Like Crazy (2011) and 'Norwegian Wood'

Sometimes we like to do things that we know will hurt us, but we do them anyway, because the experience is beautiful and necessary, sometimes even inescapable. Luckily, when I refer to this phenomenon in terms of watching certain movies or reading certain books, the repercussions and consequences are far, far minimized compared to when another human being is involved. Sometimes there's just something within us that we have to exorcize in any way possible. Recently I've been taking the relatively un-destructive route and watching movies and reading books that I know will undoubtedly break my heart. But part of me is pulled to these stories because they are real, and as they break my heart they make me feel whole and sane in a way that only relatable art can. There is simply no other way for me to explain the reason for my being so deeply drawn to that which will cause me pain, fleeting or lasting. I've always felt a need to experience the most soaring human emotions first hand, and this is probably why I'm not good at saying 'no' when I probably should. Plus, what sort of life is it, living in a grey muteness?

So I paired, rather unconsciously, Drake Doremus' 2011 film Like Crazy with Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel 'Norwegian Wood'. They were both wonderful and beautiful and heartbreaking. I enjoyed every minute of both works, particularly in combination with one another. In Like Crazy, Yelchin and Jones play Jacob and Anna, respectively, two seniors in college in LA. Anna, a journalism student, is from England, and as she falls in love with Jacob, a design student, she unwisely decides to overstay her visa, putting her future with Jacob in jeopardy, as she is subsequently banned from entering the United States. What ensues is a painful and impressionistic view of the following months, wrought with nostalgia and ache. Jacob and Anna can't reach one another on the phone, they turn to an 'open relationship' (riiiight), they break up, they get back together again, and then they try something most of us in a long-distance relationship, no matter how devoted, have not tried: they get married. Only now, six months stand between the two of them before the latter can join her partner in LA.

Understandably and realistically, shit gets complicated, and despite that living, pulsing love that Anna feels for Jacob and that he feels for her, the love over which they get back together despite months of not speaking over and over again, life ends up coming between the two. Like Crazy ends in the most ambiguous way, just like many of our relationships. You watch it and you say "Yeah, it was like that." And I find that to be a success on the filmmaker's part.

Murakami's novel was deeper, more disturbed, and more contemplative. Toru Watanabe looks back on his college years in Tokyo in the 1960s and relives his relationships with several young women who still have a hold on him so deep that he is brought to jolting nausea as the memories pour back in more than a decade later. Murakami's writing is exquisite, introspective, and everything I wanted it to be as I came to know 19-year-old Toru. Together we looked back on the time we learned that life and death are not so separate after all, the time we learned that not only are life and death not so black and white, but everything between the two; namely, love.

This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there. The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.