Yay or Nay?: Norwegian Wood (Novel)

Oh man, I thought long and hard about how best to do this review. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is supposedly the “masterpiece” of the infamous Japanese writer. Apparently, it’s the one book that everyone in Japan has read at some point or another, and after searching tirelessly through GoodReads for a book with Japan, or a Japanese focus in mind, I settled on this one because of the rumors that this book was THE BOOK to read. 

It was between “Shogun” by James Clavell, The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock (or otherwise known as the book my Grade 12 English class made me read), and, of course, “Norwegian Wood”. I thought and thought about which one I should do my review on, and I realized, while the other books I’ve read with a Japanese focus are good, they’re written by Western authors. For this review, I wanted to focus and spotlight a Japanese author, as, after all, this month is all about showcasing good literature, film, and television Japanese-made or Japanese-focused. 

Now, oh man, I don’t know where to begin with this novel. It’s…a lot. That’s the best way to describe it. This is not a light read. It’s also not one, as I discovered, best to do in one sitting by a lake. I actually received a comment on one of our earlier posts by a subscriber, saying she had to DNF it because she didn’t know if the book was for her, or if it was the mood the book gave. A quick search on GoodReads will reveal a couple other people saying similar things such as this. 

Because GoodReads is where I basically spend my life. 

And you guys are right. It’s certainly not an easy book to get through, and often times, quite depressing and feels like it’s going nowhere for long periods of time. In that regard, it’s a little deceiving, as one of the reasons I chose this book was its short page-count, and it’s reference to the Beatles song of the same name. But…we’ll get into the title’s significance in a moment, and why I think this novel is good, but in my humble opinion, not exactly what I expected, and maybe, perhaps, not worth the hype I thought it was. 

The Story 

“The more memories of Naoko that fade inside me, the more I am able to understand her. I know too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. 

The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because, Naoko never loved me.”—pg 10. 

Our story, as the back of a copy of this book will read, begins with a man named Toru (referred to as Watanabe) as he begins university in Tokyo. He’s “devoted” to a young woman named Naoko, but their relationship is marked by the death of their mutual friend, Kizuki, once Naoko’s boyfriend. Over time, Naoko grows more introspective, and while torn between his love for Naoko, Toru finds himself drawn to another woman, named Midori. 

This story is referred to as a “coming of age story seeped in nostalgia, blending the mood, the music, and the ethos of a young man’s first love, taking place in 1960’s Japan”. Indeed, this story is exactly that. It’s a coming-of-age, a story about coping, developing, and growing up. It also deals with a mental illness, specifically depression. Most of the story is, in fact, introspective in itself. It deals with issues of family and issues of the self. So, as a result, not many big “plot” twists happen. It’s more about character development, and a character’s ability to wrestle with his own problems and interacting with the world around him. So in this regard, you’ll immediately find the story a little slow and, in terms of mood, dark. 

The title’s significance (as I promised I’d discuss), comes in here. The song (which I’ll link below), Norwegian Wood is incredibly important to the characters themselves, Toru and Naoko. They only reference the song when they’re together, and often times, the girl from the Beatles song very closely mirrors Naoko. In Toru’s eyes, she shines. She is the one woman he is sure about and wants to be with. But to her, she refuses to be with him unless she is “cleaned” of her illnesses. So she goes to a sanitarium, where Toru and her write letters to each other. Norwegian Wood is the story of these two character’s often hard and painful relationship. 

Norwegian Wood

My Thoughts

So I’ll start with the very first thing that keeps me going in the book. Although the version of the story I read is a translated version, of course, the original is in Japanese, and English, while my first language is not always the most lovely, I can only imagine how beautiful it must have sounded in Japanese. Murakami’s prose is gorgeous, and I love how beautifully the words flowed off the pages, how he pauses to contemplate every thought, every detail, and to describe it.  

“Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke-rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a cage knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. 

Translated into words, it’s a cliche, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot-of-air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it in our lungs like fine dust”—pg. 25. 

This is some of the most beautiful and thought-provoking prose I’ve ever read, and it links into the story flawlessly. As those who’ve read the story note, the character Toru’s life is a knot. It becomes more and more messy and tangled, especially when the sexual politics between Midori and Naoko become involved (and I have MANY thoughts on this). Symbolically, at least, the “knot” is never unraveled, not really, until the end. Second, it also shows a quality that influences Toru, and I suspect, Haruki Murakami. 

That is, this story reads very much like the classic novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having read that as well, the specific quote above reminds of the ending of The Great Gatsby quotes: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future year-by-year that recedes before us…so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” 

Here’s my verdict: I believe that Toru is a “Jay Gatsby” figure. Except, the ending of Toru’s story is different from Gatsby’s. I believe that Toru is giving us a very similar story to Gatsby’s (of course many elements are changed), but from Gatsby’s intimate perspective that we never got. I am not saying that Toru is a Japanese Gatsby, in fact, he’s far from it in many cases. This is not a bottom line conclusion, but a theory of similarity. 

They think the same, however, and Toru references the book quite frequently throughout the novel. It’s a favourite of his, and I can’t help but notice the parallels between the two characters. But I could go on forever about this, and I won’t bore you with my symbolic, English-degree level inspections. This is merely a thought to consider if you decide to take up reading the novel. It adds a level of complexity I’m only just beginning to realize, and the complexity and difficulty of maintaining such relationships is something I’m familiar with and am beginning to understand myself. 

In this story, Toru believes in the future that he has with Naoko, of his ability to protect her, and want to hold her and keep her safe from everything, including herself. Not unlike Jay Gatsby, he deludes himself to think this for a good while but eventually realizes this may be failed thinking. Naoko too is not completely invested in the idea, and towards the end, Toru sees that he cannot go on waiting for Naoko, especially when he’s emotionally invested in another woman. 

A second element that I loved was that Murakami has said that this is not his life that he’s writing about, but the story reads like an autobiography. That’s how detailed this story becomes, and how much hard “stuff” he’ll throw at you, which, on the flip-side makes it difficult to get through. It’s raw, it’s real, and it feels like it’s realistic and that the author himself lived through it at one point. There are multiple characters you’ll get a very deep view into, and none of it will feel flat or 2-dimensional. There’s a character named Reiko for example, and her story is a sad but real one. Midori, Toru’s other friend, has a plot where her father is dying of cancer, and she spends a lot of time caring for him at the hospital, where Toru comes to see him, and they spend the day eating cucumbers and talking. Murakami does not omit anything.

A subplot between Toru and Midori is that she is very sexually liberated. There’s a constant thing between them where Midori wants Toru to try thinking of her once when he’s, well, masturbating. This is because, yes, eventually she does fall in love with him, but she simply wants to see what his reaction would be. They go to “porno movies” simply just to see the reactions. Midori is an odd character, but not one so odd that she’s not relatable. She does things to find out “why”. This is how she sees life. I see her as the literal impersonation of the voice inside everyone’s head that nobody ever says out loud. Except she does, and that’s why, while at first, I found her a weird and strange character, she’s become one of my favourites. She’s outward and inward all at once. 

“Well it’s just that life has been too cruel to us till now,” Midori said. “But that’s okay. We’re gonna get back everything it owes us.” —pg. 250. 

So what is bad? I’ve just given you an essay about what I did like, but like I said, there’s a lot to sort through. So what didn’t I like about this novel? The slow nature of it, and the story. It moves at a snail’s pace, and for all the bad that happened, I was expecting some payoff. The ending is what did me in. I didn’t like the final climax of the novel which SPOILER….

Naoko dies. I won’t say how or why it got to that point, but afterward, Toru’s life is turned upside down. Which I understand. It’s absolutely crushing when she does die. What I never got, and what absolutely bothers me is that the story builds up Toru to go beyond what he was in the beginning. He changes, he learns about people and relationships. He learns to try to cope with his friend, Kizuki’s death. He even might have begun a stable relationship with Midori, which he writes to his friend, Reiko about. 

When she dies, things go to hell, and all of that is unraveled. 

I should have expected this, I didn’t exactly expect a happy ending, but I expected something…better. But no. Toru travels Japan in anguish, and then more sexual exploits happen. This didn’t feel like a payoff to me. It felt like this was built up for nothing, and then, in the end, it ultimately didn’t matter. Which to me, defeats the purpose of the story, in the way I read it. It just made me sad in return. Toru tries so hard to get to Naoko, to reach her, to be with Midori as well and then—

“And I thought about Kizuki. “So you finally made Naoko yours,” I heard myself telling him. “Oh, well she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she’s where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko. I tried to establish a new life for the two of us. But forget it Kizuki, I’m giving her to you.”—pg. 276. 

This pretty much sums up my feelings. I expected the story to be slow, and slowly build up the characters. I got impatient at times and had to put it down because of its difficult nature, but I figured there might a light at the end of the tunnel. There isn’t. Toru returns to the way he was from the beginning, and it feels like all his trials have been for nothing. It was like the book was going in circles, ending back at square one. Such is life sure, but much of what I liked in the story, well, they’re the exact reasons that pull the story down as well. And, for me, when the good things are also the bad things about a story, that makes it a “meh” book, in my opinion.

And that’s exactly what the novel is. It’s not horrible, by any means, but it’s not a great book either. That is unless you like novels that are beautifully written, but also slow, sad, and hard to get through. If you like stories that go in circles and build you up only to let you down once more, this also might be your thing. 

But it wasn’t for me, and believe me when I say I really tried to like this novel. I tried. Very hard. I was so excited at the synopsis, and even in the beginning. But by the middle, I’d lost a lot of my interest, and just didn’t have the strength to have more stuff thrown at me like this book does. 

My Rating

Well, I’m disappointed. I’ll say that much. But, as I’ve also pointed out, the story has some merit to it. It’s a conundrum but altogether was “meh” for me. It might not be for you though, so my recommendation is finding a library and try to borrow it. Or, if you absolutely can’t, see if you can find an e-book or low-cost audiobook to listen to it. Then, if you really like it, you can buy it. 

As it stands my rating is: ⭐⭐⭐

-Meghan