As I flipped through the last pages of the “Norwegian Woods”(- by Haruki Murakami), I felt an emptiness inside me. Isn't it weird how we build these connections with the characters in a book, as if they were our long lost friends whom we discover so patiently through this whole process of reading. Not doubting the abilities of the the author, i find the process of reading so therapeutic, which all together transport me to a different world.

As in this case, the whole 1960s setup where writing letters, gifting music records (i mean who does that now) was a thing. But more particularly writing letters was one thing which made me really ponder that the world that we live in, where so much information is shared among people, where messages are written at the same time is deleted along the way. As convenient as we think that our lives have become because of all the digital platforms, communication has lost it’s essence. What would our lives be if we wrote letters instead of instant messages? One may argue that the fact, how modernization has made our lives so convenient, where touch of our fingers could make us reach to one another to the farthest end of the world yet we are nowhere close to people’s feelings and emotion. We must be going somewhere completely wrong.

As Naoko (one of the character of the book) writes to the protagonist in great detail about how she was dealing with her mental health or precisely how she really felt made me jealous in a way that I could also come across to someone like that. It is not the case that she did it with such clarity but she was able to present her complexities and flaws with ease. How often we do that in our lives?!