Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
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Book Summary Information
Author: Haruki MurakamiTranslator: Jay Rubin
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-09-12
ISBN: 0375704027
Number of pages: 298
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375704024
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Norwegian Wood
Book Review: Murakami at his most straightforward -- and his best.
Summary: 4 Stars
Unlike Murakami's other novels (e.g. Hard-Boiled Wonderland), Norwegian Wood has no technobabble, no fantastical or supernatural elements. Without those frills, it's clear that Murakami is really an old-fashioned writer, and owes a lot to Kawabata and Soseki. Murakami's evocations of university life are reminiscent of Sanshiro (and his characters, like Soseki's, write letters constantly), and the very structure of his plot is identical to Thousand Cranes -- the first love is passionate but doomed, and the second love is sweet, but hampered by the protagonist's alienation. Of course, Murakami's story is purely about the angst of reasonably well-to-do teenagers, without the wartime lament lurking beneath the surface of Kawabata's opus. In order to make this seem less frivolous, Murakami makes his main characters noticeably less wealthy than their peers (though still wealthy enough to enjoy their idleness), and adds a dark undertone in the form of a series of romantic suicides incidental to the plot.
But one still shouldn't quite take Murakami at his word. Even here, the story has a certain deliberate glamour. The protagonist claims to be just an ordinary guy, with no particular talents. But nearly every woman in the story throws herself at him sooner or later. All his problems are caused entirely by the difficulty of managing these women. No wonder the book was so popular with young people -- the protagonist's modest self-deprecation is so charismatic that it can be viewed as a kind of confidence. He suffers by sleeping with lots of girls, which is really not suffering at all. It is noteworthy that he never loses face a single time in the book. He always manages to keep his cool, his women are never able to embarrass him. The only time when he is vulnerable is in the very end, and there too his solitude is heroic rather than desperate. Real suffering is awkward, mundane, and ungainly, not cool and collected.
The protagonist's saving grace is that he really is charismatic. He doesn't whine, and he really does try to do right by at least some of his women. There are no villains in the book (no analogue of Chikako from Thousand Cranes), all the characters are quite likeable, with the possible exception of the playboy Nagasawa (but at least he repents eventually).
Murakami's name-dropping (a constant in all his work) is less irritating here than, say, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There's less of it, and Murakami makes an effort to connect his pop culture references to his storyline and characters. Like, instead of just mentioning The Great Gatsby once (perhaps naming it as a good book for cooking pasta to), he will actually cite the contents of the book and bring up the novel multiple times in conversation. The titular Beatles song also has some relevance to the plot.
This is also Murakami's most erotic book. He writes about sex a lot, in every book of his that I've read, and it's usually not the high point of his writing. He's very explicit in this book, as well. For the most part, though, the explicit parts of Norwegian Wood don't seem vulgar and pointless, because they have a certain fresh-faced innocence. Midori is supposed to be "sexually liberated," according to the back cover, but actually she doesn't come across as being any more liberated than Naoko, or any other female character in the novel. And, by today's standard, they all seem charmingly serious. It reminds me of Shintaro Ishihara, whose most decadent and experienced female characters are always trembling virgins deep down.
And anyway, The Lake had a lot of perverse desire too, and even Murakami's one scene with gratuitous lesbian themes is probably just inspired by Beauty and Sadness. Murakami writes about it more than Kawabata, though. By the end, it feels like sex is the only way Murakami can imagine of depicting meaningful emotion or having his characters express themselves. Eventually, you notice that whenever his characters are supposed to have a true meeting of souls, he goes straight to the sex scene. In his defense, though, a young man like the protagonist probably would think like that in real life.
In the same way, the numerous romantic suicides eventually become an awkward plot device, because most of them occur with seemingly no reason. Murakami just isn't into the whole "show, don't tell" thing; when he needs a side character like the protagonist's dead friend Kizuki, he gives you a brief synopsis of the character's personality, without bothering to bring it out in conversation, then skips to the catastrophic plot device. I understand that Kizuki is only important to the plot insofar as the other characters think about him, but still, I think the book could have used at least one scene with him talking to the protagonist, to illustrate why he might have felt so isolated. It would also have helped show the gradual change in Naoko. But maybe Murakami isn't interested in that. He's interested in documenting Naoko's changing feelings -- but only documenting them, not showing how they naturally emerge from a single personality.
In his other books, when Murakami doesn't know what to say, he spirals off into fantasy. Here, the realistic setting deprives him of the easy way out, and forces him to come up with personalities and characters. As a result, Norwegian Wood is his best book, and he never said anything interesting anywhere else that he didn't say here. For instance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle reuses many details from Norwegian Wood -- the inexplicable death of the wife's sister, the smart-mouthed but lonely secondary female character, even the "warm mud" metaphor -- and Sputnik Sweetheart is just a watered-down retelling of the exact same story. If you're wondering what Murakami is all about, you can safely limit yourself to Norwegian Wood.
Summary of Norwegian Wood
First American PublicationThis stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.
In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man.
Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles:
I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, Norwegian Wood captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy. --Mark Thwaite
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