“Morning is my favourite time of day,” said Naoko. “It’s like everything’s starting out fresh and new. I begin to get sad around noon time, and I hate it when the sun goes down. I live with those same feelings day after day.”
Murakami, Norwegian Wood
I don’t remember when I started reading Norwegian Wood. Unlike usual, I didn’t religiously open up my Goodreads app and make note of the start date and I didn’t click ‘I’ve read this book!’ today, when I turned the last page. I didn’t do any of these things because I started reading Murakami’s most famous novel somewhere in the oppressive fog I was wading through last month, perhaps, when I could hardly sit still long enough to watch a film or a bit of t.v. without thinking I was going to die. The peaceful act of reading a book was a far-off memory from happier and healthier times before my anxiety had become all-consuming and all of my energy was being wasted pushing bad feelings away.
But one night, things felt a little better. ‘Better’, in this context, means not being terrified of bedtime (everyone is asleep, no-one would know if I collapsed, stifling darkness), not shaking with adrenaline and crying to my Mum. It was maybe the start or middle of May and I felt like trying something new following the advice of a few weeks of therapy; I had to break the cycle of anxiety. There’s no use trembling and thinking yourself into oblivion despite the feeling that this is all you can possibly do when you’re at the most anxious. If I were to sit idly in bed, my mind would start on the monkey-bars to meltdown again and I would get hooked on those bedtime thoughts. The thoughts that kept me awake for hours until I flaked out, exhausted, only to shoot up 45 minutes later with the realest knowledge that my death was imminent. This night I was calmer and willing to live alongside the unpleasant feelings, and to return to reading.
It might not necessarily be possible to have a ‘mindful’ observation of a fictional character’s experience, but that’s what starting Norwegian Wood felt like. I was introduced to the strange and oftentimes unclear concept of mindfulness back in April by a therapist I didn’t ‘click’ with, so to me the idea of being entirely, verbosely present (one example was really FEELING the toothpaste in your mouth in a morning to live in the moment – TASTING the mint and being aware of the bristles) seemed more than a little wishy-washy. I think I started with a new therapist a week before starting Norwegian Wood, and it was finally beginning to make sense. The first page, and I’m there on the plane with Watanabe. I’m not running circles in my own head or fretting about the future or considering my death, but I’m feeling ‘strapped’ by the seatbelt, seeing the cloud and the ‘Cold November rains’, and hearing the Beatles song from which Murakami’s novel takes its name. But the song doesn’t ground our narrator, instead it pulls him into the past with all the vivid mindfulness of an immediate experience: “[…] all the while I was in the meadow. I could smell the grass, feel the wind on my face, hear the cries of the birds. Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20.”
The novel endures with the same vivid authenticity that is captured in these first few moments. Retrospective, the narrative lingers on and is worried by the idiosyncrasies of a life passed; Watanabe re-animates the emotion and beauty of now fragile, fading memories for them to feel as immediate as they did to him twenty years ago. Reflection with any less detail would run the horrifying risk of loss. And so I was as rightfully in Tokyo, 1969, as I sat in my bed night after night as Watanabe was – both when he heard the Beatles on his flight into Hamburg and when he was a 20 year-old student. Norwegian Wood reminded me of the pleasures of neglected things – rain, two hot cups of coffee, a good, solid morning routine, the power of a song – even if I didn’t feel ready to get back to those indulgences just yet. Yet, simultaneously, I felt incredibly distanced from Watanabe’s world. The feeling wasn’t unpleasant and in fact I found myself happy to be such a stranger – to Tokyo, to Japanese politics, to 60s/70s student culture, to living alone… the list goes on. I had no sense whatsoever of the geography of Tokyo. As Watanabe and Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa, walked and hopped the bus and rode the train across the capital to Shinjuku, Kichijoji, Nagano, Otsuka – I had no more idea of the length or ardor of journey than if the characters were traversing Mars. I say this not to appear ignorant, but from a sincere appreciation for the incessant movement across unknown landscapes in Norwegian Wood. It was like a dream, relying entirely on Watanabe’s lively descriptions to guide me, floating, through a student’s Tokyo. His was the guiding hand, always moving forward through the foreign spaces I lacked in my small and fearful life.
Reading through Watanabe’s eyes wasn’t always pleasant, though. In fact, there are great portions of Norwegian Wood which are greatly depressing, harrowing, existential and emotional – especially for someone in the throes of a mental illness. The passages and conversations between Reiko, Naoko and Watanabe both in the secluded Kyoto sanitarium and in their subsequent letters are notably dark and distressing in places. Both women are troubled and existentialist ponderers, sometimes deeply pessimistic – something which my anxious brain latched onto on worse days. Will I never get better? Will I gradually deteriorate over the course of my life, losing little bits of myself like Naoko? Will one Significant Event tip me over the edge? At times like this I’d have to put the book down and re-gather myself. It’s silly, but a bit like how I can’t watch 24 Hours in A&E when I’m anxious because it triggers my negative and panic-y thinking. There were times when I really was scared for myself after living the unhappiness of some fictional characters a few hundred pages in. It prompted a note on my phone, 5 June 2019 00.04AM: “One of my greatest fears in life is that I’m going to lose it. That I’m really going to lose my mind and grip on reality and my sense of who I am. That I’ll feel compelled by some powerful force to do things I don’t want to. This seems strange as mental illness is from the brain not the outside and can be therapied but it is no less terrifying. Sometimes I don’t feel strong enough to fight off future threats. I really don’t want to snap and lose my marbles”. ‘Snap’ is the exact word Reiko uses when recalling her dark period of illness, for God’s sake. So this is what happened when Murakami’s piercing and unrelenting realism faced my impressionable, anxious and over-worked brain. Complete awe and wonder and fear and worry.
I could hardly take any consolation from Watanabe being a pitiable character. He was hapless, indirectly, for reasons I won’t spoil – but by the end of the novel I still didn’t feel like I knew him. Until I had about 100 pages to go I would still forget his name. His life transformed from being so wrapped up in the lives and concerns and pains of others that I struggled to define his own person, to a character who is so tragically self-consumed and unthinking as to neglect the one (mostly) unproblematic person for him. Watanabe’s ultimate depression is heartbreaking, but I didn’t completely feel in his corner. For his three years he clung onto the image of Naoko as the wandering fairy girl, mourning her ex-boyfriend. He compares nearly every walk with a girl to his walks with Naoko. It can’t be helped, perhaps, but give these girls an identity of their own! Naoko was never ‘his’ to begin with; Watanabe’s entire perception of Naoko seems, for the most part, a fallacy.
My personal feelings towards Watanabe aside, the enduring sentiment in Norwegian Wood of stoic endurance stuck with me, hard. In the sanitarium, Reiko says, “[…] if you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark”, a difficult and frightening idea which I found aligned itself with all I’ve been taught about anxiety, and advice that Watanabe actually takes when his own darkness comes. Nothing has been scarier in recent weeks than “get[ting] used to the dark” – not being afraid of something which is so apparently real, not being sad about something which is ostensibly exhausting and disheartening. Today, my therapist talked about acceptance and willingness: to welcome anxiety and bad feelings, to make space for them, to recognise thoughts as not your own and to be willing to carry on alongside uncomfortable thoughts and feelings in the service of my core values in this life. I’m not sure exactly the same thing is going on in Murakami’s novel, but a lot of what Watanabe writes to Naoko resonated with me for a long time afterwards. “[…] in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. […] I tell myself, “Ok, let’s make this day another good one.” […] It’s because I think of you when I’m in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day. I know I have to give it my best here just as you are doing there.” It’s really beautiful and sad, feeling as Watanabe does at this time in my life and having Murakami relay the feelings so viscerally: “I trudged along through each day in its turn, rarely looking up, eyes locked on the never-ending swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, 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”. Carry on. Keep going forward. Despite bad thoughts – “How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me?” – better things are coming. A first-class lesson in anxiety acceptance and willingness to ‘turn up’ (Brené Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o&t=3s) from Toru Watanabe: misconstrued, brooding teenager with his fair share of rotten luck and a less than likeable precocity.
I didn’t intend for this piece to be so long at all, but I was happy to let thoughts run into one another. I don’t know if anyone will care and I don’t mind if they don’t, because honestly I really enjoyed Norwegian Wood and it gave me a little comfort at a difficult time. It’s rife with racy sex which I still think is over-romanticised by Watanabe as having an earth-shattering significance – the glamorisation of the slender-yet-curvy female body and a handful of passages about semen – and it paints a picture of student life so starkly different to my own (threesomes?????) that, as mentioned, it seems something from a different world. But for all its weaker spots, Norwegian Wood is a book that for me was incredibly emotional, resonant and still urgent thirty years after its publication. Anyone struggling with loss or going through the motions of young adulthood should indulge in Murakami’s reflections on burgeoning identity. I was left genuinely heartbroken after the last line – unmoored, uncertain, floating in a ‘no place’, having to get used to the darkness again.
hbiswriting 