Haruki Murakami, 『Norwegian Wood』

 

Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami / Jay Rubin
VINTAGE BOOKS

1.
Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

 

2.
Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start ㅡ the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless, Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts.

 

3.
Or maybe it didn't matter all that much and nobody really cared ㅡ aside from me. Not that really cared, either. It was just something that happened to cross my mind.

 

4.
I was impressed by the variety of dreams and goals that life could offer.

 

5.
"I can never say what I want to say," continued Naoko. "It's been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words ㅡ the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can't catch her." She raised her face and looked into my eyes. "Does this make any sense to you?"

"Everybody feels like that to some extent," I said. "They're trying to express themselves and it bothers them when they can't get it right."

 

6.
There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else.  (...) It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

It's a cliche translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me, the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.

(...) I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching the truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

 

 

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셰익스피어 앤 컴퍼니에서 사온 VINTAGE BOOKS 판 노르웨이의 숲. 심플하지만 전혀 부족함 없는 표지에, 무엇보다도 엄청나게 가벼운 책의 무게가 정말 매력적이다. 상실의 시대라, 참으로 오랜만에 다시 읽는다. 영어 공부도 할 겸 해서 조금씩이라도 매일매일 꾸준히 읽기로 했는데, 역시 예상대로 하루키의 문장은 군더더기 없이 깔끔해서 읽기가 좋다. 

앞으로 꽤 오랫동안 문장을 추가해가게 될 듯.