Norwegian Wood (1987) is considered a masterpiece, and Murakami the best known/ best selling Japanese author outside of Japan. So what is it about this book that hits the buttons? It is torturously sad, the story of a life defined by suicides – the whole book really a nostalgic subtext for the story that might have been told had Toru Watanabe’s college friend not committed suicide at the start. It’s timeless, sometimes beautiful. Pitch perfect. A masterpiece? Yes, perhaps.
It’s a coming-of-age story about a sensitive young man – a bit of a misfit even in the strange world of Japanese adolescence. Toru, after his best friend suicides, is left feeling an obligation to the girlfriend left behind. She’s a deeply troubled girl called Naoko who falls off the edge. The connection of the dead friend binds the pair of them together and they spend time walking around Tokyo aimlessly, without talking, and later writing letters. In time Toru’s commitment seems to turn into what he describes as kind of love, albeit a deeply unsettling one. He swears his fealty to her, but it always feels transitory.
Toru makes another friend, Nagasawa, a narcissistic playboy, who takes him out at night to prey on young woman, though perhaps in the 70s the idea of picking up girls to sleep with was just a form of entertainment. Nagasawa already has a intelligent and lovely girlfriend who thinks she can change him. Things don’t end well for her. Over the course of the story, Toru’s emotional intelligence grows and he begins to see things from the point of view of the girls.
At the other end of the spectrum to the emotionally complex and difficult Naoko is another girl Toru befriends from university, Midori. She’s sassy, outspoken. She rescues Toru a few times with her straight-forward, working-class decisiveness, though she is not slow to leave him to sort himself out, which is just fine by me. The boy needs to help himself, though he often wallows in his emotions.
There’s a creepy character called Reiko who got my hackles up. I assume this is deliberate by Murakashi; it would be disturbing to think this woman was meant to be a beguiling character. She’s an older woman who sits around ingratiating herself with with the young folk, playing ‘Norwegian Wood’ on her guitar. It’s forever killed the song for me. She’s Naoko’s room-mate. Toru tells her he likes her wrinkles a lot (WTF?). “…You youngsters get old just like me,” she tells them, before absolutely inappropriately oversharing stories about her sexual past and hitting on them both.
So, is Norwegian Wood a masterpiece? I think so. The story is no better or worse than any other. The setting is pretty bland. The characters are well drawn but not particularly unusual. But, personally (and I can be severely judgemental) I think it deserves the praise. It’s the timelessness of the emotions in the book that make it so powerful– the very believable bind this boy gets himself into and the way his desire battles with his inability to do the right thing. It doesn’t matter where it is set, or in what era. It’s a universally applicable story about morality.
I’m not sure that I would recommend it to anyone for a fun read. But of you’re after a complex emotional hit, read Norwegian Wood, for sure.
Cristina Sanders' blog 