Noewegian Wood

I re-read the Norwegian wood after the adolescence. I just can't remember where I bought this novel, until I saw the receipt - it is Montreal, and I just realise that I once promised myself to remember a place by a book, like The Boat (Stockholm),  Empire of Illusion (Hong Kong), though they just don't have any connection, and I somehow do not follow this rule in the following years (Because of Kindle, thanks). But it reminds me some trivial incidents in Montreal, the feeling of being solitude, with film cameras, the chilly temperature, paper map, Sunlights in square, and I just got in the book store without knowing what I want, and this book was at the corner side of shelves, with one of several authors I knew at that time. 

Reiko wrote to me several times after Naoko's death. 
The memories would slam against me like the waves of an incoming tide, sweeping my body along to some strange new place - a place where I lived with the dead. There Naoko lived, and I could speak with her and hold her in my arms. Death in that place was not a decisive elements comprising life. There Naoko lived with death inside her. And to me she said,"Don't worry, it's only death . Don't let it bother you."

I felt no sadness in that strange place. Death was death, Naoko was Naoko. "What's the problem?" she asked me with a bashful smile. "I'm here, aren't I?" Her familiar little gestures soothed my heart and gave me healing. "If this is death," I thought to myself, "then death is not so bad." "It's true," said Nako, "death is nothing much. It's just death. Things are so easy for me here." Naoko spoke to me in the spaces between the crashing of the dark waves. 

Eventually, though, the tide would pull back, and I would be left on the beach alone. Powerless, I could go no where; sorrow it self would envelope me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was crying than that the tears were simply oozing out of me like perspiration. 

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko's death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it.