By a friend’s recommendation, I finally picked up Murakami’s "Norwegian Wood" during the break. Growing up in Asia, Murakami has always been one of the most respected authors we discussed in class. "Kafka on the Shore," one of my favorites from Murakami that almost won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was even one of our mandatory readings for a semester. As versatile and complex as most of his novels could be, Murakami decided to take on the most common topic, love stories, and that was how "Norwegian Wood" emerged.

You might think of romantic novels as the most clichéd and lovable theme, but "Norwegian Wood" was a story of great loss and by far one of the saddest novels I’ve ever read. It’s a nostalgic story from the perspective of the narrator, Watanabe, in his college years in Tokyo, of extreme loss and sexuality. Along with the emotionally unstable but beautiful Naoko he loves, his outgoing friend Midori, and the death of his high school best friend Kizuki, "Norwegian Wood" weaves a story of great burdens that Watanabe carries over the people around him.

Over the many suicides in the story, the novel paints a gray scale as reader's emotions spiral down the more they get to know Watanabe. It is a very heavy book to finish (and even heavier as I was stuck on a 14-hour flight). All of the characters in the story seem to be emotionally fragmented and broken in some way, but surprisingly they all had different approaches towards death, choosing to believe that death is not the opposite of living, but just living in another way.

Death is a really powerful topic to touch on, and death of loved ones is even more strenuous to illustrate if one hasn’t been through the experience himself. I wrote about the death of my grandfather a few weeks ago, and that was the closest I’ve ever been to death. Still, I do not think I understand what death means; it’s just like funny memories left behind a person. But the more I think about what Murakami said in "Norwegian Wood," the more I choose to believe that death doesn’t have to be scary, sad or dramatic. People leave a trace of the most beautiful memories behind with their death.

This way, it probably makes the ones that live feel a little better with living.