ノルウェイの森

I think the first time I've heard about it was on a late night Chinese radio show.  The host shared a passage from a book called "挪威的森林" and I immediately fell in love with it.  That year, I was 12.

As time passed by, I forgot all about it...


Until several years ago, after finishing reading a book given by my brother that I realized it was the very same book that I loved more than a decade ago.  I know maybe this doesn't seem to be so important or significant to you.  But I think it means something...  Exactly what?  I can't tell.  It's only the feeling I get that counts.

So here is my favorite passage from the book for sharing...for those who have read the book to remember...for those who haven't read the book to discover...


"...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.

Translate into words, it's a cliche, 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...

I lived through the following spring...with that kind 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...In the midst of life, everything revolved around death."

ノルウェイの森 by 村上春樹