Norwegian Wood

Last night I stayed up until 3 AM to finish Norwegian Wood, one of my Christmas gifts. The novel read like a memoir and it was indeed the memoir of a 37 year old man, looking back on his college days. The man was in love with his dead best friend's girlfriend who was never fully able to get over the death of her boyfriend. The narrator also, gradually, came to fall in love with a different girl altogether, someone who is a completely different animal from the dead best friend girlfriend. Intertwined throughout the novel were various sexual exploits that the boy goes through, the sex was mostly casual and treated with both interest and disdain at the same time, much like my attitude towards it admittedly.

I thought what permeates the novel's overall tone was one of existential angst. It was not hard to see what triggered the protagonist's disinterest and lack of motivation towards life. His best friend, at age 17, decided to smoke up the exhaust pipe from his car, with unsurprising results. The novel's forward momentum is characterized by the boy's gradual and very rocky ascent towards enjoying and truly appreciating life once again. In the mean time, the book also reflects to some degree, the general sense of malaise and discontent that is the lot of human beings when they regard their lives, at the same time, I think it also uniquely reflects the Japanese post-modern society, their disaffected youths, their desire to find meaning in life but somehow, never quite going up the right alley to do so. One of the most interesting characters in the novel is a woman in her late 30's, who suffered multiple mental breakdowns and lived for almost a decade in a quiet commune designed for psychologically unstable people. They live a structured quiet life in the countryside, trying to build stability both in their lives and in their mind. People who recover eventually leave and rejoin society. There is an interesting contrast between the respite offered by the commune and the crazy frenetic energy that is Tokyo. On some level, the author is perhaps saying that all of us need a break from TOKYO (or NORMAL LIFE) as we know it and just coast for a few months or years in a soothing nondemanding environment. This novel, written in 1987, presages the now common and ubiquitous belief that we human beings are STRESSED STRESSED STRESSED, so many busy milling ants running around, picking up loads too heavy for our bodies to bear. I sometimes wonder...is modern day stress exacerbated by the very fact that every pop psychologist and their mother are constantly berating us for letting ourselves be stressed? It's a vicious cycle and I'm completely digressing.

I read the novel quickly, I finished it in barely three days. I think at some point in the future, I will go back and re-read it at length, although, I wasn't too impressed with the translation, becuase at times it seems a bit choppy, but there aren't exactly multiple versions/translations available. I guess I could read it in Chinese and that will definiitely force me to go slower.

I have as of now, ten different books awaiting my attention. I want to finish them all in three weeks time. The Catch-22 is that if you read fast, you read widely but you read only shallowly. I want to read both deeply and widely and because I'm being somewhat greedy in this respect, I am also paid the friendly visit by our dear friend Stress again. Yes I am actually feeling a bit stressed that I won't be able to read all 10 books on my list in the time I allotted myself. I also fear I am going blind from reading so much. I shall end this post before I get completely mired in negativitiy. See? That's what reading existential angsy books do to you. They never leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling afterwards, rather, they pass on the malaise and discontent from their words to your eyes to your optic nerve to your brain and finally penetrates your consciousness. Now someone get me a happy pill, please.