murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

"I'm here, aren't I?" Her familiar little gestures soothed my heart like a
healing balm. "If this is death," I thought to myself, "then death is not
so bad." "It's true," said Naoko, "death is nothing much. It's just death.
Things are so easy for me here." Naoko spoke to me in the spaces
between the crashing of the dark waves.
Eventually, though, the tide would pull back, and I would be left on
the beach alone. Powerless, I could go nowhere; sadness itself would
envelop me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was
crying than that the tears were simply oozing out of me like
perspiration.
I had learned one thing from Kizuki's death, and I believed that I had
made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: "Death exists, not
as the opposite but as a part of life."
By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was
only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko's
death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a
loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure
that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and
learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing
the next sadness that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves
at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on
these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I
moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whisky, bread
and water.
One windy evening, as I lay wrapped in my sleeping bag, weeping, by
the side of an abandoned hulk, a young fisherman passed by and
offered me a cigarette. I accepted it and had my first smoke in over a
year. He asked why I was crying, and almost by reflex I told him that
my mother had died. I couldn't take the sadness, I said, and so I was
on the road. He expressed his deep sympathy and brought a big bottle
of sake and two glasses from his house.
327