Despite that, I don’t read much fiction; I dig Murakami! Been his fan since I read the IQ84 trilogy a few years ago. I’ve been reading Norwegian Wood over the past few weeks and bumped into this beautiful prose on death:
Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It’s a cliché 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.
It’s worth reading a hundred times. Because it’s the truth. I haven’t read anything like it in my life. What about you? Do you agree with Murakami?