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Summary
Summary
Norwegian Wood
Author Notes
Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, Japan and studied at Tokyo's Waseda University. He opened a coffeehouse/jazz bar in the capital called Peter Cat with his wife. He became a full-time author following the publication of his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979.
He writes both fiction and non-fiction works. His fiction works include Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, The Strange Library, and Men Without Women. Several of his stories have been adapted for the stage and as films. His nonfiction works include What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He has received numerous literary awards including the Franz Kafka Prize for Kafka on the Shore, the Yomiuri Prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the Jerusalem Prize. He has translated into Japanese literature written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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, LilithÄthe 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
This is the novel that made Murakami a celebrity in Japan. Published in 1987, it sold in the millions and sent the author scurrying to the anonymity of life in Europe and the U.S. Only now has Murakami finally authorized the book to be translated and sold outside Japan. Curiously, it bears little in common with the author's later fiction--The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both wildly ambitious, innovative novels played out on the broadest of canvases. Here he tells a seemingly conventional, first-person love story, set in Tokyo in the late 1960s. Toru Watanabe, a university freshman, is obsessed with Naoko, the lover of Watanabe's best friend, who committed suicide. The two come together in their grief, but Naoko disappears, surfacing in a strange sanitarium where she is being treated for mental illness. Watanabe wanders through his student life in Tokyo, falling in with another strange girl, the free-spirited Midori, but he remains utterly committed to Naoko, whom he visits in the sanitarium. When tragedy finally arrives, as we know it must, Watanabe lets it wash over him as if he is a pebble buffetted in the surf. In many ways, Norwegian Wood (after the Beatles' song, Naoko's favorite) is typical of numerous coming-of-age stories in which wounded outsiders share an island of tenderness. And, yet, it is different, too. This is a quiet novel about very unquiet emotions; it lacks the histrionics one expects from young people in pain, but somehow that stillness makes the pain all the more intense. But there is great humor here, too, especially in the character of Midori. Murakami is never a conventional writer, even when he tells a conventional story. Expect this haunting tale to reach a considerably larger audience than Murakami's more demanding, longer works. --Bill Ott
Guardian Review
In this three-hander with walk-on character roles, Barnes returns to Oliver, Stuart and Gillian, the love-crossed trio who appeared in the earlier Talking It Over . Barnes, as an unseen interviewer, draws them to separately relate their version of events. As with a good docu-soap, the real revelations come through what is not said. Oliver expects you to remember where Talking It Over left off; Stuart and Gillian fill in the gaps. Once up to speed, a new turn of the wheel in the two men's rivalry over Gillian begins. Barnes's prose is without blemishes, but his mid-life, middle-class characters are stuck in dilemmas and attitudes that now seem dated. Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami (Harvil, pounds 6.99) There are plenty of clues to help you place Murakami's story of a young man's sentimental education. The narrator, Toru Watanabe, a student of German at a Tokyo university, carries a copy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain when he visits his emotionally disturbed girlfriend in a mountain sanatorium; "Don't tell me you're trying to imitate that boy in The Catcher in the Rye ," her roommate accuses; and he bonds with a fellow student over a shared obsession with The Great Gatsby . Torn between the fragile Naoko and down-to-earth Midori, Watanabe is piloted gracefully and humorously across the hyper-real cusp between adolescence and adulthood. Armed with Madness, by Mary Butts (Penguin, pounds 7.99) Virginia Woolf disliked her perfume, but Jean Cocteau became a friend; she drank with Hemingway, and cooked up opium poppies from her Cornish garden. Mary Butts was on the edge of modernism, a footnote to Bloomsbury whose work fell out of print. First published in 1928, this, her second novel, is redolent with unease and shadowed by the first world war. Set in the Dorset home of brother and sister Felix and Scylla, it revolves around the discovery of an ancient cup and its effect on their guests. Mysticism, psychoanalysis and a suspicion of the new are touched upon in this edgy, curious distillation of contemporary sensibilities. Shopgirl, by Steve Martin (Phoenix, pounds 6.99) No excuses are needed for Martin, actor and New Yorker contributor: he is an able writer whose tone is sympathetic and wise. The shopgirl is Mirabelle, glove saleswoman at a Beverly Hills store. In a city where appearances are augmented and egos impregnable, Mirabelle is a little girl lost. Consolation comes through her cat, her art and a psychiatrist's prescription, until Ray Porter - older, richer and more worldly - passes by her counter. Martin points out the snakes and ladders in the relationship between wealth and beauty, physical and emotional need. The characters may be archetypes and the plot slender, but Shopgirl is a likable light read. Caption: article-Fiction.1 In this three-hander with walk-on character roles, [Julian Barnes] returns to Oliver, Stuart and Gillian, the love-crossed trio who appeared in the earlier Talking It Over . Barnes, as an unseen interviewer, draws them to separately relate their version of events. As with a good docu-soap, the real revelations come through what is not said. Oliver expects you to remember where Talking It Over left off; Stuart and Gillian fill in the gaps. Once up to speed, a new turn of the wheel in the two men's rivalry over Gillian begins. Barnes's prose is without blemishes, but his mid-life, middle-class characters are stuck in dilemmas and attitudes that now seem dated. - Isobel Montgomery.
Kirkus Review
A first US appearance of a novel originally published in 1987, this crisp portrayal of "flaming youth" in the late 1960s proves one of Murakami's most appealing--if uncharacteristic--books. Best known to us as the comic surrealist-symbolist author of such rousing postmodernist fare as A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Murakami is also a highly intelligent romantic who feels the pangs of his protagonist Toru Watanabe's insistent sexual and intellectual hungers and renders them with unsparing clarity (the matter-of-fact sexual frankness here seems unusual for a Japanese novel, even a 1987 one).Toru's narrative of his student years, lived out against a backdrop of ongoing "campus riots," focuses on the lessons he learns from relationships with several highly individual characters, two of them women he simultaneously loves (or thinks he loves). Mercurial Naoko, who clearly perceives the seeds of her own encroaching madness ("It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself"), continues to tug away at Toru's emotions even after she enters a sanatorium. Meanwhile, coy fellow student Midori tries to dispel shadows cast by her parents' painful deaths by fantasizing and simulating--though never actually experiencing--sex with him. Other perspectives on Toru's hard-won assumption of maturity are offered by older student Nagasawa ("a secret reader of classic novels," and a compulsive seducer); Naoko's roommate Reiko, a music teacher (and self-styled interpreter of such Beatles' songs as the one that provides Murakami's evocative title) who's perhaps also her lesbian lover; and the specter of Toru's boyhood friend Kizuki, a teenaged suicide. There's a lot of talk about books (particularly Fitzgerald's and Hesse's) and other cultural topics, in a blithely discursive and meditative story that's nevertheless firmly anchored to the here and now by the vibrant immediacy of its closely observed characters and their quite credibly conflicted psyches and libidos. A contemporary equivalent of This Side of Paradise or Vile Bodies, and another solid building-block in one of contemporary fiction's most energetic and impressive bodies of work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A huge success when it was published in Japan in 1987 and only now translated into English, this book would seem to bear little resemblance to Murakami's surreal later novels (e.g., The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) and has been dismissed as just another love story. But it is more. Overcome by the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood," which affects him the way the madeleine affected Proust, narrator Toru spills out the story of his younger self; best friend Kizuki, a suicide at 17; and Kizuki's beloved, Naoko. After Kizuki's death, Toru falls in love with the beautiful, fragile Naoko, who quickly recedes into mental illness. Toru tracks her to a rest home, where he is befriended by her decades-older roommate, Reiko. But as Naoko deteriorates, he falls in love with a woman at his school who is also troubled but is frisky and open. Toru is honorable and intelligent. He questions his obligations: to the dead, to the living, and to himself. And Reiko? Is she a somewhat sinister figure, coming to almost instant intimacy with Toru? Or is sheDas she is presentedDa sympathetic, almost tragic, figure who wishes all the young people well? Deeply moving, darkly comic, beautifully written, and smoothly translated, this is for all literary fiction collections.DJudith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth and lent everything the gloomy air of a Flemish landscape: the ground crew in rain gear, a flag atop a squat airport building, a BMW billboard. So-Germany again. Once the plane was on the ground, soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood." The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever. I bent forward in my seat, face in hands to keep my skull from splitting open. Before long one of the German stewardesses approached and asked in English if I were sick. "No," I said, "just dizzy." "Are you sure?" "Yes, I'm sure. Thanks." She smiled and left, and the music changed to a Billy Joel tune. I straightened up and looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again. The plane reached the gate. People began unlatching their seatbelts and pulling baggage from the storage bins, and all the while I was in the meadow. I could smell the grass, feel the wind on my face, hear the cries of the birds. Autumn 1969, and soon I would be twenty. 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. Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer's dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-tall grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that faroff sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking-a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway to another world. We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright, red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods. As we ambled along, Naoko spoke to me of wells. 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. Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. The smell of the grass, the faint chill of the wind, the line of the hills, the barking of a dog: these are the first things, and they come with absolute clarity. I feel as if I can reach out and trace them with a fingertip. And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then-Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It's true, I can't even bring back Naoko's face-not right away, at least. All I'm left holding is a background, sheer scenery, with no people up front. True, given time enough, I can bring back her face. I start joining images-her tiny, cold hand; her straight, black hair so smooth and cool to the touch; a soft, rounded earlobe and the microscopic mole just beneath it; the camel's hair coat she wore in the winter; her habit of looking straight into your eyes when asking a question; the slight trembling that would come to her voice now and then (as if she were speaking on a windy hilltop)-and suddenly her face is there, always in profile at first, because Naoko and I were always out walking together, side by side. Then she turns to me, and smiles, and tilts her head just a bit, and begins to speak, and she looks into my eyes as if trying to catch the image of a minnow that has darted across the pool of a limpid spring. I do need that time, though, for Naoko's face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute-like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand-ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. At the Hamburg airport, though, the kicks were longer and harder than usual. Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them. Let's see, now, what was Naoko talking about that day? Of course: the "field well." I have no idea whether such a well ever existed, It might have been an image or a sign that existed only inside Naoko, like all the other things she used to spin into existence inside her mind in those dark days. Once she had described it to me, though, I was never able to think of that meadow scene without the well. From that day forward, the image of a thing I had never laid eyes on became inseparably fused to the actual scene of the field that lay before me. I can go so far as to describe the well in minute detail. It lay precisely on the border where the meadow ended and the woods began-a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by the meadow grass. Nothing marked its perimeter-no fence, no stone curb (at least not one that rose above ground level). It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. The stones of its collar had been weathered and turned a strange muddy white. They were cracked and had chunks missing, and a little green lizard slithered into an open seam. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world's darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density. "It's really, really deep," said Naoko, choosing her words with care. She would speak that way sometimes, slowing down to find the exact word she was looking for. "But no one knows where it is," she continued. "The one thing I know for sure is that it's around here somewhere." Hands thrust into the pockets of her tweed jacket, she smiled at me as if to say "It's true!" "Then it must be incredibly dangerous," I said. "A deep well, but nobody knows where it is. You could fall in and that'd be the end of you." "The end. Aaaaaaaah, splat. Finished." "Things like that must actually happen." "They do, every once in a while. Maybe once in two or three years. Somebody disappears all of a sudden, and they just can't find him. So then the people around here say, 'Oh, he fell in the field well.'" "Not a nice way to die," I said. "No, it's a terrible way to die," said Naoko, brushing a cluster of grass seed from her jacket. "The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing. You'd yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody'd hear you, and you couldn't expect anybody to find you, and you'd have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it's dark and soggy, and way overhead there's this tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little by little, all by yourself." "Yuck, just thinking about it makes my flesh creep," I said. "'Somebody should find the thing and build a wall around it." "But nobody can find it. So make sure you don't go off the path." "Don't worry, I won't." Naoko took her left hand from her pocket and squeezed my hand. "Don't you worry" she said. "You'll be O.K. You could go running all around here in the middle of the night and you'd never fall into the well. And as long as I stick with you, I won't fall in, either." "Never?" "Never!" "How can you be so sure?" "I just know," she said, increasing her grip on my hand and continuing on for a ways in silence. "I know these things. I'm always right. It's got nothing to do with logic: I just feel it. For example, when I'm really close to you like this, I'm not the least bit scared. Nothing dark or evil could ever tempt me." "Well, that answers that," I said. "All you have to do is stay with me like this all the time." "Do you mean that?" "Of course I mean it." Naoko stopped short. So did I. She put her hands on my shoulders and peered into my eyes. Deep within her own pupils a heavy, black liquid swirled in a strange whirlpool pattern. Those beautiful eyes of hers were looking inside me for a long, long time. Then she stretched to her full height and touched her cheek to mine. It was a marvelous, warm gesture that stopped my heart for a moment. "Thank you," she said. "My pleasure," I answered. "I'm so happy you said that, Really happy," she said with a sad smile. "But it's impossible." "Impossible? Why?" "It would be wrong. It would be terrible. It-" Naoko clamped her mouth shut and started walking again. I could tell that all kinds of thoughts were whirling around in her head, so rather than intrude on them I kept silent and walked by her side. "It would just be wrong-wrong for you, wrong for me," she said after a long pause. "Wrong how?" I murmured. "Don't you see? It's just not possible for one person to watch over another person for ever and ever. I mean, say we got married. You'd have to go to work during the day. Who's going to watch over me while you're away? Or say you have to go on a business trip, who's going to watch over me then? Can I be glued to you every minute of our lives? What kind of equality would there be in that? What kind of relationship would that be? Sooner or later you'd get sick of me. You'd wonder what you were doing with your life, why you were spending all your time babysitting this woman. I couldn't stand that. It wouldn't solve any of my problems." "But your problems are not going to continue for the rest of your life," I said, touching her back. "They'll end eventually. And when they do, we'll stop and think about how to go on from there. Maybe you will have to help me. We're not running our lives according to some account book. If you need me, use me. Don't you see? Why do you have to be so rigid? Relax, let your guard down. You're all tensed up so you always expect the worst. Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up." "How can you say that?" she asked in a voice drained of feeling. Naoko's voice alerted me to the possibility that I had said something I shouldn't have. "Tell me how you could say such a thing," she said, staring down at the ground beneath her feet. "You're not telling me anything I don't know already. 'Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up' What's the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back. I'd go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can't you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can't see that?" I said nothing in return. "I'm confused. Really confused. And it's a lot deeper than you think. Deeper . . . darker . . . colder. But tell me something. How could you have slept with me that time? How could you have done such a thing? Why didn't you just leave me alone?" Now we were walking through the frightful silence of a pine wood. The desiccated corpses of cicadas that had died at the end of the summer littered the surface of the path, crunching beneath our shoes. As if searching for something we'd lost, Naoko and I continued slowly down the path in the woods. "I'm sorry," she said, taking my arm and shaking her head. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Try not to let what I said bother you. Really, I'm sorry. I was just angry at myself." Excerpted from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
