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This bird has flown

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but in every book from a Japanese author that I have read someone dies.
This is the case as well in this book, which is so abundant of death that a good title could be “sex, suicide and solitude”.
Watanabe, a young Japanese man, tells the story of his late adolescence in which he lost several friends. The story is woven of his sexual experiences and his growing up from a high school student to university, alienated from his surroundings and his friends. I think it is the “solitude” that struck me most in this book, I remember a passage where Watanabe observes dust particles which are illuminated by the dawning sun, he reaches out, but his fingers touch nothing. I am sure, that is something every one of us tried at least once. Like dust particles people appear and disappear around Watanabe, but he and/or them have difficulties to get together, to communicate feelings with each other. There is even an incapability to focus, “touch” his own feelings and emotions, and everyone who passed adolescence knows, that this is so true. I found it was very interesting that in this book don’t really appear parents or other family members, no protagonist has a person to who he/she can rely on and therefore these people struggle by their own, mostly failing.
But I wouldn’t call it a sad book, it’s just life. Watanabe at the end grows out of it, grows up – after two thirds of very confusing story, that introduces many characters, the last third picks up speed and is very nice. I have no preparation in Japanese culture, but I thought that this book has a beauty like reading a very long haiku or looking very long at a Japanese drawing. It has its own special esthetics and ethics, or you’ll like it or you’ll think it is boring. Some things don’t have any explanation, you just have to accept them as they happen. Now I found this is very true in life, too.

The song “Norwegian Wood” appears often in the story and as soon as I finished it, I took my copy of the ‘red album’ and listened to it.

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me…

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Uploaded on Nov 9, 2009

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