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Norwegian Wood (Paperback)

by Haruki Murakami (Author) "I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN THEN, STRAPPED IN MY SEAT AS THE HUGE 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport ..." (more)

4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (91 customer reviews)

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Product Details

Paperback: 298 pages
Publisher: Vintage (Sep 12 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375704027
ISBN-13: 978-0375704024
Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 13.2 x 2 cm
Shipping Weight: 223 g

Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (91 customer reviews)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #22,127 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#3 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Japanese

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Product Description

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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

From Publishers Weekly

In a complete stylistic departure from his mysterious and surreal novels (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; A Wild Sheep Chase) that show the influences of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Tom Robbins, Murakami tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story, reminiscent of J.R. Salamanca's classic 1964 novel, LilithAthe tale of a young man's involvement with a schizophrenic girl. A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki, inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered. She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young love bound for tragedy. Published in Japan in 1987, this novel proved a wild success there, selling four million copies. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN THEN, STRAPPED IN MY SEAT AS THE HUGE 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

91 Reviews

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3 star:		(5)
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4.6 out of 5 stars (91 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars It's the Humor that Balances the Sadness that makes this an all-time "Catcher in the Rye" classic, Feb 1 2009

By	Jonathan Mendelsohn - See all my reviews

The first time I read "Norwegian Wood" I was living in Japan, teaching at a conversation school in north Osaka. I'd never heard of Murakami. A girl I worked with recommended it. It is the only book to date that after I reached the last page, after I read the book's pitch-perfect last line, due to an utter unwillingness, a near inability, to leave the beautiful world Murakami had created, I proceeded to immediately flip back to the first page and read the novel all over again. This may be because sometimes I prefer art to people. This may be because I was lost in Japan. And may be because the book hit a place in my soul, a mate to my soul, a heart to my heart. That was in the late winter of 2002. I've read the book again since. More than once.

The Beatles song Murakami's 1987 novel is named after is on surface listen a pretty two minute ditty. A pretty, but sad, thing. The tone of Murakami's novel has something similar gently pulling the reader through.

"The stewardess came to check on me again. This time she sat next to me and asked if I was all right.
'I'm fine, thanks,' I said with a smile. 'Just feeling kind of blue.'
'I know what you mean,' she said. 'It happens to me, too, every once in a while.'
She stood and gave me a lovely smile. 'Well, then, have a nice trip. Auf Wiedersehen.'
' Auf Wiedersehen.'

The easy read that is the book is so like the song in how deceptive it is, how simple it seems. Beneath a book that reads like almost pure autobiography, and a song that listens like effortless melody, lie layered artful structure, and things thematically heavier than meet the eye.

The Beatles' song that is so melodically sweet ends with a man taking revenge on a girl who would not sleep with him, by burning down the furniture in her room.

Murakami's male narrator/protagonist does no such thing. But his book too juxtaposes a gentle tone with themes of longing, of loss and of what can and will never be.

To be somewhat vague and very brief (this isn't a "proper" review cause it lacks a thorough synopsis - I'm not even telling you about Naoko and she's one of the book's central characters), "Norwegian Wood," set in the Tokyo of the 1960s, is a love story. Basically it is a sad story. Because most all the love in the book is of the unrequited variety, and there is more than one suicide. The book has much to lend itself to feeling blue, like Miles Davis on his muted trumpet. But for every lonely moment, you get a scene with a character like Reiko, a woman who should be tragic considering her history but who, by the time we meet her in a sort of sanatorium for sad or screwed up people (except that it's in the mountains outside Kyoto and sounds a little like paradise, what with people growing their own vegetables, playing tennis and actually being allowed to be who they really are) Reiko turns out to be a fierce grounding force, that rock solid salt of the earth type who seems like the healthiest person in the book and beyond. Better still, though no longer the piano virtuoso she once was, she plays a mean guitar, Beatles song included.

The magic of Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," is that a book so focused on the subjects of unrequited love and death manages to have what all books need to be great - a sense of adventure. Not, of course, in the children's literature sense of the word, but in the 'you've gone off to another place' sense. Like you've been lifted off and taken somewhere other. That "other place" as Murakami has called it.

"... the bus plunged into a chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way they towered over the road, blocking out the sun and covering everything in gloomy shadows. The breeze flowing into the bus's open windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin. The valley road hugged the river bank, continuing so long through the trees it began to seem as if the whole world had been buried for ever in cedar forest - at which point the forest ended, and we came to an open basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Broad, green farmland spread out in all directions, and the river by the road looked bright and clear. A single thread of white smoke rose in the distance..."

For a book that really is delving into pretty dark waters it has a lot of humorous bits too. The poetry is in the balancing of all these different elements.

Because alongside depression and suicide, out of a deep dark forest, you get to see the mountains, or, 60 pages into the book, alongside all those things that never could have been and never will be you get a character like Midori - one of my favourite in literature.

"At 5:30 Midori said she had to go home and make dinner. I said I would take a bus back to my dorm, and saw her as far as the station.
'Know what I want to do now?' Midori asked me as she was leaving.
'I have absolutely no idea what you could be thinking,' I said.
'I want you and me to be captured by pirates. Then they strip us and press us together face to face all naked and wind these ropes around us.'
'Why would they do a thing like that?'
'Perverted pirates,' she said.
'You're the perverted one,' I said."

And really, what else do you need to help you cope with death, and the kind of love that will never be, but perverted pirates?

Bookworm, Movie Nerd
[...]

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4.0 out of 5 stars Not the opposite, but a part of, Nov 17 2007

By	Craobh Rua "Craobh Rua" (N. Ireland) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Norwegian Wood (Paperback)

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but spent most of his youth in Kobe. "Norwegian Wood" was first published in Japan in 1987, and first translated into English in 2000.

Toru Watanabe tells the story, looking back on his days as university student living in Tokyo. His circle of friends was very small, and he appears to have always been a fairly solitary type. Originally from Kobe, Toru only had one real friend at school - Kizuki, who committed suicide at seventeen. He went on to university in Tokyo, where he largely appeared to keep to himself. There, he did - briefly - have a roommate at his dormitary - though the pair had very little in common. (Toru's roommate is known only as "Storm Trooper" in the book, a nickname gained through his obsession with sanitation). Nagasawa, a diplomacy student at the university, was more an acquaintance than a real friend. He was very intelligent, and came from an influential family - he took Toru under his wing after the pair discovered a common love of "The Great Gatsby". (No-one else in the dorm had any interest had any interest in the classics). Nevertheless, they did little together other than drink and chase women.

Toru's two key relationships, however, were both with women. One was Naoko - a Beatles fan and the very delicate one-time girlfriend of Kizuki.The pair meet up again in Tokyo, roughly a year after Kizuki's death and start spending more and more time together. Eventually, Toru falls for Naoko and, on the evening of Naoko's twentieth birthday, things get intimate. Unfortunately, the evening proves a little difficult for Naoko to deal with and she takes off - booking herself into a sanitorium in an attempt to deal with her difficulties. The pair keep in touch write to each other, though, and Toru is keen to see her again.

In Naoko's absence, however, the arrival of Midori Kobayashi complicates things. Like Toru, she studies drama at the university - but she's very different sort of person to Naoko. Lively and outgoing, she combines her studies with helping her father in his bookshop. Gradually, she and Toru spend more and more times together - and it leaves Toru a little unsure which direction to travel in.

A little frustratingly, the book left me with a couple of questions about some of the characters. Despite only being a minor character, I couldn't help wondering what happened to Storm Trooper...Similarly, I found myself feeling concerned for Reika, Naoko's closest friend at the sanitorium - and hoping that things worked out for her. Most of all, there's no indication of how Toru's life progressed, between the book's final page and the flight to Germany that sparked his memories. However, it's an excellent book overall, and well worth reading.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Japanese existentialism at its best, Jun 26 2007

By	Ian Gordon Malcomson (Smithers, Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Here are five good reason to take up this book:
A. The story offers a very pungent insight into the pressure-cooker environment of modern Japanese society, with all its time-honored traditions and taboos. In the rush to succeed in an overly competitive society, many of the main characters like Toru and Naoka either self-destruct or withdraw because of their glaring inability to control the situation at hand as they climb the mystical ladder of success;
B. The story provides a titillating plot full of adventure, suspense,loathing and uncertainty, as the characters move in and out of various sexual relationships;
C. You, the reader, get to peer inside the minds of youth as they grapple with the big moral issues of the day;
D. The author captures the futility of life as bound up in the individual seeking to become established in a society that is always in transition with no time for reflection;
E. The title "Norwegian Wood" befits the storyline very effectively. Toru's frustrations at not being able to form a permanent relationship are captured in that classical line, "And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown."

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4.0 out of 5 stars I'm the Critic.
Norwegian Wood, written by Haruki Murakami, is a tremendous piece which involves many strives and hardships about love and relationship. Read more

Published on Jun 4 2007 by Sugar520

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding
Wow! I was completely enchanted by this lyrical novel. The character development is outstanding and the mood really grabs you and gives the words a sense of depth and intense... Read more

Published on May 17 2004 by meggin8D

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bird Has Flown
Norwegian Wood tells the story of Toru, a 20-ish University student living in Tokyo. Toru is devoted to Naoko, the girlfriend of his deceased best friend. Read more

Published on April 15 2004 by M. Ansty