I’ve loved other novels by Murakami, loved them despite being maddened by them; novels like his most famous The Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore are riveting and compelling while being obtusely fantastical with no attempt to tie anything together or explain the unreal happenings.
Norwegian Wood is a completely different book: It is a realistic love story (there is not a single fantastical event), but it is also riveting and beautifully written. Norwegian Wood is a coming of age novel. Its protagonist, a somewhat solitary, thoughtful young man, Toru Watanabe, lost his closest childhood friend to suicide at the age of seventeen, and so he moves through his life with caution, afraid to open himself up too much, unsure of the direction his future should take him. The novel is a flashback, told eighteen years after Watanabe’s nineteenth year, and it recounts his love and social life during his first and second years of college.
What makes this a successful novel is how beautifully written the characters are. Watanabe is in love with a young woman, Naoko, the lover of the childhood best friend; she is equally damaged by his suicide and struggles to make meaning of her life. And then Watanabe meets Midori, who, in less masterful hands, could end up becoming a stereotype of the liberated young woman, but Murakami also paints her with complexity and thoughtfulness. Even a more minor character, an older woman Watanabe meets, is given a rich back story, (the title comes from her playing the Beatles’s “Norwegian Wood” on the guitar for Naoko and Watanabe), and her perspective, in some ways, is the heart of the story: “If you don’t want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life’s natural flow…”
Norwegian Wood is sexy, sad, moving, and beautifully written. It invites us in to get to know its characters, and, despite its simplicity, it lingers long after you’ve finished reading.
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