Norwegian Wood

Author: Haruki Murakami

Translated by: Jay Rubin

Rating: 2/5

Toru Watanabe reminisces about his college life as a student obsessed with a beautiful, quiet girl named Naoko.

Spoilers ahead.

Detailed Summary

Toru Watanabe essentially recalls his past university years after coming off a plane, listening to “Norwegian Wood” by The Beatles. In high school, he was friends with Kizuki who had a girlfriend named Naoko. The three were best friends. Kizuki had a way of making the group cohesive. At seventeen, he committed suicide, scarring Naoko and Toru. Toru meets Naoko during his first year of university on the train and they end up spending more and more time together. On her twentieth birthday, Naoko is crying and stuff and they share a bed. Naoko’s a virgin by the way. So, after that, she tells Toru that she needs a break and goes to a sanatorium. Toru is friends with this really smart guy named Nagasawa who sleeps with tonnes of girls despite having a girlfriend named Hatsumi. Toru often goes with him on those girl-hunting trips. Then he meets Midori, a girl in his drama class, and feels drawn towards her. He visits her father in the hospital and hangs out at her bookstore but she keeps going away for long amounts of time. Toru visits Naoko at the sanatorium and meets Reiko, an older patient who is kind of like Naoko’s confidante.

Reiko tells Toru her story–she was a piano prodigy but her fingers had some weird condition so she had to stop. She suffered from mental illness. Then she got married and had a kid and eight years ago, started giving piano classes to this manipulative thirteen-year-old who raped her (a thirty-one-year-old). She gets accused of stuff and tells her husband they need to get out but he refuses, saying he needs a month so she divorces him and comes to the sanatorium and has been here ever since. Naoko is still vulnerable and unwell but she and Toru do weird stuff on grass. Toru goes back to Tokyo and meets up with Midori but he’s kind of unattentive. She gets mad and tells him so in a letter. She drops all communication with him. At this point, Toru has moved out of his university dorms and is renting this old couple’s house. He wants Naoko to move in with him but she’s unwell and is sent to a proper hospital to get better. Toru becomes kind of depressed. Eventually, he does make up with Midori and they do a bunch of inappropriate things. He asks Reiko for advice because he likes Naoko and Midori but doesn’t want to break Naoko’s heart. Reiko tells him to go with Midori (that was the essence of her very long letter).

The next chapter starts with Toru learning of Naoko’s suicide. He goes travelling around like a hobo, living on the streets. He doesn’t feel better so returns to Tokyo. Reiko meets up with him there, they talk about the old times with Naoko and then share a bed together. It’s, like, really intense. Reiko goes to some other place to teach music. Toru realises that he really loves Midori so he calls her from a public phone box, telling her his feelings, and she asks him where he is. The book ends with Toru thinking about that question.

Plot and Pacing: The Librarian recommended this book to me. He had recommended it a LONG time ago but I kept putting it off. I’ve always been intimidated by Murakami. I feel as though I’m too dumb to understand any of his books because they’re meant to be very convoluted and weird that only “intellectuals” can understand. This book is one of the “easier” books by Murakami so I guess that made me feel a bit better. Either way, I started this book prepared for confusion and mind-boggling ideas. I think the plot was fairly straightforward. It’s a coming-of-age story told from Toru Watanabe’s perspective and I imagine it must be relatable for certain people but I didn’t enjoy it. What was the point of Toru sharing a bed with almost every female character in the book? How is it that a thirteen-year-old raped a thirty-one year old? I mean, perhaps I’m being ignorant about the second part; perhaps it happens regularly but I felt it was very far-fetched. Going back to the bed-sharing thing, the ending where Toru does it with Reiko was really disturbing. I always felt the two would remain best friends without any physical intimacies. Small details like these made me not like this book.

However, I will admit that some of Toru’s thoughts are quite realistic. The beginning of the book is all about how death and life are intertwined, you can’t have one without the other and death is an innate quality of life. I think it’s easy to forget that everyone’s life ends with death. Regardless of what you accomplish and what value you had to the world, death is what awaits you in the future. It’s bleak but I think it’s kind of comforting too. Perhaps it’s only in death that we’re all equal.

Toru’s one-sided feelings for Naoko were relatable to an extent. I mean, who hasn’t had a relationship like that? I haven’t had any sort of romantic relationship but I’ve had friendships where I was putting all the effort. What I found admirable and annoying at the same time was how Toru was loyal to Naoko (minus all the bed sharing). She was all he could think about even though he knew she didn’t love him. Which is terrible because Naoko was stuck in a dark abyss and out of love, Toru let Naoko carry him down with her. In that sense, Midori was a good friend for Toru because she represented all the carefreeness in the world with her exuberance and brutal honesty. Then she, too, lets Toru down by not communicating with him at all even though she wrote him a letter saying she wanted to help him. More about her in the characters section of the review.

Perhaps Murakami wanted to convey that when it comes to truly loving another individual, we’re all deluded and hopelessly idealistic. Love can cause every fibre of your being to aches for that special someone–when all you can do is spend hours thinking about them. Simultaneously, love can cause you to suppress your feelings because you are in a state of denial.

It sucked that Naoko died in the end. I knew she was going to but I was still disappointed. I also really hate the ending. I wouldn’t have minded if Murakami ended it with Toru just calling Midori but it ends with her asking him where he is and he has no idea. That just confuses me because now I feel like there’s probably a deeper meaning that I’m not comprehending. The words “dead centre” do sound funny. Maybe Toru has become aware of the abyss he’s been living in? I don’t know.

Characters: I have mixed feelings about everyone in the book. I thought Toru was quite charming and I could connect a bit to him. Like the parts where he doesn’t seem to belong anywhere and feels lost a lot of the time. But the other stuff? I couldn’t relate to that at all. Perhaps I haven’t lived long enough to experience all that Toru went through. Toru reminds me a lot of Nick Carraway and Holden Caufield. Midori mentions several times that he sounds like Caufield so I guess Murakami must have been influenced by him. As for Nick Carraway, well, that’s one of Toru’s favourite books and maybe he’s trying to be like Nick.

I hated Naoko because she was selfish and it was so clear that she was ruining Toru’s life. If only he could have seen that. I do understand that she had a mental illness and perhaps my judgement of her is unfair. However, I didn’t like how she kept tempting Toru. If she knew she didn’t love him, why couldn’t she just say so? She should have been honest with him and let him go live his own life.

At the same time, I didn’t care much for Midori either. Her straightforwardness was interesting and I liked that she was able to voice her opinion about everything. Here’s the thing, she starts off as this independent woman and then becomes overly reliant on him and kind of clingy. Plus, she becomes really selfish as well when she cuts all ties with Toru just because he didn’t notice her haircut or something. I understand that she was upset that he was distracted but if she really cared about him, she should have understood how much pain he was going through!

Nagasawa annoyed me too although I’ve met quite a few people like him. I had two reasons for not liking him. First, he treated Hatsumi horribly, cheating on her a million times though he was honest about it. Second, I’m kind of envious of people who just breeze through school and university and every single thing they do. It’s painful to know that you’re stuck here, working your butt off and barely scraping the grade while they’re there, procrastinating and doing fun stuff and blowing your grade out of the water. And people like Nagasawa often aren’t aware of how incredibly lucky they are and waste their talents to such an extent that I can’t help thinking if only I was as good as them, I’d do so much more with my life.

Writing Style: I thought Murakami dragged on and on and on a lot with the descriptions. Not just the descriptions but the dialogue as well. There would be gigantic blocks of Midori talking or Reiko talking and I kept losing the sentence I was on because the text was so small. Also, there were parts where it felt as though Murakami was trying too hard to slip in a symbol or metaphor. I’m not a huge fan of that.

But there were some bits I liked.

“So I’m not crazy after all! I thought it looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first grader or a concentration camp survivor. What’s this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.”

Midori says that to Toru. I liked that because I have short hair too and every time I cut it back into a pixie cut, my friends (especially the boys) are all like, “WHY DID YOU CUT IT? I liked you better with longer hair. Now you look like a boy.” Ugh. Very annoying.

Another part I really liked was this:

“No way,” I said. “I’m not that strong. I don’t feel it’s O.K. if nobody understands me. I’ve got people I want to understand and be understood by. But aside from those few, well, I figure it’s kind of hopeless. I don’t agree with Nagasawa. I do care if people understand me.”

I liked that quote because I guess we are all floundering in life trying to find someone who understands us and who, in turn, is worth understanding.

I don’t think I’ll be reading more Murakami books any time soon. I’m just glad I’m done with this book!