Or; On Seeing the 100% Perfect Book One Mundane March Afternoon



In March of last year, I sat down on the sofa. What I was doing in that moment I do not recall. I do recall, however, that it was in a period of my life where I had too much time on my hands but was still failing at doing anything resembling productivity in personal growth or achievement (an all too familiar malaise now).

This sofa has been in the family over two decades, its arms are torn and its cushions, so worn with age, drags you into their meeting point as soon as you sit yourself down. Nobody sits on this sofa much anymore. In a moment of boredom, I did, and gazed at the bookshelf that lives directly opposite the sofa.

On the shelf, I spot the spine of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The spine is far from eye-catching: white cover, title and author’s name in red and black font, a small image of a couple in a romantic embrace at its tip. I had never read a novel of his, and it’s title was only vaguely familiar to me as the title of a Beatles song. It led me to recall that I won a copy of the book from a local bookstore’s Facebook page, who each week gave away a free book to a fan who liked a post of theirs. I wasn’t a reader at all, I just liked free stuff (shout out totallyfreestuff.com, I miss you in my bookmarks bar).

—————————————————————————————————————————————

I won this book back in 2011 and for the next six years of its life it sat on the same spot on the bookshelf, readying itself for the next phase of its life in the Salvo’s collection bin. However, on this day, with the unconscious acknowledgment that I needed a new hobby, I pulled myself up from the black hole of the sofa’s cushions, took Norwegian Wood from the shelf and placed it on my desk.

Despite having read fewer than ten book for leisure in the preceding five years, I began the book the next day and finished it two days after that. Since then, I have read every English Published work of Murakami’s which consists of 12 novels, five short story collections, four non-fiction books and one children’s novella.

—————————————————————————————————————————————

Norwegian Wood is a harrowing story of loss and loneliness, a reflection on the complications of being a young adult; unsure of your place in the world and never having your expectations met. Murakami has a great skill at expounding on the apathy of daily life in an entirely engaging and authentic fashion. As is presented in Norwegian Wood, this apathy often the eventual product of great loss or of great emotional exhaustion and can still manage to linger in the face of change and of love. Murakami’s works are frequently caricatured by their clichéd tropes of cats, beer, ears, cooking, music, sex and disappearing women. These are tropes for a reason, they are consistent through his stories, but I find the manner in which he can reinvent these tropes across his stories while maintaining the apathetic mood to be extremely comforting, and perhaps the reason I have developed such an infatuation.

I knew as soon as I completed the traumatic experience that is Norwegian Wood that I was not merely making good on the bookshop’s good will. I would read every Murakami, and I would spend all these extra minutes I am afforded as a student (and now an unemployed graduate) reading. For every Murakami I read, I read another book that led to some other great discoveries, but none as meaningful as discovering Norwegian Wood from the sofa.

I read the rest of Murakami’s works in no particular order, just by what I could find at local bookshops and by which as cheapest at the time.

—————————————————————————————————————————————

While I have read plenty of other books in the past twelve months, few have created such lasting memories for me as reading Murakami. Maybe it is proof of my own delirium, but with plenty of the 22 books I’ve read, I can remember where I was when I was reading them, what I was wearing, what I had for lunch that day, and most importantly how I was feeling. I remember being late to work as I stopped by the public library ten minutes before the start of my shift so I could read the end of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I read Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki on the same sofa in a day.I can remember being late to a haircut appointment as I was too busy sitting in the mall reading Kafka on the Shore. I had an egg roll for lunch that day, and the haircut cost $36.

As has been a theme for me in the last year, Murakami himself is much more adept at explaining my own feelings and experiences than I am myself. So, upon reading his second novel Pinball 1973, I was struck by how he explained my serendipitous discovery of Norwegian Wood:

“On any given day, something claims our attention. Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, that sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days then go back to wherever they came from… to darkness.”

Fortunately, I made best on Norwegian Wood’s place in my consciousness before it escaped to darkness. Had I not read it so soon after finding it on the bookshelf, I’m sure it would have ‘bumped’ around in my consciousness for ‘two or three days’ before getting buried under whatever junk I piled on top of my desk and returning to its perpetual darkness. Thankfully though, Murkami’s work bumps around in my consciousness every day.