Norwegian Wood // Book Review
Murakimi is the most successful author to come out of japan. Published in 1987 in Japanese, turning him into a national star. He left the country for several years to avoid the fame
A Bildungsroman-a genre of literature that begins with the storyās protagonist experiencing an emotional loss and then achieving gradual maturity or growth as an individual
Norwegian Wood emphasizes the painful inevitability of growing up and how it is tied to the ceaseless march of time: almost every event that happens in the novel is given a date, so that the reader can feel the passage of particular lengths of time along with Toru, who often remarks about how another month or another year has passed.
A slice of life book. Nostalgic, innocent, sensitive, and simple
Toru tries to search for a meaning in life. Naoko tries to overcome her worsening mental health. Midori tries to find someone who will love her. All three try to overcome loneliness, move past painful memories, and grow up.
While on an airplane descending to Hamburg Airport, Toru Watanabe (a 37 year old, graduated drama student, who considers himself a very ordinary person), hears the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood" played over the speakers and is overcome by painful memories of his past. He remembers a meadow where he and Naoko, the girl he loved, walked 18 years ago when he was still 19.
Toru grew up in Kobe with Kizuki as his best and only friend. Along with Naoko, who was Kizuki's girlfriend and childhood friend, Toru and Kizuki formed an inseparable small group. However, their lives were torn apart in their second year of high school when Kizuki inexplicably committed suicide. Naoko becomes very quiet, has trouble finding words sometimes, and has incredibly clear, bottomless eyes. Independent of each other, both Toru and Naoko decide to leave their hometown for Tokyo to attend university, where they run into each other in 1968 in their first year. The two end up going on dates every Sunday, simply walking extensively throughout the city; meanwhile, Toru deals with his stuttering and eccentrically neat roommate, nicknamed "Storm Trooper," and gets to know Nagasawa, a charismatic and egoistic upperclassman in the dorm. Nagasawa begins to take him out some nights to find random girls to sleep with.
On Naoko's 20th birthday, Toru comes over to her apartment, and when she breaks down into tears he comforts her and then has sex with her. The next day he tries to contact her again, but later finds that she has moved. Concerned, he sends her a letter. Meanwhile, Toru meets Midori Kobayashi, an underclassman in his drama class with a vibrant and quirky personality who seems to have taken an interest in him. A few weeks later Midori invites him over to her house, and while watching a house fire from her balcony they kiss.
Toru receives a letter from Naoko explaining that she has gone to Ami Hostel, a special kind of sanatorium, to recover from psychological problems she has been having. Toru visits her there and meets Reiko Ishida, a woman in her late thirties who is Naoko's roommate. Reiko explains that at the sanatorium, located in the middle of a remote forest, people do not try to cure but rather adapt to their individual deformities. That night Toru sees Naoko in the moonlight by his bed, and mysteriously she reveals her naked body to Toru, astounding him with its perfection.
During Toru's stay, Reiko and Naoko separately tell him their life stories. Reiko was an aspiring concert pianist until a nervous breakdown derailed her career; and then her mental problems made it difficult for her to have a normal life until a man married her and promised to take care of her. However, due to an incident in which a young piano student of hers manipulated her, she had another nervous breakdown, after which she came to the sanatorium. Naoko tells Toru about how she witnessed her older sister's suicide.
Upon returning to Tokyo, Toru feels disoriented, as though he left part of himself in the quiet world of Ami Hostel. However, Midori revitalizes him by taking him drinking. Later she takes him to the hospital where her father is dying of brain cancer, and Toru bonds with the man, who dies within a week. Around this time, Nagasawa invites Toru to a dinner with his girlfriend Hatsumi; at the dinner, the couple falls out over Nagasawa's inability to consider Hatsumi's feelings.
Toru makes another visit to Ami Hostel to see Naoko and then moves from the dorm into a house. Due to his ignoring her, Midori angrily refuses to speak with Toru, and this combined with news from Reiko that Naoko's condition is worsening sends Toru into a depression. However, he manages to pull himself out of it. He and Midori come to realize that they love each other, but they agree to wait while Toru tries to understand his relationship with Naoko.
Out of nowhere, Toru receives news that Naoko has killed herself; grief-stricken, he spends a month traveling alone aimlessly away from Tokyo. However, he feels compelled to return and restart his life. Reiko leaves the sanatorium to visit, and together the two hold a small funeral for Naoko involving Reiko playing every song she knows on the guitar. Afterwards, Reiko sleeps with Toru, and then the next day she leaves for a new life in Hokkaido. Some time later from some unknown place, Toru calls Midori telling her that he needs her.
In a way the central problem of the novel is the existential question of staying aliveāput bluntly, this comes to something like, "Why not commit suicide?" All the characters face this question, but especially those who are one relation away from death, so to speak, due to a family member (Naoko, Midori) or loved one (Naoko, Toru) who has died or even taken their own life. Toru realizes early on in his relationship with Naoko that the two of them are seeking for something absent and lost, namely Kizuki, and because of this their love seems to pull them away from life into the other world that is death. However, Midori acts as a counterbalance for Toru, pulling him back into life just as Reiko does for Naokoāand for Toru, following Naokoās death.
One shouldn't forget that the novel itself is framed within the elder Toru's attempt to write about his memories. At the end of the first chapter he writes of how the painful clarity of his memories of Naoko prevented him from writing of her, but how the passage of time, a double-edged sword, blurred those memories and enabled him to write. Similarly, Toru writes a great deal of letters, mostly to Naoko but also to Reiko and Midori, over the course of the novel, and he also has a great many conversations; as he realizes during an intense spell of depression when he is unable to see anyone, his letter writing is the last thing holding his life together, regardless of his not receiving any replies. Although Toru usually finds a way to express himself due to his honesty and straightforward sincerity, Naoko has trouble translating her feelings into words to share with others, and this serves as the essence of her pain. The way that characters speak in the novel often tells us more than explicit descriptions of their personalities or emotional states.
The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.
Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed itā¦the pain of growing up.
Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I've chosen to liveāand to live the best I knowā¦I'm going to mature. I'm going to be an adult. Because that's what I have to do. I always used to think I'd like to stay seventeen or eighteen if I could. But not anymore. I'm not a teenager any more. I've got a sense of responsibility now. I'm not the same guy I was when we used to hang out together. I'm twenty now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.
We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live.
The firefly Toru releases from the dormitory roof (symbol)
The symbolic significance of the firefly that Storm Trooper gives to Toru is immediately established by Storm Trooper's suggestion that Toru give it to his "girlfriend," i.e. Naoko. Toru sees the firefly somewhat as he sees Naoko: a creature once bright and free that has lost much of its life and become caged. Looking at its pale glow in the dark night, he thinks not of the present but is instead flung back into memories of a past with brighter fireflies. When he frees it on the rooftop, it is still for such a long time that Toru begins to doubt whether it is still alive; but he waits, as any true lover waits, and finally the little bug takes flight, tracing an arc in the air that seems to reclaim a lost past, and then flying off into the night. Although this image is very positive for the firefly, Toru is left grasping in vain at the trail of light it left behind in his mind.
Perhaps the weather condition that occurs the most frequently in the story, rain is a crucial figure to the novel. From the very beginning of the novel when Toru's plane lands in Hamburg in the rain to such climactic scenes as the night Toru sleeps with Naoko, rain creates a presence of the supernatural, or at least an emotional charge that far exceeds that of everyday life. In fact, even when there is no rain, such as the fair day when Toru and Naoko walk through the meadows near Ami Hostel, rain makes itself felt through its absence.
Letter writing (allegory)
If we want to identify Toru's first letter, it would either be the note that he left with Naoko the morning after he slept with her or the letter he sent to her home after he found that she had moved from Tokyo. It contains the crucial theme sustained through their correspondence: the desire for understanding and dealing with pain. Apart from Toru's two visits to Ami Hostel, the letters that he exchanges with Naoko remain his one link with her, and during the month that he is cut off from all people, including Midori, his letter writing becomes the only thing connecting him to the world outside himself at all, just as letter writing was for Naoko.
More links about Norwegian Wood
http://www.harukimurakami.com/
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/haruki-murakami-the-art-of-fiction-no-182-haruki-murakami
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/books/rubber-souls.html
