Norwegian Wood

by Haruki Murakami

We talked about whatever came to mind—our daily routines, our colleges; each a little fragment that led nowhere. We said nothing at all about the past. And mainly, we walked—and walked, and walked.

just walking and walking with no destination in mind. We forged straight ahead, as if our walking were a religious ritual meant to heal our wounded spirits.

I can’t seem to recall what we talked about then.

Making maps was the one small dream of his one small life. Who had the right to make fun of him for that?

Besides, the sight of Naoko’s smiling face had become my own special source of pleasure. I went on supplying everyone with new stories.

I’ve got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.”

None of this had any special meaning.

My arm was not the one she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else. I felt almost guilty being me.

She seemed to be searching for something and this would give me a strange, lonely, helpless sort of feeling.

I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words—something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.

Language

There was nothing I wanted to be. I tried to talk about this feeling with Naoko. She, at least, would be able to understand what I was feeling with some degree of precision, I thought. But I could never find the words to express myself. Strange, I seemed to have caught her word-searching sickness.

Trauma as affectual

What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

Urging others to read F. Scott Fitzgerald, if not a reactionary act, was not something one could do in 1968.

1968

“but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”

He could charge forward, the optimistic leader, even as his heart writhed in a swamp of loneliness. I saw these paradoxical qualities of his from the start, and I could never understand why they weren’t just as obvious to everyone else. He lived in his own special hell.

Still, I never once opened my heart to him, and in that sense my relationship with Nagasawa stood in stark contrast to my relationship with Kizuki.

When I had slept with three or four girls this way, I asked Nagasawa, “After you’ve done this seventy times, doesn’t it begin to seem kind of pointless?” “That proves you’re a decent human being,” he said. “Congratulations. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from sleeping with one strange woman after another. It just tires you out and makes you disgusted with yourself. It’s the same for me.”

When you’re surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up. See what I mean?”

Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands.

one of her favorites, Brahms’s fourth symphony.

I was amazed at the power of her memory, but as I sat listening it began to dawn on me that there was something wrong with the way she was telling these stories: something strange, even warped. Each tale had its own internal logic, but the link from one to the next was odd.

The cycle started with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and ended with Bill Evans’s Waltz for Debbie.

though she had certain subjects she was determined to avoid, she went on endlessly and in incredible detail about the most trivial and inane things. I had never heard her speak with such intensity before, and so I did nothing to interrupt her.

The ragged end of the last word she spoke seemed to float in the air, where it had been torn off. She had not actually finished what she was saying. Her words had simply evaporated. She had been trying to go on, but had come up against nothing. Something was gone now, and I was probably the one who had destroyed it. My words might have finally reached her, taken their time to be understood, and obliterated whatever energy it was that had kept her talking so long.

she continued to cry without a sound.

I SLEPT WITH NAOKO that night. Was it the right thing to do? That I cannot tell. Even now, almost twenty years later, I can’t be sure. I guess I’ll never know.

And yet, when I went inside her, Naoko tensed with pain. Was this her first time? I asked, and she nodded.

all words had left her lips, and her body now seemed stiff, almost frozen.

table. It was as if time had come to a sudden stop here.

When I lost Kizuki, I lost the one person to whom I could speak honestly of my feelings, and I imagined it had been the same for Naoko. She and I had probably needed each other more than either of us knew, which was probably why our relationship had taken such a major detour and become, in a sense, warped.

The answer did not come.

Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern. There was an abnormal lightness to my body, and

classes more faithfully than ever. The lectures were boring, and I never talked to my classmates, but I had nothing else to do. I would sit by myself in the very front row of t...

The student strike started at the end of May. “Dismantle the universit...

The money was good, though, and as long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

What the hell am I doing? I started wondering as soon as I was alone and feeling disgusted with myself. And yet it was all I could do. My body was hungering for women.

I tried a few times to mention it to you, but I was never able to make myself begin. I was afraid even to pronounce the words.

I have to take

on all by myself. I had been putting it off for more than a year, and so I ended up making things very difficult for you.

What I need now is to rest my nerves in a quiet place cut off from the world.

I feel grateful in my own way for the year of companionship you gave me. Please believe that much even if you believe nothing else. You are not the one who hurt me. I myself am the one who did that. This is truly how I feel.

I read Naoko’s letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with that same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko herself stared into my eyes.

Objects in the scene would drift past me, but the words they spoke never reached my ears.

Now that the training had ended, he was going back to the mountains of Yamanashi.

Location

that brilliant, burning image was the one that had stayed with me all that time.

I heard the wind with unusual clarity. Far from strong, the wind swept past me, leaving strangely brilliant trails in the darkness. I opened my eyes to