murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

smoke rising from tall crematorium chimneys, and chunky
paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first.
I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air.
And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple
form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:
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. This
had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over
there. I am here, not over there.
The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and
life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was
already here, within my being, it had
always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.
When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me
as well.
I lived through the following spring, at 18, with that knot of air in my
chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious.
Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching the truth, I
sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no
matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating
contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were
strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life,
everything revolved around death.
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