Lost in the Forest

Lost in the Forest

It has been almost twenty years since I first started reading Haruki Murakami’s novels. Of course, it may only be nineteen or eighteen years, if Xiao’s memory is more accurate than mine, in which case the time frame could be narrowed a little. But for me, in my increasingly blurred recollections, the time when I came to know Xiao and the time when I began reading Murakami have completely overlapped. After all, every Murakami novel I read back then came from him, and he was the only person I knew who had bought nearly all of Murakami’s books available at the time.

Twenty years ago, I was not yet old enough to be at the age when Watanabe and Naoko are together in Norwegian Wood. I had not yet gone through a love so deep it would leave a permanent mark, nor had I experienced the kinds of romantic entanglements that Murakami’s novels so suggestively evoke. If not for Xiao’s recommendation, I probably would have needed a few more years before I could speak fluently about Murakami’s works—or perhaps I might simply have missed them altogether. It was precisely in that time, when I understood nothing and longed for everything, that I accidentally wandered into the Norwegian wood and have been lost there ever since.

Just as Watanabe still clearly remembers what that meadow looked like eighteen years earlier, no matter how many times I reread it, I can still clearly remember how it felt to read Norwegian Wood for the first time. Watanabe’s posture—seemingly casual and yet deeply attentive—was almost enviable, and the tangle between him, Naoko, and Midori was at once heartbreaking and strangely alluring. To be sure, Storm Trooper and Nagasawa also left vivid impressions, but no matter how profound the rest of the book was, nothing could surpass the confusion and fascination that one single sentence caused in my adolescent self: “Her lower part was warm and wet, waiting for me.”

After that, I tore through all the books in Xiao’s collection, and every one of them left a deep impression on me. Whether it was Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, Dance Dance Dance, A Wild Sheep Chase, or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, each one drew me completely in. What they described was mostly the adult life I had not yet lived at the time—lonely and austere, yet full of fantasy, with occasional strands of warmth that quietly touched the heart. Perhaps that was the best version of the future we could imagine in adolescence.

Thinking carefully about it now, in the twenty years of friendship between Xiao and me, it seems we never really sat down and talked in depth about Murakami’s novels. But I believe we were both deeply shaped by them, each in different ways and from different angles. That influence became, faintly but unmistakably, a kind of tacit understanding and bond in our friendship. It was like the relationship between “I” and Rat in Murakami’s fiction—perhaps I played the role of Rat, or perhaps he did. Or perhaps some books can be discussed while others cannot. At least from my side, I have never been able to describe exactly the shock and emotion each story brought me. I imagine it was more or less the same for him.

After graduating from university, I gradually collected a full set of Murakami’s novels myself. But the ones I reread again and again were still only those first few. The only one I still feel compelled to pull down and flip through from time to time is Norwegian Wood—and, in a strangely corresponding way, the only film I keep wanting to revisit every so often is A Chinese Odyssey. My impressions of Murakami’s later novels have faded one by one. Kafka on the Shore still left a relatively deep mark, though it is a pity that Murakami did not write this novel about a boy at an earlier time; by the time I read it, we had already passed that age. I remember almost nothing about the slim After Dark. South of the Border, West of the Sun was fairly good. And by the time 1Q84 came along, without Lin Shaohua’s translation, even continuing to read suddenly felt like a strain.

I hear that Killing Commendatore will officially be published this year—hopefully it will not really use that title—and only then did I realize that even the previous one, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, was already five years ago. I do not know how many more novels Haruki Murakami still has left to publish, but in truth, however many he writes will not make much difference. A writer may tell many different stories, but in the end, all of them are only different ways of telling the same self.

The years between Watanabe at twenty and Watanabe at thirty-seven never appear in the novel, as though nearly two decades passed in a blur, leaving behind a great blank. My life seems much the same. At some point, without my noticing, memory began to measure time in decades, and I too seemed, in an instant, to have crossed from Naoko’s side to the spacious cabin of a Boeing 747 descending toward the ground.

Twenty years later, I am still lost in the Norwegian wood.