Love is Never Having to Say You�re Sorry for not Smashing the Educational-Industrial Complex: Haruki Murakami�s Norwegian Wood, Tran Ahn Hung�s Norwegian Wood, and the Syd Barrett Syndrome

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There is an oft-quoted line from T. S. Eliot�s The Wasteland that goes, �Never had I thought death had undone so many.� I quite like that idea, that one is �undone� by death.  But all the time we can see examples of people undone not by death but undone by life, destroyed by life.  We see several illustrations of this in Haruki Murakami�s 1987 novel Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori) and Tran Anh Hung�s 2010 film adaptation of the same name.  Now, when I read this novel, I must confess that I wept profusely (manly tears, I assure you, after which I ate raw meat and punched a lion or something) and to a lesser extent when I saw the movie the next day (whether this lessening of my emotional response can be attributed to some sort of deficiency in the film, or to the fact that I had been somewhat inoculated against its particular brand of sadness by only just having read the book, I cannot say with certitude).  And as I read the book and wept over it, and watched the movie, and wept over it, I remember thinking to myself, �Why is this affecting me so much? I�ve read plenty of sad books before, and seen plenty of sad movies before, and I rarely cried over them, and certainly not to this extent.  Perhaps the tears rose to my eyes from time to time, but certainly I did not weep like this.  What�s going on here? What is it about Norwegian Wood that gets me?�

To answer this question, I will provide my readers with a summary of the relevant plot points (which are basically the same between the novel and the film; the film just elides certain things) and these readers should be forewarned that �spoilers� abound.

The story opens in the late 1980�s with our narrator, Toru Watanabe, hearing a cover of the Beatles� �Norwegian Wood� by chance while on a flight to Germany.  This song serves the same function as Proust�s madeleine, and Watanabe is flooded with memories of the late �60�s, when he finished high school and went through college.  A tumultuous time in anyone�s life, to be sure.  In a previous post I believe I asserted that adolescents may very well �feel things� more deeply than others, at least under certain circumstances, and this seems to be the case with Watanabe and his two high school friends, Kizuki and Naoko.  In high school, Naoko is only Watanabe�s friend in that she�s Kizuki�s girlfriend, and Kizuki is Watanabe�s best friend, and they form a weird trio and frequently hang out together.  One day, in their final year of high school, when they�re only seventeen, Kizuki surprises everyone by committing suicide.  He had given no indication that he was suicidal (at least none that anyone picked up on), left no note, and his motivations are never explicitly stated.  But Kizuki commits suicide, and Naoko and Watanabe are devastated.  As Kizuki was the bond between them, they stop seeing each other socially and that would seem to be the end of their connection.

Watanabe, Kizuki, and Naoko.

The next year they both, unbeknownst to each other, move to Tokyo to attend college there (different colleges, though).  Watanabe, like most Murakami protagonists, is a quiet, withdrawn, and almost somewhat bland individual.  He likes his books�unhip American books by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote; the �cool kids� are reading edgy, provocative Japanese authors like Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe, or ultra-cool French authors (I don�t recall which ones get named, but I�d assume it�s the �usual suspects�: Sartre and Genet and the like; later Watanabe meets a guy who reads Georges Bataille and Boris Vian.  I haven�t read much Bataille, but I�ve read everything by Vian that I can find in English, and he is a source of great whimsy and delight and playfulness and pleasure and I strongly recommend him.  He seems to be insufficiently famous, at least in the U.S., so it was a pleasure to see him mentioned here.  Perhaps he�s big in Japan?)�and he likes his music (all Murakami protagonists like music, specifically Western music, often an eclectic mix of Western classical, jazz, blues, and rock).  The Japanese student protests (of which I spoke in a previous post) are in full swing when Watanabe enters college, but he has no interest in them; to him, they�re just background noise, to be filtered out.  A running joke in the book, and to a lesser extent in the movie, is that all this political chaos is going around in the background and Watanabe really, really doesn�t give a shit.

So Watanabe swiftly settles into a quiet, somewhat melancholy routine at his college, until one day, completely by chance, he bumps into Naoko at a train station.  They decide to go for a walk together and they talk about their lives, all while carefully avoiding any overt reference to Kizuki.  They never talked that much�just the two of them, that is�when they were in high school, as Kizuki was always a buffer between them, and they  are surprised to find each other�s company so congenial. 

Naoko (Rinku Kikuchi) and Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama).

And so they start to go on long walks together every Sunday, exploring a large swath of Tokyo in their aimless ramblings, and they become increasingly close.  Naoko is, if anything, even more quiet and withdrawn than Watanabe, so they make a good pair.  After several months, Naoko�s twentieth birthday arrives, and Watanabe comes to her apartment with cake and a gift.  They chat pleasantly and I think Watanabe says something off-handed like, �So, what�s it like to be twenty?� and Naoko says (I�m paraphrasing), �Well, it�s kind of stupid, actually, to be twenty.  I don�t feel prepared to be twenty.  I think people should go back and forth between eighteen and nineteen.  So when you�re eighteen you turn nineteen and then when you�re nineteen you turn eighteen again.� And they chuckle over this notion, and Naoko continues on in this vein about how awful it is to become an adult, and suddenly she starts crying and then she starts sobbing and we are reminded, �Yes, there are serious issues underlying everything Naoko has been saying,� and Watanabe embraces her and they do that for a bit and suddenly they start kissing and then they start having sex.

I�m always perplexed by movie scenes where two characters kiss each for the first time and they do it silently; they both just seem to intuit that the moment is right and that the other person is reciprocating their feelings, and then they both simultaneously lean in for the kiss.  I do not wish to divulge too many details of my own romantic life, but I can state with confidence that I have never kissed a girl for the first time without first asking something like, �Should we kiss?� Maybe that�s not the most romantic thing to do, but I can�t see myself just going in and kissing the girl without first making sure she�s �on board� with it.  Because if she�s not, then you�ve just seriously fucked things up.  But I digress.

They start having sex.  These circumstances (your dead best friend�s former girlfriend is having an emotional breakdown) are probably not the best under which to have sex.  But they do it anyway.  And as they do, it quickly becomes evident that Naoko is a virgin.  Now, this is somewhat perplexing to Watanabe, but he seems to handle it well enough.  We get the clich� question, �Is this your first time?� and then he adjusts the speed and the depth of his thrust, and apparently he�s just really good at sex, because the pain quickly goes away and Naoko has an orgasm.

Ok, so far, so good.  And then, as they�re lying there in a post-coital embrace, we have the suspicion that Watanabe might be a colossal idiot, because he asks, �Why didn�t you sleep with Kizuki?� Dumbass.  And Naoko starts crying again and goes off and locks herself in some other room.  The proper answer from Naoko would have been something along the lines of, �Fuck you, that�s why.� 

Watanabe leaves a note apologizing and saying he has to go to class (idiot) and several days pass without him hearing from Naoko.  He goes to her apartment building only to find that she has moved.  What the fuck? Well, I don�t remember how he pieces this together, but over the following weeks, he discovers that Naoko has had a complete mental breakdown, has withdrawn from college, and returned to her home in Kobe (I believe she and Watanabe and Kizuki were all from Kobe; Murakami is from Kobe, so his characters tend to be as well).  From there, Watanabe finds out that she�s taken up residence at a mental health institution out in the woods somewhere, and they begin an off-and-on, melancholy correspondence.  Watanabe gets to visit her several times at the institution over the next year or so, and we piece together bits of Naoko�s problems, but just like with Kizuki, the precise issues (like a diagnosis, for instance) aren�t explicitly spelled out.  We find out that Naoko had an overachieving older sister, who one day, without any apparent warning�just like Kizuki�committed suicide; she hung herself in her bedroom, and a young Naoko discovered the body.  Well, that�ll fuck anyone up, and perhaps it�s a bit too heavy-handed; in Tran�s film, there is no reference to any older sister; he evidently thought that this element was unnecessary. 

In both the book and the film, Naoko tells Watanabe why she never had sex with Kizuki; the problem was that she couldn�t get wet (that sounds a bit pornographic, but to say �she could not achieve sufficient vaginal lubrication� just sounds too clinical for our purposes here).  She could never get wet with Kizuki, and so they never had vaginal sex, although she was more than happy to masturbate him to the point of ejaculation.  However, when Watanabe came over to her apartment on her twentieth birthday, she says that she was extremely wet, the whole time he was there, and that this had never happened before, and why had this never happened before, with Kizuki, as opposed to Watanabe?  Because, no offense, Watanabe, but she actually loved Kizuki.

Watanabe and Naoko never have sex again.  One of his visits to the institution, Naoko masturbates Watanabe, and on another occasion she fellates him.  Their relationship is vexed; Watanabe clearly loves her, but she doesn�t really love him, although she feels great affection for him, and she needs him as one of her few connections to the outside world.  It�s also quite likely that, even if she won�t admit it, she finds in him a surrogate for Kizuki.

Watanabe and Naoko, out for a walk at the mental institution.
  I know I've been focusing on plot rather than cinematography in this post,
but it must be said somewhere that Tran's film is a visual masterpiece.  This
still image looks like a painting.

Naoko�s condition worsens and she starts to hear voices.  Her anxieties are exacerbated by her fear that the longer she goes without re-entering the world, the harder it will be to do so.  She�s missing college and she�s missing most social interactions, and eventually it becomes difficult for her to function.  She no longer writes letters to Watanabe, and he instead receives messages from her quirky, early-middle-aged roommate, Reiko (Reiko is important in the book in her own right, but I want to focus on why the book had such emotional resonance with me, and I don�t think Reiko was terribly important in that respect).  Finally she�s sent from the rural mental institution�which is really more of a retreat than a full-fledged hospital�to an actual mental hospital, where she can theoretically receive more expert treatment.  One day she is allowed to visit Reiko at the retreat and her plan is to spend the night there.  Reiko reports that she seemed happier and it looked like things were improving.  When Reiko awakens the next morning, she finds that Naoko is gone and, well, we can already see where this is going.  Her body is found hanging from a tree in the woods nearby.  In Tran�s film, we get an abrupt, deeply disconcerting image of Naoko�s legs and feet dangling down from the tree, the skin almost purple with the cold of the wintry landscape and the cold of death.  This is an effect that Tran was able to convey which Murakami could not.  In my last post (on Czech cinema), I mentioned Milan Kundera�s distaste for cinematic adaptations of novels, but here�s an example of an advantage that cinema has over the novel that bears consideration.

And so Naoko is dead.  Now, I saw this coming, and I�ve read plenty of books and seen plenty of movies where the characters commit suicide, so why did I find this so affecting?  I think it is because this is the tragedy of a young person killed by the process of becoming an adult.  Naoko is a sensitive individual and her entrance into the �real world,� which arguably begins with the death of Kizuki, is just too much for her to bear.  Her life with Kizuki before his death sounds idyllic, with mutual support and understanding, not to mention guiltless mutual masturbation; the thing about idylls is that they never last, and so, no matter how pleasant they might be, they are always tainted with an element of sadness.

I think Naoko bears comparison to two of her famous literary antecedents, Hamlet and Werther, both of whom were passionate and sensitive young people entering into adulthood, and both of whom were shattered to find that reality did not correspond to their vision of what it should be.  The world was cold and hostile, and they just couldn�t tolerate it.  I think one of the greatest causes of Hamlet�s angst isn�t necessarily the murder of his father and his mother�s remarriage, but rather the fact that he�s expected to do something about it.  If Hamlet had his way, he�d be making love to Ophelia and engaging in scholarly pursuits in Wittenberg; this was probably the life he had imagined for himself.  Maybe he�d write poetry.  And he�s not the type to tolerate the bitter �slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.� He�s not complacent.  He�ll have life the way he wants it or he won�t have it at all.  Goethe�s Werther seems to be animated by a similar mindset; he enters into adult life assuming that things will go well for him, and when his love for Lotte isn�t reciprocated, he just can�t process it.  His fantasies don�t line up with reality, and it destroys him.

Now, what were Naoko�s fantasies of the future? It�s hard to say.  But they probably included Kizuki.  Perhaps she thought their idyll would never end, and the moment it did, she was already doomed.  I think what disturbs me most about Naoko�s hospitalization and death is that she didn�t get to live.  Well of course she didn�t get to live, James, she�d died!  Yes, but I mean, during the period when her mental illness overwhelmed her, she missed so many experiences.  She didn�t get to go to college.  She didn�t get to have a potentially fulfilling romance with Watanabe or anyone else, for that matter.  Her life just fizzled out and she died at the age of twenty-one.  Watanabe points out that Kizuki will be seventeen forever and Naoko will be twenty-one forever (elsewhere, I recall Murakami observing that the only way to remain �forever young� is to die young).  Watanabe, in a private conversation with the dead Kizuki, at around the time when Naoko is having her final breakdown, says to him, �You couldn�t become an adult.  And you left Naoko alone.  I am going to become an adult.� Now, this may sound like a tasteless recrimination against a suicide, but Watanabe needs to tell himself these things in order to go on living.  Because Kizuki had established suicide as an unfortunate precedent and Naoko would soon join him; it must have looked tempting for Watanabe.

One more example here of someone destroyed by life, and this is a real person, and I think his case is a quintessential example of the phenomenon: Syd Barrett.  

Syd Barrett, pre-madness.

Syd Barrett was the original front man for Pink Floyd and he wrote most of the songs on their 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.  He then promptly went insane.  There were a number of factors here, including what was either incipient schizophrenia or a pre-disposition to it, which was certainly exacerbated by the massive quantities of LSD he was taking at the time.  And he became unable to function.  The band would go on stage and Barrett would just stand there, or he�d bring the microphone up to one of the speakers and amuse himself with the feedback.  In 1968, the band fired him.  He made two solo albums and then he just completely fell apart.  He withdrew from society and retreated to his mother�s house, where he became obese and shaved his head (a form of self-mutilation); before the breakdown, he�d been handsome to the point of prettiness.  This was all when he was in his early-to-mid twenties.  And he never recovered.  He lived as a recluse until his death in 2006 from complications from diabetes (just a few days before the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, as I recall). 

No longer looking so good.  I will spare you the pictures of him from 1975 onwards, as they are sad beyond words.

And Syd Barrett was an amazing person, amazingly talented, who, at the age of twenty-one, had an incredibly bright and promising future ahead of him.  But adulthood destroyed him and he collapsed into himself, just like poor Naoko.  Whenever that sort of thing happens, I think of Syd Barrett, and I have dubbed it the �Syd Barrett Syndrome.�  So as far as I�m concerned, Naoko succumbed to the Syd Barrett Syndrome, and I can think of few things sadder.  Because she�s so young, she never had a chance to do anything in life.  She was �nipped in the bud,� as it were.  I�m reminded of Kenzaburo Oe�s first novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, about the destruction of children by the forces of the adult world (interesting, then, that Watanabe probably wouldn�t have read this book, as his preferences were so woefully American).

And so we must struggle valiantly! And we mustn�t fall into complacency, but neither should we fall into despair.  We must take our visions of a humane and livable world, and do all we can to impose them upon cruel, indifferent reality.  As the French student protestors of May 1968 used to say, �Glory to the imagination!� And we must cultivate the infinite compassion of a Buddha, so as to help each other survive and even flourish, and avoid the fates of Hamlet, Werther, Syd Barrett, and Naoko.