•Norwegian Wood, set in 1960s Japan, is like a long journey to the woods accompanied by different characters, each with its own share of life & the taste of death. With aches being mostly physical & verbal, Norwegian Wood was like feeling for the ones whose ache was a world building within their minds. An ache that made even the words tremble.

• With Toru Watanabe as the protagonist, his journey from being an 18 year old, college student, to someone who lived death while living life, we get to read how death lives with us throughout our lives, shaking our realities with each loss it leaves in our hearts & yet we keep on living because that’s we can do. When his childhood friend, Kizuki, was lost in the world of dead, I felt what it means to lose a precious part of yourself, a part only one friend had access to. With the voids of loss growing inside him, Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko, was the only knot he could held onto. And, Naoko! The fragility of life, the storm of losing oneself to the presence of the dead somewhere within you, I felt for her as if she was making it through, one day at a time.

• With characters like Midori, Reiko, Nagasawa, there were aspects of them I loved reading. Also, I liked the conversations of anything & everything Toru had with them. I felt Murakami captures the essence of conversations in a really diverse way.

• Murakami holds space for literature, music, solitude & individual space in such a great way. You crave reading, solitude, music and living in a peaceful way. You know, a kind of silent motivation to live life as it demands to be lived.

• Murakami has dealt with mental agonies  in such a truthful way that you feel yourself crushing just realizing how impactful loss is in devastating not only the peace but the entire life ahead of people. How people fail to live life no matter how hard they try to.