THE ICE MAN

Haruki Murakami

"...the runway was buried beneath a hard sheet of ice. Just like my heart"

All was confusing for me. It kept me a day to fully understand how loneliness, being
stagnant and isolated are what constituted the story. I was deeply driven of the idea
that a person can truly love a person so different, how a person can truly make a
stand against it all, if it comes to love. But in the end, it's the love that made me feel
so lonely, hopeless and alone. Because to sum it up, the story is about a girl who
loves a boy that is so odd, that she felt the coldness of him but believed that it can
never get rid of her warmth, that even if he's holding on to his past, she still hoped for
a future for them. But in the end, everything turned to ice.

The story did a good picture of every scenario, but not the characters. The girl and
especially the ice man were so intriguing and the way they are presented are
debatable because it depends on how the reader imagined them, not how the
literature was written. The author did well on making the readers hang on some lines,
to question about it. The flow was surprisingly making readers so intent and eager to
read every line. As for me, there are things left unclear that is why I can't stop
reading this until the end. I wasn't sure why I didn't see the ending coming. I felt that
I'm still on the climax where the main characters are still on the way to resolution.
And it saddened me, that it was the end already, that I didn't see the resolution/
problem solving. It is because the part of her turning to ice like the iceman is actually
the resolution to the problem of her loving the iceman. It makes me lonely to think
that this was my interpretation of the story. That they're love didn't conquer it all
because they left the best part of love and that is to picture every approaching
moment to be with the one you love. That nothing really should be the same, But it
ended up that they got stuck to the same reason iceman was cold as ice.

With this kind of stories, it can always be rooted from the author. Haruki Murakami is
a superb author in colliding fantasy and reality into a magnificent story. And in this
short story, I was filled with indescribable emotions about love and life. I felt like I was
confined in all the stories of happy endings that I literally didn't see the ending of this
story was coming. I felt the urge to think that everything did well to them but it didn't.
It didn't because no one's been well in the plot that even her heart became frozen as
ice without knowing when it began and when it ended. Putting this in reality, yes, they
love each other, but a love that is trapped in the past is never a happy one. They
both never look back but were living in the past. It breaks my heart that these things
could be possible, to forget how warmth it is to be on the places you've been, how
loving a person can inevitably change you, and how this change can make you stuck
to the idea of your past self. Unknowingly, the girl felt numb about it and there's no
other way but to cry over the past. Because the girl let her love, the ice man be
locked up in the past that she too was fixated with the past. And it turned out that
time was stopped in the past even though they are in the present.
This story can be understood in the sense that our realities are in the form of our
past, present and future. And living with those creates ourselves. But living in one of
those can deteriorate our understanding of life. We cannot fully seize our lives trying
to come back with what has been, trying to focus on what is present leaving what
has been and what would be and apparently, living life with the sole idea of the future
will be detrimental to what is.