It is a great challenge for me to read Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Forest every week and leave notes. Out of my preference for language, I came into contact with Japanese in college. Japanese is a second foreign language besides English. Although I joined a Japanese-funded joint venture after graduation and received short-term language training, I was more or less in contact with Japanese personnel in my daily work and studied hard for some time, but I was not proficient in it after all. Therefore, I want to motivate myself to study in this way. Learning has no other purpose, just a hobby. All right, here we go. Choose an appreciation once a week.

To tell the truth, I only know the outline of this book. The Chinese name is Norwegian Forest, and the Japanese name is ノ 12523ェィの Sen, written by Haruki Murakami (むらかみはるき). Because I have to chew down this masterpiece bit by bit, I don't even need to tell the outline of the story here, just open it with the mentality of reading for the first time.

At the beginning of the novel, I (Watanabe), who was about to arrive at Hamburg Airport, heard the music of The Beatles's Norwegian Forest, which evoked memories of Watanabe 18 years ago. The description in the first paragraph suddenly brings the reader into a gloomy background:

At the age of 37, I sat in the seat of Radio 747, and my huge body crossed the storm clouds and leaned down to land at Hamburg Airport. 1 1 month's cold rain painted the earth gloomy, making the ground crew wearing raincoats, the flag on the flat-topped terminal and the BMW billboard look like the background of the Flemish depression picture. That's all. I think it's Germany again

The forest in Norway is a sad story. The movie of the same name starring Kenichi Matsuda and Rinko Kikuchi lasted for more than two hours, and it was always full of depression and anguish. It is estimated that both the director and the actors have carefully studied the original work, and the beginning of the whole novel is such a setting, which is about a person's indelible memory and lingering sadness, as well as his inner experience.

Even today, after the spring and autumn of 18 degrees, I can still really remember the scenery of that grassland. A few days of warm Mao Mao rain washed away the dust in summer. The hillside is green and dripping, the heading Miscanthus twists and turns under the golden wind in October, and the thin clouds cling to the blue sky that seems to be freezing. Looking at it, the sky is vast, but my eyes feel dull pain. The breeze brushed the grass, brushed her hair slightly, and immediately blew into the miscellaneous trees. The leaves on the treetops are whispering, and the dog barks far and near. If anything, it is as subtle as coming from the entrance of another world. Other than that, everything was quiet. I didn't smell anything in my ears, and no one around me brushed it. I saw two birds on fire, leaping from the grass in horror and flying towards the jungle. Naoko told me the story of the well while moving his steps.

I think the author mainly wants to write an ethereal world, which is characterized by silence and nature, which is the same as Naoko's later environment in Kyoto Mountain Sanatorium, but his memory should be more than just the scenery like Kyoto. The scenery he wrote seems to have been in Naoko's mind all the time. He loves Naoko and can understand what the world is like in Naoko's heart. The season is like October and autumn, and the sky is high and the clouds are light. It was not until Naoko's childhood sweetheart boyfriend Muyue committed suicide that his mental problems appeared. She seems to have feelings for Watanabe, but she can't live without Muyue in her memory. Muyue is gone, and her world seems empty. Perhaps only when Watanabe is by her side can he feel the richness of the world.

In fact, the world is colorful and vulgar at the same time. Naoko is not as lively as another Qing Zi who is also tied to Watanabe in the novel. Her world became pure because she was three years old with Muyue. She and Muyue seem to be a person, an interdependent person. You have me and I have you, but they can't really combine. This is tragedy. From the first chapter to the later description, Murakami deliberately described the emptiness and monotony of this spiritual world, paving the way for Naoko's later practice. This is the theme of his novel. There are very pure people in this novel, that is Naoko, and there are also very tacky and bohemian people, that is Watanabe's good friend Yongze. Watanabe is more like a carefree observer, but he can do nothing for anyone. In the film, his mantra "もちろん" (meaning "of course", mostly used to echo others' statements) seems that the director has spent some effort. He obeys everyone and doesn't want to hurt anyone, but he can't hide his expression. Maybe Murakami is such a person in life? His works are all written with heavy psychological descriptions.

Speaking from the Japanese expression itself, it is a habit of this language to use all kinds of auxiliary words and long sentences. Sometimes we don't understand what he wants to express until the end of the sentence, which invisibly adds a sad tone to the expression of the most beautiful scenery. The continuous forms of verbs used together are explained in large paragraphs, which supplement the confusion of memory. Pay attention to "don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't smell, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. This sentence (literally, a faint voice seems to come from another world) is actually telling that what he recalls may not be the real world. Watanabe may think Naoko must be serene and pure in another world. He even suspects that his experience 18 years ago may not really happen in the present world. It seems to him that Naoko is from another world. In this sense, I don't think this film is a success. The film does reflect the anguish of young people, but it does not reflect Naoko's ideological world. Just Watanabe and Naoko walking around on the grass seems far-fetched.

At first, I looked at the literary descriptions in Japanese, but I still felt that Japanese was more scarce than Chinese. This is not Murakami's problem, but the Japanese noun system mostly comes from Chinese, so the word meaning is not expanded enough. You can compare the original text with the translation. In fact, there are many sayings about light rain in Chinese, such as Meng Meng, Feifei, lixi and "When?" Another example is "そののにはどんなもなかった" (literally, there is no other sound), and China's sentence "Everything else is silent. But as I said before, the advantage of Japanese lies in the vividness and picture sense of conjunctions and auxiliary adverbs rather than Chinese rhetoric. This is my first time reading Murakami's works. Of course, it's all based on intuition and sense of language. English fixed words are different from English. English fixed words have fixed artistic conception, and some words are as good as Chinese.

Murakami's psychological description is necessary. When I read the Chinese version, I used to stubbornly believe that Naoko was a fictional character of Junichi Watanabe. This time I studied the Japanese version carefully and found the author's true meaning. This feeling is still good. In a word, I have entered the picturesque world of Watanabe and Naoko ideologically, and there should be no misunderstanding in the original work. Wonderful words belong to this world, and I look forward to a better and purer feeling when I read them in the future.