath, and studied my face for a while. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” she asked. “You’ve got this spaced-out look. Your eyes aren’t focused.” “I’m O.K.,” I said. “I just got back from a trip and I’m kinda tired.” “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” “I see.”
-
“My intuition’s not as good as yours, so I have to learn systematic thinking to some extent. Like the way a crow collects chunks of glass in a hollow tree.” “Does it serve some purpose?” “I wonder. It probably makes it easier to do some kinds of things.” “What kinds of things? Give me an example.” “Metaphysical thought, say. Mastering several languages.” “What good does that do?” “It depends on the person who does it. It serves a purpose for some, and not for others. But mainly it’s training. Whether it serves a purpose or not is another question. Like I said.”
-
He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition. Around the dry lips sprouted clumps of whiskers like so many weeds. So, I thought, even after so much of his life force had been lost, a man’s beard continued to grow.
-
‘Oh, Midori, you’ve got such a healthy appetite.’ What do they think I am, a donkey pulling a cart? They’re old enough to know how the world really works, so why are they so stupid? It’s easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit. I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too. I mean, you try watching a gang of doctors get together and cut open somebody’s head when there’s no hope of saving them, and stirring things up in there, and doing it again and again, and every time they do it it makes the person worse and a little bit crazier, and see how you like it!
-
“After I do my laundry tomorrow morning and hang it out to dry, I’ll go to my ten o’clock class. It’s the one I’m in with Midori, History of Drama. I’m working on Euripides. Are you familiar with Euripides? He was an ancient Greek—one of the ‘Big Three’ of Greek tragedy along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. He supposedly died when a dog bit him in Macedonia, but not everybody buys this. Anyhow, that’s Euripides. I like Sophocles better, but I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I really can’t say which is better. “What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple—a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that’s the point where critical opinion divides over him. “But think about it—what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that? Anyhow, that’s History of Drama. This is more or less the kind of stuff we study at the university.”
-
“This was excellent sea bass,” I offered, but no one took me up on it. I might as well have thrown a rock down a deep shaft.”
-
“It was Nagasawa, of course, who told me what had happened. His letter from Bonn said this: “Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something. This is unbearably sad and painful, even to me.” I ripped his letter to shreds and threw it away. I never wrote to him again.”
-
“Nah, a funeral’s a piece of cake. We’ve had plenty of practice. You put on a black kimono and sit there like a lady and everybody else takes care of business—an uncle, a neighbor, like that. They bring the sake, order the sushi, say comforting things, cry, carry on, divide up the keepsakes. It’s a piece of cake. A picnic. Compared to nursing somebody day after day, it’s an absolute picnic. We were drained, my sister and me. We couldn’t even cry. We didn’t have any tears left. Really. Except, when you do that, they start whispering about you: ‘Those girls are cold as ice.’ So then, we’re never going to cry, that’s just how the two of us are. I know we could have faked it, but we would never do anything like that. The sons of bitches! The more they wanted to see us cry, the more determined we were not to give them that satisfaction. My sister and I are totally different types, but when it comes to something like that, we’re in absolute sync.”
-
“That was fun,” said Midori. “Let’s try it again sometime.” “They just keep doing the same things,” I said. “Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things.” She had a point there.”
-
Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps. The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. The world around me was on the verge of great transformations. Death had already taken John Coltrane, who was joined now by so many others. People screamed there’d be revolutionary changes—which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the “changes” that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning. I trudged along through each day in its turn, looking up only rarely, eyes locked on the endless swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.
-
“Anyhow, be happy. I get the feeling a lot of shit is going to come your way, but you’re a stubborn son of a bitch, I’m sure you’ll handle it. Mind if I give you one piece of advice?” “Sure, go ahead.” “Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only assholes do that.” “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. We shook hands and went our separate ways, he to his new world, and I back to my swamp.”
-
Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult. Because that’s what I have to do. I always used to think I’d like to stay seventeen or eighteen if I could. But not anymore. I’m not a teenager anymore. I’ve got a sense of responsibility now. I’m not the same guy I was when we used to hang out together. I’m twenty now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.
-
“‘Why?’!” she screamed. “Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don’t know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl say something like this? I like you more than I like him, that’s all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn’t. I fell in love with you!”
-
“After saying good-bye to Midori, I bought a newspaper at the station, but when I opened it on the train, I realized I had absolutely no desire to read a paper and in fact couldn’t understand what it said. All I could do was glare at the incomprehensible page of print and wonder what was going to happen to me from now on, and how the things around me would be changing. I felt as if the world was pulsating every now and then. I released a deep sigh and closed my eyes. With regard to what I had done that day, I felt not the slightest regret; I knew for certain that if I had it to do all over again, I would live this day in exactly the same way again. I would hold Midori tight on the roof in the rain; I would get soaking wet with her; and I would let her fingers bring me to climax in her bed. I had no doubts about those things. I loved Midori, and I was happy that she had come back to me. The two of us could make it, that was certain. “As Midori herself had said, she was a real, live girl with blood in her veins, and she was putting her warm body in my arms. It had been all I could do to suppress the intense desire I had to strip her naked, throw open her body, and sink myself in her warmth. There was no way I could have made myself stop her once she was holding my penis and moving her hand. I wanted her to do it, she wanted to do it, and we were in love. Who could have stopped such a thing? It was true: I loved Midori. And I had probably known as much for a while. I had just been avoiding the conclusion for a very long time. The problem was that I could never explain these developments to Naoko. It would have been hard enough at any point, but with Naoko in her present condition, there was no way I could tell her I had fallen in love with another girl. And besides, I still loved Naoko. Bent and twisted as that love might be, I did love her. Somewhere inside me, there was still preserved a broad, open space, untouched, for Naoko and no one else.”
-
“I have always loved Naoko, and I still love her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me. It has an irresistible power that is bound to sweep me into the future. What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being. I don’t know what to do. I’m confused. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself, but I do believe that I have lived as sincerely as I knew how. I have never lied to anyone, and I have taken care over the years not to hurt other people. And yet I find myself having been tossed into this labyrinth.
-
Reiko wrote to me several times after Naoko's death. It was not my fault, she said. It was nobody’s fault, any more than you could blame someone for the rain. But I never answered her. What could I have said? What good would it have done? Naoko no longer existed in this world; she had become a fistful of ash.
-
The memories would slam against me like the waves of an incoming tide, sweeping my body along to some strange new place—a place where I lived with the dead. There Naoko lived, and I could speak with her and hold her in my arms. Death in that place was not a decisive element that brought life to an end. There, death was but one of many elements comprising life. There Naoko lived with death inside her. And to me she said, “Don’t worry, it’s only death. Don’t let it bother you.
I felt no sadness in that strange place. Death was death, and Naoko was Naoko. “What’s the problem?” she asked me with a bashful smile, “I’m here, aren’t I?” Her familiar little gestures soothed my heart and gave me healing. “If this is death,” I thought to myself, “then death is not so bad.” “It’s true,” said Naoko, “death is nothing much. It’s just death. Things are so easy for me here.” Naoko spoke to me in the spaces between the crashing of the dark waves.
Eventually, though, the tide would pull back, and I would be left on the beach alone. Powerless, I could go nowhere; sorrow itself would envelop me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was crying than that the tears were simply oozing out of me like perspiration.
I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.
By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whiskey, bread, and water.
-
The month of traveling neither lifted my spirits nor softened the blow of Naoko’s death. I arrived back in Tokyo in pretty much the same state in which I had left. I couldn’t even bring myself to phone Midori. What could I say to her? How could I begin? “It’s all over now; you and I can be happy together”? No, that was out of the question. However I might phrase it, though, the facts were the same: Naoko was dead, and Midori was still here. Naoko was a pile of white ash, and Midori was a living, breathing human.
-
Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.
-
I’m all through as a human being,” she said. “All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by rote memory.
-
“If you feel some kind of pain with regard to Naoko’s death, I would advise you to keep on feeling that pain for the rest of your life. And if there’s something you can learn from it, you should do that, too. But quite aside from that, you should be happy with Midori. Your pain has nothing to do with your relationship with her. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix. So, hard as it may be, you have to be strong. You have to grow up more, be more of an adult. I left the sanatorium and came all the way up here to Tokyo to tell you that—all the way on that coffin of a train.” “I understand what you’re telling me,” I said to Reiko, “but I’m still not prepared to follow through on it. I mean, that was such a sad little funeral! No one should have to die like that.” Reiko stretched her hand out and stroked my head. “We all have to die like that sometime. I will, and so will you.”
-
Next she played a guitar transcription of Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dying Queen” and a beautifully clean rendition of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune.” “I mastered both of these after Naoko died,” said Reiko. “To the end, her taste in music never rose above the horizon of sentimentalism.”
-
“I telephone Midori. “I have to talk to you,” I said. “I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
Midori responded with a long, long silence—the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited. At last, Midori’s quiet voice broke the silence: “Where are you now?”
Where was I now?
Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.”