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Norwegian Wood Paperback – September 12, 2000

by Haruki Murakami (Author), Jay Rubin (Translator)

4.4 18,199 ratings

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From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love.

Now with a new introduction by the author.

Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

Print length

298 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 12, 2000
Dimensions

5.17 x 0.68 x 7.97 inches
ISBN-10

0375704027
ISBN-13

978-0375704024
Lexile measure

790L
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

Review

“A masterly novel.... Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami’s hand.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Norwegian Wood...not only points to but manifests the author’s genius.” —Chicago Tribune

“[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Vintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

From the Inside Flap

First American Publication

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

From the Back Cover

First American Publication
This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

About the Author

HARUKI MURAKAMI lives near Tokyo.

Newly translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; First Paperback Edition (September 12, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375704027
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375704024
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 790L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.17 x 0.68 x 7.97 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #143 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Haruki Murakami
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Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.
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Jay Rubin
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Jay Rubin (b. 1941) is an American academic, translator, and (as of 2015) novelist. He is best known for his translations of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. He has written about Murakami, the novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), the short story writers Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908) and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), prewar Japanese literary censorship, Noh drama, and Japanese grammar. In May 2015 Chin Music Press published his novel THE SUN GODS, set in Seattle against the background of the incarceration of 120,000 U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
Rubin has a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Washington for eighteen years, and then moved to Harvard University, from which he retired in 2006. He lives near Seattle, where he continues to write and translate.
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P. J. Owen

A coming of age story that you won't be able to put down

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2011

Verified Purchase

Murakami is someone I've never fully embraced, yet keep coming back to. I don't like some of the fantastic and surreal elements of his writing, but I'm also drawn by the energy, intelligence, and inventiveness of it. And I also love how he infuses his work with elements of Western culture, especially music.

Norwegian Wood is a straight-on story about love and loss, and coming of age. It's not cluttered by any surrealism or fantasy. And it's loaded with musical references to classical and jazz, as well as the Western rock music of the late sixties. (As the title would suggest.) Thus, Norwegian Wood was exactly the right Murakami book to pick up next, the one book to push me further into his work.

It tells the story of Toru Watanabe, a college freshman living in Tokyo. Like many young men his age, he doesn't know what he wants to do with his life, and majors in drama for no real reason. And like many men his age, women both complicate and clarify things.

He has relationships with two completely different women: the troubled and introspective Naoko and the outgoing and spunky Midori. Naoko poses the most trouble for Toru for many reasons. First, she's the ex-girlfriend of Toru's best friend in high school, Kizuki, who committed suicide at 17. Kizuki's death had a major impact on both friends. For Naoko, she lost not just a boyfriend, but someone she had known since childhood, someone who had become almost a part of herself. For Toru, his friend's suicide changed his perspective on life, filling everything with the taste of death. `Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it', becomes his new motto.

So when Toru and Naoko meet again, accidentally, on the subway, there's a connection, but a troubled one. The ghost of Kizuki hangs over them. They begin with odd walks through the city, Toru trailing Naoko like a puppy. But eventually a form of love develops. Once things eventually come to a head on her 20th birthday, their relationship becomes further complicated as Naoko runs away to a kind of sanatorium in the mountains over Kyoto. Months pass before Toru even knows where she's gone, and he lives in a sort of limbo, going to school, working at a record store. Waiting.

Meanwhile, he meets Midori, a fellow drama student. They form an immediate bond, though she has a boyfriend and has her own problems with her troubled family life, including a father dying of brain cancer. They become fast friends, and Toru finds himself attracted to her despite the pain he still feels at the loss of Naoko.

Of course, Naoko muddies the waters again by writing him to tell him where she is and inviting him to visit. There he meets Naoko's roommate, Reiko, an older woman with a talent for music. The three spend much time sitting around while Reiko plays guitar for them, including Naoko's favorite song, Norwegian Wood. In a sense, Reiko becomes the third woman in Toru's life, because she is open, and they develop a friendship in his short time there. With Naoko, he learns some more about her issues, but just enough happens to keep him connected to her, not enough to resolve their love. He is still in a limbo.

Murakami teases the frustrations of this state out of Toru. Toru agonizes over his dilemma, stuck between a woman he loves but can't have and a great woman he can have. Midori begins to fall for him and pressures him. But he's waiting for something to happen. Of course, something does. But then what? Has he waited too long?

This is a great story, but it is further strengthened by great characters. Besides Toru and Midori, whose honest, straight-forward manners combine with deep vulnerabilities to make them both irresistible, Murakami fills the landscape with great supporting actors as well. Reiko steals each scene she walks into. Toru's anal roommate "Storm Trooper" makes for some good laughs, and is a great source of conversation for Toru. Nagasawa is a privileged student of an elite university who is drawn to Toru through a shared love of Western literature and uses his influence to help Toru out of a few jams. Yet his arrogance and womanizing also adds a layer of complexity to the friendship, as these traits both compel and repulse Toru. The characters really make this book hard to put down.

Norwegian Wood is a great read and will definitely keep me on the path to reading more Murakami.

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Phred

Murakami, not quite coming of age as a writer

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2016

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Bottom Line First: Haruki Murakami’s fifth book, Norwegian Wood was his break out book as a major Japanese novelist. It is not the fantasy reality of his later works. This is a more personal book and more focused on people, moods and feelings. It has serious emotional depth and some wasted space. Were I not coming into this book as a fan, I am not sure I would have determined to read all of his titles. Recommendation a definite read for like minded fans, a bit troublesome for the uninitiated but a good story of a time place and age.

The narrator and central character of Norwegian Wood, Toru Watanabe is a relatively impecunious collage freshman in a lessor Japanese collage. He is socially withdrawn and emotionally uncertain. He was the last person to see his very close childhood friend before the friend committed suicide and through him he has a very close feeling for his late friend’s girlfriend Naoko. They are both survivors of the suicide and both having to understand who they are absent this person who had been their common center.

Much of this 400 page novel is about Watananbe trying to understand who he is and how he best fits into the lager world after leaving home. This world is the Japan of the 1960’s where student can take over the campus and politics as much as money influence your social standing. He is has a powerful bond with Naoko and will become deeply involved with a stronger, elusive female college classmate Midori. Watanabe is alternately a good person, instantly able to, for example, identify with and bond with Midori’s dying father. He is just as capable of using his socially adept and well healed collage chum to cruise the bars to pick up and sleep with random faceless women. He does not like any of his male classmates and he has a particular distaste for the man he uses for a variety of favors.

Most of Norwegian Wood is about how Wanatabe alternately indulges and pushes himself while allowing events and people to flow around him. He is capable of being very gentle and understanding. Or he is being passive and accepting. One expects that he would make a very good psychotherapist, or at least a counselor of some type. For all this the word I kept associating with him was ‘Passive”.

I have to agree with other reviewers who feel this book has been padded out. It may be that in the original, many of the overly detailed descriptive passages are lyrical, but too often I found them a needless demand on my time. Murakami can set a mood and bring you into people’s minds but at this point he is not always sure why he brought you there.

Norwegian Wood s early Murakami. It is not his best. He will keep many themes and backgrounds in later works. I liked this book, even if at times, I wanted Watanabe to take a stand, to take charge and for the writer to speed things up.

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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2023

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Interesting coming of age, love story, with 1969 Japan as the backdrop. If this book were a movie, it would be rated R... because some of the characters do some sexy stuff, and to be honest, I was not expecting that. But, by the time the book went there, I was too far in to stop reading. Not the normal type of book I read, and I enjoyed the overall story.

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Alejandro

Mental Illness and love in 1960s Japan

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2023

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I didn’t know anything about the book when i picked it up. Is a detailed story of a fantastical life in university, sex, love and mental illness.

Despicable behaviour under the guise of ignorance and immature characters. Leave your moral compass at the door before you jump into this story.

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Dayna Martin

Great quality

Reviewed in Canada on April 5, 2023

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Book arrived in great condition. Very happy with the purchase and excited to read. :)

Sudhakar kadiyala

A book coming straight from the authors heart.

Reviewed in India on December 16, 2023

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While on a flight to Germany and while landing, the writer happens to listen to the song "Norwegian Wood" by Beatles.The wonderful song would have raised and must have elated the moods of all the other passengers on board listening to the pleasant, musical,soothing,lyrics ,but for the writer Murakami of "Norwegian Woods",as being narrated that the song always reminded him of his shuddering past,an unforgettable memory and a saddened truth which can't be erased from his memory.By the above we may conclude initially that it looked as if we are reading a sad story of someone whose thoughts are linked with the song.It also looked as if we are reading an autobiography of the one who has written the lines,until denied by the writer. himself. Murakami starts the book,"Norwegian Wood " with an exceptional beginning by picking up a popular Beatles song, titled,"Norwegian Wood",while putting life into the characters of the book simultaneously, filling with feelings and emotions, bringing out wonderful description of nature around,meadows,past memorable memories and the city of Tokyo, during the period 1968-70.The vivid description of dorms,universities,porn and students unrest etc are also brought out with such an impact that as a reader ,we have a feeling of witnessing the same in the present.As we continue reading, we learn that the lines above are thoughts of the protagonist, in the book'Thoru Watanabe' and the song "Norwegian Wood" by Beatles,was the favorite song of his beloved 'Naoko'.But then,to say the book as an ideal love story is also wrong,because on the one hand you read about the intense love,passion,emotions & feelings between Thoru Watanabe and Naoko(who is his best friend, Kizuki' s girl friend), but on the other hand we also witness the same intense relationship between him and,his other girlfriend, Midori and which is no less as close.Besides,we also come across about the physical relationship between Reiko and Watanabe(after the death of Naoko & who also happens to be a roommate & close friend of Naoko at the rehab sanctuary). We also read, the multiple flings of Watanabe with other girls, along with his friend Nagaswa while at dormitory and during their college days etc makes the feeling strong that the book is not an ideal love story though it's hard to keep the feeling aside at many a places, which is an incredible art by the writer to keep the intrest of the readers.With the number of deaths in the story by suicides (Kizuki,Hatsumi,Naoka),the frequent failure of love between(Toru Watanabe with Naoka and Midori, & Nagasawa with Hatsumi) ,an happily married life ending into divorce due to an unfortunate rumor (Reiko's ending up in a rehab) makes the story sad and tragic.With out doubt these things on the part of the reader - I.e. the subtle feeling of autobiographical part,the love story part, and the sad & tragic part intrigues us.The
takeaways from the book are the strong and unflinching friendships that exist between different characters.,the mention of Beatles songs and books like Great Gatsby,which are skillfully clubbed with the story.Though it's not a suggestion to listen to the song of Beatles or read the book ,but definitely most of the readers may endup doing so if not done earlier,just out of curiosity. The charecter of Toru Watanabe for eg, as a caregiver to Midori's father while giving her a break touches us near to the heart.Then complimenting Midori for her cuteness with words like "So cute that the Mountains crumble and the Oceans dry up,"etc brings out the wit in him ,the replies that comes from Thoru Watanabe,and also being a favorite and being liked by every other charecter in the book
goes down long with the reader.Similarly, the mention of Storm Trooper and his habits of being a perfectionist
bring a lot of laughter.Above all,both the writing by Murakami and the translation by Jay Rubin are outstanding..

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Really engaging

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2023

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After reading the first 30 pages, this book makes you fall in love with the story.

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L. RIMSKY

Absolutely immense.

Reviewed in France on June 7, 2023

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This book is one of the very few that takes you deep within the soles of each of the characters.

shriaya

Highly recommended

Reviewed in Germany on April 16, 2023

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If you are into artistic pieces where the author is walking just on the boundaries then you should read this

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Norwegian Wood Paperback – September 12, 2000

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