Norwegian Wood

by Haruki Murakami

It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me.

“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.”

I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them.

as long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

By the second week in September I reached the conclusion that a college education was meaningless. I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom. I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to quit school right away, and so I went to my classes each day, took lecture notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up.

Here I was in my early twenties and the best part of my life had ended. Do you see how terrible that would be? I had had my hands on such potential, and I woke up one day and all of it was gone.

“Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go someplace where you don’t know a soul? Sometimes I feel like doing that. I really really want to do it sometimes.

“It must be a wonderful thing to be so sure that you love somebody.”

“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.”

What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for—and to do it so unconsciously.

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.

You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don’t want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life’s natural flow.

That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have for happiness where you find it, and not worry too much about other people. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

“Be happy,” Reiko said to me as she boarded the train. “I’ve given you all the advice I have to give. There’s nothing left for me to say. Just be happy.