Half truth

Can one be truthful all the time? When something is said, whoever hears it will convey the thing he or she has heard in the way he or she thinks he or she has heard. There are times when I try to translate or transcribe what I have heard to another person, I will be conveying a message according to what I understand it to be and how I have remembered it. I try to remember what I have heard, at times I doubt if that is really the exact or full  thing that  I have heard. If I have to communicate to another something that I have heard knowing that it can be damaging to someone or hurting , I would rather not be the bearer of that piece of news or information as I might  find it hard to deliver that piece of information or news as they are. When I try to present it in another way so as to reduce its impact, the piece of information becomes incomplete and confusing, it ends up sounding like a piece of untruth and I would rather not do it.

When I try to narrate what I have seen or witnessed , I try to recall what I have seen or witnessed and describe the image that I have according to what I remember, somehow I do not quite trust my memory as the image may not depict what I actually saw as my mind might not have been completely  present at the time to capture the entire scene. As much as I like to relate a story as accurately as I can, at times, when I relate the story, it somehow becomes a  variation of the original story although the essence of the story remains the same. It also depends on to whom I relate the story.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is a  story about sexuality and young love. It is told from the first person perspective of Toru Watanabe who looks back eighteen years later on his youth in the late 1960s. Watanabe reminisces his relationships with two very different women, the beautiful but emotionally unavailable Naoko and the vivacious and outgoing Midori when he was a college student doing a course majoring in drama and was  interested in American literature. He was then confused about his feelings for the two women, as they appeared to be two wholly different emotion.

Toru sought guidance from Reiko, an older woman who was close to Naoko. Reiko wrote,

‘ All of us (by which I mean all of us, both normal and not-so-normal) are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don’t live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors. Am I right ?’

Norwegian Wood is Toru Watanabe’s coming of age story. The story is rather straightforward unlike Murakami’s other works where there are mysterious sheep, talking cats and dimension shifting characters. Toru takes things too seriously and is wise beyond his age, he is a thinker and all that growing has to happen before he turns twenty years old. It is a sad story but not tragic as the ending is a positive one.