The “If” of Identity
... destined to meet; if not that day at the train station, somewhere else. A person can neither change nor avoid their fate, and yet fate upsets the structure of Toru and Naoko’s society so much that Naoko believes she must enter a sanitorium to become “normal” again. Fate plays off the main theme of Norwegian Wood: who determines the meaning of normal vs. abnormal? When Kizuki killed himself for no apparent reason, he essentially contributed to Naoko’s suicide. After Kizuki’s death, Naoko faced the realization that she was not meant to live the rest of her life with him. What she believed to be her fate was disrupted, and therefore, so was her meaning to live. Through sleeping with Toru, Naoko realizes she needs help to become “normal” again; this realization would have never surfaced if Naoko and Toru had not met at Yotsuya. As Reiko said: “What makes us most normal, is knowing that we’re not normal.” Naoko comes to the conclusion that she will never be “normal.” Being abnormal in society becomes an unbearable thought for her, and she kills herself. But in Toru’s letter to Naoko cited above, he tells her she is normal. What if Toru had not sent that letter; would their destiny be different? The “what if’s” in life stay with a person forever; for example: what if I had told her I loved her, what if I had taken that job, what if we had not met that day? The last question still plagues Toru twenty years after the fact. Their random encounter was the beginning of Naoko’s unraveling and Toru’s self-discovery. While their structure of life was disrupted because of their meeting, it was destined to occur. Toru also comes to the realization that no one can define “normal,” only that random events are necessary and inescapable in society. Katarina and August play a substantial role in Peter’s life, and Peter wonders what his life would be had they not met. All three characters realize they are not “normal,” which, in connection to Reiko’s belief, essentially makes them “normal.” The rigid structure of the society at Biehl’s Academy and their desire to change this structure makes them borderliners: The succession of days was an endless line, gray. They ran past you. Yourself, you were held firmly in place, you stood absolutely still and watched them running past, and there was nothing to be done about it. Maybe, somewhere inside you, you felt that surely it could have been otherwise. That it had not needed to be so hard and gray and monotonous. But you say no way out. Until I met Katarina. But then...