'In literature love is presented as a negative emotion'. By comparing TWO prose texts, explore the extent to which you agree with this statement.

Although love can be seen as quite pessimistic in a number of modern texts, some books retain the view that love is a positive emotion.
In Murakami's "Norwegian Wood", love is seen to be largely a negative emotion, and hard to find. Toru, the narrator, insists that he has a "kernel in [his] heart", making it difficult for him to fall in love. Indeed, love is presented as fickle and almost a weak emotion, and perhaps Toru is a stronger character for not being able to fall in love. Indeed, Hatsumi knows that her boyfriend, Nagasawa, 'was sleeping around, but she never complained to him', because she would rather have a cheating boyfriend than no boyfriend. Love makes people weak. This is the complete opposite from how love is presented in Ali Smith's "Artful", where although the narrator has lost the person they loved, their lives are all the richer for having known them: like books, lovers 'travel with us ... accompany us through from our past into our futures, always with their present-tense ability.' Furthermore, by refusing to assign genders or sexualities to the characters, Smith also acknowledges that love is universal and for everybody, while "Norwegian Wood" presents a very hetereonormative and therefore exclusionary view of love.