There are certain realities in life that we avoid looking right in the eye. They stare at us, but we avoid their glare purposefully because we know that acknowledging that truth will hurt in ways unimaginable to us. Norwegian Wood is one of those reads where you are made to stand right in front of these discomforting truths and admit that you feel the same. 

There is nothing outrageous in this tragic, romantic tale. No overt expressions of love, no jealousy, no schemes, absolutely nothing that is over the top. A simple story of love is what one would say, but in my opinion, within this simplicity lies oaths conveyed through glances, unuttered promises made in the depths of one's heart, and a kind of love so palpably true that it seems to be bursting forth through this garb of minimalism. 

If I say that this story is about a young boy venturing into manhood fall in love with his dead best friend's girlfriend, then you would raise a question of morales. But wouldn't you think that this man has taken upon himself the responsibility of giving this girl the happiness she deserves? She needs to get over the trauma of losing her closest childhood companions, her sister, and her best friend turned boyfriend, to death without a plausible reason. Don't you think that you must praise this man's heart?

There were three things that caught my eye, barring the authenticity with which the concept of love was dealt with, and that was how mental health affects lives and the extraordinary strength of the female characters, and the strange complexity of love and want.

The thorn in this love story is the issue of mental health and the fact that they are an extremely complex disease whose diagnosis and prognosis both happen to be incredibly difficult because it is not always that the afflicted show the signs. Both Naoko's sister and her boyfriend Kizuki committed suicides whose reason's were unknown to the world. Neither left a note, neither ever said nor showed what hurt them, leading one to think that the sources of such depression are not easy to find. 

To talk about the women in this novel, each has a brilliantly sorrowful story, and one wonders what gives them the power to have fought the battle for so long.

Naoko is a mysterious little girl initially, and as one plods through the initial pages, they are left wondering why can she not reciprocate Toru's love in full measure. It is only when she reaches the hospital in the depths of the woods, it is unveiled that when she was a child, she was the one who found her elder sister, a perfect daughter, student, and sibling, hanging from the ceiling by the window in her room. Next, the boy who has been by her side ever since their childhood, the boy with whom falling in love was only natural because who else would understand her the way he did, it was almost as if they were joined by some invisible thread for 17 years of their life, only to be snapped when he dies. But despite this brimming sense of belongingness, Naoko couldn't give him her body. Her body failed to respond to him, yet it responded to Toru, whom she wanted to belong, but couldn't probably because that invisible string from Kizuki still held her back. But it wasn't as if she hadn't tried. Try she did with all her heart to love him, to respect him, to give this boy who unconditionally loved her the reciprocation he deserved. It was honestly this love that gave her the strength to live from 17 to 21. And it was almost as if she kept herself alive just for Toru to find someone else to love so that she wouldn't leave someone else alone like she was. And their relationship can be summed up in this conversation between her and Toru:

"Do you want to sleep with me?"

"Of course I do"

"Can you wait?"

"Of course I can"

Midori is an inspiration. She was forced to mature at such an early age. She saw her mother die, heard her father say hurtful things to her and her sister, and then himself lie in the hospital bed barely able to move, rendered immovable one operation after another. Midori has spent 20 years of her life serving her parents and looking after their bookshop, with nothing in return, not a word of appreciation, no token of love, not even with her boyfriend who was a heartless ruthless fellow. And then she found Toru. She was enamored by his straightforwardness, his loyalty, his ingenuousness in friendships. Unknowingly she started loving him and she wanted the same from him as well because she knew he valued her. She knew he had a girlfriend, she knew he was in love with someone else who was far away from him, she knew his girlfriend couldn't give him what he needed because she wasn't in the right mental space. And now after her father's death, when she was finally free from all her responsibilities when she could finally step out of the gloom that shrouded her youth, she wanted to take a chance and grab happiness with both her hands. She wanted to feel what it was like to love and feel loved. She was a human being in flesh and blood and not a figment of imagination, and she wanted Toru to realize that.

A saying is often heard that when someone claims to be ordinary, they are definitely not ordinary. Toru always identified himself as an ordinary boy and even told people that he was one. But those few who were close to him knew that even though his life was painfully simple his ability to provide affection definitely was not. Toru was an ordinary boy with an unordinary ability to love. He was much stronger than he gave himself credit for. He had gradually come to love Naoko, he loved her little gestures, the clear transparency of her eyes, and even her lithe supple body. He loved her so much that just walking across towns with her made him feel happy, that when his desire for the warmth of another human's body ate him inside out, he stopped sleeping with random girls and just lied down and thought about Naoko and pleased himself, just because all he wanted to do was let her touch linger on his skin. In fact, at Midori's request, when he tried to please himself he couldn't think of her that way, because even though he loved her, he didn't want her the way he wanted Naoko. He wanted to be strong for Naoko, wanted to erase the pain of Kizuki's death from her mind. But he is human after all, and that is how he tries to justify his actions. When Naoko died, he felt it was because she had realized that his heart was not faithful to her anymore. He left everything, cut all connections, and just went off wandering, gaining solace when he saw Naoko speaking to him in his dreams. He felt that Kizuki finally had Naoko, that their love was truer than what he shared with her. All this made him think of the time he had his first girlfriend, a folly of his teenage years, someone he couldn't bring himself to love. He wondered if she had ever gotten around to forgiving him, his behaviour. What made Toru so endearing to women is that he was always respectful of them, always considering their boundaries, even if they made a move, even if they were drunk. He had a strange accurate sense of what was right and what was wrong and when the line between the two became blurred, he fell into a sense of despair. 

So, was Toru a perfect man? Definitely not. But he surely was a gentleman. 

While it was rational of Toru to acknowledge Midori's love and respond to it, as he needed someone to be with him, I cannot deny that a part of me felt sad when he did so, especially when Naoko was alive. However, my sadness was mitigated when I saw that Naoko's death had shaken him to the core. Nonetheless, I held no grievances against him when Midori called him after he came back. He too deserved some stable love after chasing it around for so long.  

Whatever I could write so far in a faint attempt to give a certain structure to my emotions regarding this book, has been a tedious task. It was so difficult for me to continue reading the book, that I had to keep it down and stare at a blank wall to come to terms with what I had just read because the numerous parallels it drew were far too similar. But I am sure that everyone who reads the book will relate to it and reflect on it in someway or the other.