What happens of the moons after their star bursts into nothingness?
Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is named after Naoko’s favourite song from The Beatles. She said the song made her sad, so much so that she only listened to it when she felt strong enough not to drown in her own melancholy. It is the story and Naoko and Toru Watanabe, who had a Kizuki they loved. It is about their sad epiphany that while the three of them were closely knit, the two barely ever talked without Kizuki. Naoko and Kizuki had been lovers ever since they were little, and Watanabe had been Kizuki’s best friend the same. Sometimes, Watanabe did feel like he was third-wheeling, but Naoko and Kizuki would stop him right there.
You’re our only link to the outside world, they said.
Then one night, when he was 17, Kizuki killed himself.
Watanabe and Naoko were two moons under the same star, and their star exploded. So, I ask you again, what happens of the moons when their star dies?
Moons close enough will be engulfed.
Naoko knew she was damaged. Her sister had killed herself, too, without explanation, just like Kizuki.
I want you always to remember me.
Will you remember that I existed
and that I stood next to you here like this?
It is funny what we take grief for when it is someone else’s. We take it for a flood that is gushing at them, neck-high and with devil’s force. They are drenched and cannot breathe, stand, or see. And in those moments, they are justified in feeling that everything they have is being washed out. But hang in there. Let the pain subside. The flood is but moving water; it will pass with time. Their skin shall dry too. All that will remain are little puddles along the way. And it does not make sense to us why they should be drowning in puddles, for as long as they jumped them right, they would be fine.
But when the grief is ours, oh boy! We have cracks all over, and the water seeps through. It stays there and rots us, and we find it so hard to dry. And people as tender of age as sixteen have huge cracks upon themselves because they are just forming.
She did not know how to make sense of it. All she knew was that she was hurting and needed comfort.
And only Toru, of all people, could get her.
Moons that remain shall keep going in circles around a white dwarf ball.
And Toru watched her slowly getting engulfed.
He wanted to save her because he ‘loved’ her. He must love her.
And we see them making many naïve, toxic choices. They slept with each other for comfort, ghosted each other for months, and then came back. But Naoko told him straight that she would never love him the way she loved Kizuki and that she was damaged much deeper than he knew. And Toru said he would wait for her, fix her.
Because he ‘loved’ her. What did he know of love?
All he knew was that he had slept with loads of girls to numb his loneliness, could not survive without cigarettes or beer or whisky, and did not go out of his way to make friends with people. It just leads to disappointment, he said.
He also knew that if Midori disappeared from his life, the loneliness that filled him would kill him. Midori, his friend from university, somehow managed to carve a space for herself in his life. She was young, spicy, and fought her battles with vigour. She took him out on lunches around the city, put him in check for disappearing, was inappropriately inquisitive about how boys pass their time in the dorms and refused to stop living, despite all her setbacks.
Her setbacks included having a dying father who said he would rather have his daughters die than his wife. I believed in him because he could say that. He really loved my mother, she said. Her setbacks included running rounds of the hospital, taking care of a dying mother, then a dying father, and finding herself alone in all of that.
Toru’s ‘love’ for Naoko was attached to her absence, the letters he wrote to her, and the hope that someday they would live together, and he would have her all to himself. And they would somehow manage to lift that heavy Kizuki-named boulder from their chests.
But with Midori, it was simple- he loved being around her. Midori stood for life.
Death exists, not as the opposite, but as a part of life.
Letters are just pieces of paper.
Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay.
Keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.
When Toru finally decides to move on with Midori, when he finally chooses to live, a nagging thought starts to disgust him ¾ he cannot let go of Naoko. But why?
Well, first, because he had promised her. And if nothing, they were friends, and he owed it to her.
But she had only asked him to remember her.
Maybe, because Naoko was the last living, validating evidence of what he had gone through. And choosing to move on was to release everything he had felt for her. Doing so would leave empty spaces in his heart if nothing. And he was afraid those spaces would become echo chambers for his demons to scream.
Or maybe he cannot imagine what his life will be without it, as Murakami writes in the last paragraph of the book.
Murakami does not give us any closures, and maybe that was his point – things just happen, and we are left to make sense of them. He chooses to end his book with:
Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were countless shapes of people walking to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.
Image Credits: The Globe and Mail
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