Norwegian Wood

By Murakami Haruki

Translated by Jay Rubin

(1987, translated 2000)

Vintage International

(Novel) 

Norwegian Wood is one of Kawakami’s most traditionally-constructed and most popular novels. It tells the story of three high school friends: Toru, the narrator, and Naoko and Kizuki, a girlfriend/boyfriend pair that have known each other since they were four years old. When Kizuki passes away in his second year of Japanese high school, Naoki and Toru drift apart, only to meet by chance a few years later while attending university in Tokyo. Toru is drifting aimlessly through his life as a half-hearted scholar, avoiding relationships by adapting himself to the influence of monied narcissist, Nagasawa, who takes him out on the town periodically to meet girls in bars and take them to love hotels. Meanwhile, Toru is trying to resist his growing attraction to Noako. Both he and the object of his desire are still grieving for the loss of Kizuki and believe a relationship would be a betrayal of the spirit of the deceased boy. The story is steeped in nostalgia and is deeply evocative of the 1960s. The music of The Beatles, Bill Evans, and Coltrane are a palpable presence in the novel, as are the many books Toru reads or rereads as he tries to distract himself from his emotional pain. For example, he brings The Magic Mountain to a sanatorium and he repeatedly reads The Great Gatsby as either an escape or as a form of exquisite psychological torture. He witnesses the student riots at Tokyo University, visits an experimental mental health hostel, finds a hilariously spontaneous and foul-mouthed girlfriend, and abandons himself to a lonely drunken pilgrimage along Japan’s coast. Although the overall tone is subdued and many more characters than Naoko and Toru are deep in the process of grieving, Kawakami provides heavy doses of sardonic, offbeat humor that can be both high-brow and x-rated.

“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.”