Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki

Japan Book Review: Norwegian Wood

ISBN: 978-0375704024
Vintage, 2000
298 pp; paperback

While Death is an ever-present companion in Murakami's fiction, lurking just out of sight of the mundane world (and often down a well), the dark, impenetrable wood of suicide is peculiar to Norwegian Wood, perhaps his most famous novel. Its date of publication, 1987, puts it inside the speculative economic 'bubble' period in Japan. 1987 seems to have been a particularly angst-filled time for Japanese postmodern writers, for in the same year Banana Yoshimoto published her first novel Kitchen. While this does not deal with suicide, it mirrors Norwegian Wood's focus on the struggles of those whom Death leaves behind in the mundane world, to carry on living as best they can, and to make sense of life and death in any way that works for them.

Norwegian Wood

Tōru Watanabe, the I-narrator of Norwegian Wood, inhabits two time periods in this story - the framing world of the late '80s, in which he is a financially successful, yet emotionally adrift, author, and his earlier, eventful university years. The bulk of the novel takes place in the late 1960s, when, as a young adult, he has been reunited with childhood friend Naoko, the suicide of whose boyfriend in high school has left her mentally unstable. Watanabe finds his feelings for this girl rekindled, but when she leaves Tokyo to enter a sanatorium near Kyoto he finds himself drawn into the world of the offbeat Midori, who is the vital, worldly foil to Naoko's ethereal, tenuous existence. In the unconscious push and pull between these two poles, the immortal lyrics of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood gain their purchase: "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." For Watanabe is in thrall to both females, and in a sense they represent two basic human responses to extremity: the death urge and the sex urge, Thanatos and Eros. The emotionally crippled Naoko cannot internalise sexual experience, while Midori thrives on it, even if most of it takes place in her fevered imaginings.

Indeed, the novel aroused comment in Japan for both its frank treatment of suicide and depiction of youthful sexual fumblings, the latter of which has surely enlightened a whole generation of high-school students in Japan. Some might argue that this novel created the inflexible mould for Murakami's subsequent treatment of female characters: their sexuality is rarely left unexplored in his later works, and an uncharitable critic could argue that much else of them is. (None of his novels, for example, has had a female voice: Sputnik Sweetheart, ostensibly focusing on female protagonist Sumire, still has a male narrator as a framing device.)

Norwegian Wood, as I have already suggested, is different from Murakami's other novels to date, and not only in terms of its subject matter. Unlike his previous, fourth novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, whose narrative alternates between worlds of fantasy and 'reality', this work purposely does not employ the occult as some balance to the jazz-and-whiskey Tokyo urban jungle that characterises Murakami's take on modern 'internationalised' society. The late-60s setting - a time of soul-searching for Japan's student elite, under the influence of European and American intellectuals - reveals much about Murakami the writer as a young man. He pointedly prefers Fitzgerald and Chandler to Ōe and Mishima, rejecting the aesthetic of his fellow countrymen, and regards personal philosophical enquiry as inherently superior to social revolution, as the latter is, for him, inevitably self-undermining and hypocritical. (The 'other' Murakami, Ryū, explores similar themes in his bitingly funny social critique 69.)

Watanabe may never be able to fathom the depths of Naoko's despair, but he makes a sincere attempt to understand her. In a similar way, perhaps, Murakami never quite explains the enigma of what it means to live in a postmodern, seemingly arbitrary, ideologically vacant society, but in this his fifth novel he refines his still-ongoing examination of the millennial human condition. In this sense, Norwegian Wood is a reasonably significant late-20th-century novel, and in terms of what it reveals about Murakami the writer, an important one for his fans.

Review by Richard Donovan.

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