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Norwegian Wood
UK cover
Author	Haruki Murakami
Original title	ノルウェイの森 Noruwei no mori
Translator	Jay Rubin
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Genre(s)	Coming of age novel
Publisher	Vintage International
Publication date	1987
Published in English	2000
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	296 (US Paperback) 400 (UK Paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-375-70402-7 (US edition) ISBN 0-09-944882-3 (UK edition) ISBN 4-0620-3516-2 (JP edition)
OCLC Number	42692182
Dewey Decimal	895.6/35 21
LC Classification	PL856.U673 N6713 2000

Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森, Noruwei no Mori ^?) is a 1987 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.^[1] The novel is a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality.^[2] The story's protagonist and narrator is Toru Watanabe, who looks back on his days as a freshman university student living in Tokyo.^[3] Through Toru's reminiscences we see him develop relationships with two very different women — the beautiful yet emotionally troubled Naoko, and the outgoing, lively Midori.^[4]

The novel is set in Tokyo during the late 1960s, a time when Japanese students, like those of many other nations, were protesting against the established order.^[5] While it serves as the backdrop against which the events of the novel unfold, Murakami (through the eyes of Toru and Midori) portrays the student movement as largely weak-willed and hypocritical.

Part of the novel was originally published in the collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman under the title Firefly.^[6]

Norwegian Wood was hugely popular with Japanese youth and made Murakami somewhat of a superstar in his native country (apparently much to his dismay at the time).^[7][8]

Despite its mainstream popularity in Japan, Murakami's established readership saw Norwegian Wood as an unwelcome departure from his by-then established style of energetic prose flavoured with the unexpected and supernatural (as exemplified by Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, released two years earlier); as translator Jay Rubin observes in the translator's note to the 2000 English edition, Norwegian Wood retains much of the complexity and symbolism characteristic of Murakami's work and is thus "by no means just a love story."

The novel's title

The original Japanese title Noruwei no Mori, is the standard Japanese translation of the title of The Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.^[9] The song is often mentioned in the novel, and is the favourite song of the character Naoko. Mori in the Japanese title translates into English as "forest", not the material "wood", even though the song lyrics clearly refer to the latter. This seemingly odd translation is based on the official translation of the song's title. Forest settings and imagery are also significantly present in the novel.

Characters in Norwegian Wood

• Toru Watanabe — The main character and narrator. He is a Tokyo college student of average ability, majoring in drama but without reason or conviction for doing so. Unlike most students, he is interested in Western, and in particular, American literature. He is Kizuki's best friend, and develops romantic relationships with Naoko, and later, Midori.
• Naoko — a beautiful but emotionally fragile woman who is Kizuki's girlfriend, but becomes involved with Toru after Kizuki's death. Naoko's older sister committed suicide at age 17, which, along with Kizuki's suicide, has a lasting effect on Naoko's emotional stability.
• Midori Kobayashi — a vivacious, outgoing classmate of Toru. She and her sister help their father run a small bookstore. She originally had a boyfriend but develops feelings for Toru as she gets to know him more, putting Toru in a tough situation.
• Reiko Ishida — a music teacher and a close friend of Naoko who stays with her at the asylum. As a result of lifelong mental problems that wrecked her professional musical career and later her marriage, she attempts to advise Toru and Naoko in their relationship.
• Kizuki — Toru's best friend in high school, and Naoko's first boyfriend. Kizuki took his own life when he was 17.
• Nagasawa — a diplomacy student at the elite University of Tokyo who befriends Toru through a shared love of The Great Gatsby. Nagasawa is unusually charismatic and is complex in both his ideals and personal relationships. Often given to debauchery, Toru initially goes along with him to have intercourse with random girls Nagasawa picks up, but later he just stays on as Nagasawa's on/off friend.
• Hatsumi — the long-suffering girlfriend of Nagasawa. A kind woman by nature, she tries to offer advice to Toru, but Toru is reluctant to trust her or Nagasawa, for fear of the situation with Naoko and Kizuki being repeated. (Outside the story of the book, she will get married, two years after Nagasawa leaves for Germany, only to commit suicide after another two years by slashing her wrists.)
• "Storm Trooper" — Toru's dormitory roommate who is obsessed with cleanliness, and who is majoring in cartography in preparation for a career at the Geographical Survey Institute of Japan. He later moves out, leaving their room entirely to Toru until he moves out of the dorm altogether.
• Itoh — an art student whom Toru meets after moving out of the dorm he shared with Nagasawa and Storm Trooper. The two share a love of Boris Vian. He has a girlfriend in his hometown of Nagasaki, but her unease about Itoh's chosen career leads him to unease about their relationship.
• Momoko (Momo) Kobayashi — Midori's sister.
• Mr. Kobayashi — Midori's widowed father. Midori had initially said that he had emmigrated to Uruguay, but that later turns out to be a joke; Mr. Kobayashi was actually in a hospital in Tokyo, with brain cancer. When Midori and Toru visit him, Toru briefly stays to take care of him alone. He later dies, and his daughters sell the bookstore to move to new quarters.
• Sir Nakano — the nickname given to the head of Toru's dorm, a man who is popularly rumoured to be a former spy.
• Uniform — the nickname given to Nakano's assistant, known for always wearing a school uniform.

Plot synopsis

A 37-year-old Toru Watanabe has just arrived in Hamburg, Germany. When he hears an orchestral cover of the Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood," he is suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of loss and nostalgia. He thinks back to the 1960s, when so much happened that touched his life.

Toru, his classmate Kizuki, and Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko are the best of friends. Kizuki and Naoko are particularly close and feel as if they are soulmates, and Toru seems more than happy to be their enforcer. This idyllic existence is interrupted by the unexpected suicide of Kizuki on his 17th birthday. Kizuki's death deeply touches both surviving friends; Toru feels the influence of death everywhere, while Naoko feels as if some integral part of her has been permanently lost. The two of them spend more and more time together, trying to console one another, and they eventually fall in love. On the night of Naoko's 20th birthday, she feels especially vulnerable, and they consummate their love. Afterwards, Naoko leaves Toru a letter saying that she needs some time apart and that she is quitting college to go to a sanatorium.

The blossoming of their love is set against a backdrop of civil unrest. The students at Toru's college go on strike and call for a revolution. Inexplicably, the students end their strike and act as if nothing had happened, which enrages Toru as a sign of hypocrisy.

Toru befriends a fellow drama classmate, Midori Kobayashi. She is everything that Naoko is not — outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident. Despite his love for Naoko, Toru finds himself attracted to Midori as well. Midori is attracted to him also, and their friendship grows during Naoko's absence.

Toru visits Naoko at her secluded mountain sanatorium near Kyoto. There he meets Reiko Ishida, another patient there who has become Naoko's confidante. During this and subsequent visits, Reiko and Naoko reveal more about their past: Reiko talks about her search for sexual identity, and Naoko talks about the unexpected suicide of her older sister several years ago.

Now back in Tokyo, Toru unintentionally alienates Midori through both his lack of consideration of her wants and needs, and his continuing thoughts about Naoko. He writes a letter to Reiko, asking for her advice about his conflicted affections for both Naoko and Midori. He doesn't want to hurt Naoko, but he doesn't want to lose Midori either. Reiko counsels him to seize this chance for happiness and see how his relationship with Midori turns out.

A later letter informs Toru that Naoko has taken her own life. Toru, grieving and in a daze, wanders aimlessly around Japan, while Midori — whom he hasn't kept in touch with — wonders what has happened to him. After about a month of fugue, he returns to the Tokyo area, where Reiko is visiting. The middle-aged Reiko stays with Toru, and they have sexual intercourse. It is through this experience, and the intimate conversation that Toru and Reiko share that night, that he comes to realise that Midori is the most important person in his life. Toru calls Midori out of the blue to declare his love for her. What happens following this is never revealed — Midori's response is characteristically (by this point) cold, yet the fact that she does not explicitly cut Toru off at that point (as she did before) leaves things open.^[10]

Allusions/references to other works

• One of the favorite books of Toru and his older friend Nagasawa is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But before said book became Toru's favorite, he liked John Updike's The Centaur, which he read several times.

• When Toru first moves into the dorm, he is struck by the punctual raising of the flag of Japan and playing of the Japanese national anthem by Sir Nakano and Uniform, two characters whom he finds somewhat ridiculous.

• In his initial meetings with Naoko and Reiko at Ami, Toru is reading Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. The premise behind Mann's novel mirrors the situation of Toru's friends: members of a community of patients who wish to set themselves apart from the rest of society. In Mann's novel, the characters isolate themselves in a tuberculosis sanitorium; in Murakami's novel, the characters separate themselves from the greater society due to mental illness and also a feeling of not fitting in elsewhere.

• He is also assessing Beneath the wheel, the second book of Hermann Hesse.

• In the opening chapter Toru and Naoko search for a hidden well. When Sumire disappears in Sputnik Sweetheart, "K" worries continuously about whether there are any wells on the island. Wells also play a large role in the plot of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

• Throughout the novel, Toru continuously bellows "Twice", often rupturing friendships and casuing family rifts. It is unknown why Toru does this; but Harold Bloom has posited that it relates to the number of times Toru cooked the beef. Responding to a fan's question, Murakami cryptically asserted that he did not know why he included "Twice", and that he had heard of Norwegian Wood referenced but was not there during its writing.

English translations

Norwegian Wood has been translated into English twice.^[1] The first was by Alfred Birnbaum (who translated many of Murakami's earlier novels) and was published in 1989 in Japan by Kodansha as part of the Kodansha English Library series.^[11] Like other books in this pocket-sized series, the English text was intended for Japanese students of English, and even featured an appendix listing the Japanese text for key English phrases encountered in the novel. Notably, this edition kept the two-volume division of the original Japanese version and its color scheme — the first volume having a red cover, the second green (the first UK edition in 2000 would also keep this division and appearance). This earlier translation has been discontinued in Japan.

The second translation, by Jay Rubin, is the authorized version for publication outside Japan and was first published in 2000 by Harvill Press in the UK, and Vintage International in the USA.^[1]

The two translations differ somewhat. Of note, there are some differences in nicknames: Toru's roommate, for example, is called "Kamikaze" in the Birnbaum translation, and "Storm Trooper" in the Rubin translation.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

It was announced in July 2008 that Tran Anh Hung would direct an adaptation of the novel. The film stars Kenichi Matsuyama^[12] as Watanabe, Rinko Kikuchi^[13] as Naoko and Kiko Mizuhara^[14][15] as Midori, and is expected to be released in autumn 2010.^[16][17][18]

Trivia

The novel appears for a split second in the Bollywood movie Wake Up Sid, as being read by the lead actress Konkona Sen Sharma .

References

From Wikiquote

Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami and translated by Jay Rubin is a Japanese novel focused on the theme of relationships. It was the author's first mainstream success in his native land, and one of the most popular translated Japanese novels in the Western Hemisphere. It is narrated by the character of Toru Watanabe.

Chapter Two

• Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
  • Toru Watanabe

Chapter Three

• Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend's girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.
  • Toru Watanabe

• I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.
  • Toru Watanabe

• Only the dead stay seventeen forever.
  • Toru Watanabe

• "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."
  • Nagasawa

• "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
  • Nagasawa

Chapter Four

• [...] even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We had met that day because we were supposed to meet. If we hadn't met then and there, we would have just met somewhere else sometime.
  • Toru Watanabe

• "Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment."
  • Toru Watanabe

• "Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."
  • Nagasawa

• "A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do."
  • Nagasawa

• "Being able to say you don't have any money [is the best thing about being rich]. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we should do something, she could say, 'Sorry, I don't have any money.' Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said 'I don't have any money,' it would really mean 'I don't have any money.' It's sad. Like if a pretty girl says 'I look terrible today, I don't want to go out,' that's O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her."
  • Midori Kobayashi

• "That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that, I couldn't stand it."
  • Midori Kobayashi

• "You'll die with me?" Midori asked with shining eyes.
  "Hell, no," I said. "I'll run if it gets dangerous. If you want to die, you can do it alone."
  "Cold-hearted bastard!"
  "I'm not going to die with you just because you made lunch for me. Of course, if it had been dinner..."
  • Dialogue between Midori Kobayashi and Toru Watanabe

• "If I'm going to test myself, I want to do it in the biggest field there is - the nation. I want to see how high I can climb, how much power I can exercise in this insanely huge bureaucratic system."
  "Sounds like a game."
  "It is a game. I don't give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don't. I may be a selfish bastard, but I'm incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world."
  "And you have no use for 'ideals' I suppose?"
  "Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."
  • Dialogue between Nagasawa and Toru Watanabe

Chapter Six

• What made [the houses] look strange it's hard to say, but that was the first thing I felt when I saw them. My reaction was a lot like what we feel from attempts to draw unreality in a pleasant way. It occurred to me that this was what you might get if Walt Disney did an animated version of a Munich painting.
  • Toru Watanabe

• There were no loud voices and no whispers, no one laughing out loud or crying out in shock, no one yelling to another person with exaggerated gestures, nothing but quiet conversations, all carried on at the same level. People were eating in groups of three to five. Each group had a single speaker, to whom the others would listen with nods and grunts of interest, and when that person was done speaking, the next would take up the conversation. I could not tell what they were saying, but the way they said it reminded me of the strange tennis game I had seen at noon.
  • Toru Watanabe (In describing a mental facility's dining area.)

• The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. They floated over the earth in silence, carrying farm tools and baskets and some kind of sack.
  • Toru Watanabe

• Next door was a shop where a middle-aged, sleepy-eyed guy sold "adult toys." I couldn't imagine why anyone would want the kind of sex paraphernalia he had there, but he seemed to do a lot of business. In the alley diagonally across the from the record store I saw a drunken student vomiting. In the games centre across from us at another angle, the cook from a local eatery was killing his break time with a game of bingo that took cash bets. Beneath the eaves of a shop that had closed for the night, a dark-faced homeless guy was crouching, motionless. [....] Every fifteen minutes or so I would hear the siren of an ambulance or cop car. Three drunken company employees in suits and ties came by, laughing at the tops of their voices every time they yelled "Piece of ass!" at a pretty, long-haired girl in a telephone booth.
  The more I watched, the more mixed-up my head became. What the hell was this all about? I wondered. What could it possibly mean?
  • Toru Watanabe (In describing a street scene)

• "That's when I noticed she looked taller than usual. What was going on? I wondered: it was so strange! Did she have high heels on? Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling - I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a ruler."
  • Naoko (In describing her discovery of her sister's suicide)

• "I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I'm much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match."
  • Reiko Ishida

Chapter Seven

• How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? "Quiet, peaceful, and lonely," I said aloud to myself.
  • Toru Watanabe

• "I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me."
  • Toru Watanabe

• " People are strange when you're a stranger."
  • Toru Watanabe
  • Taken from a Jim Morrison song.

• "But it's the working class that keep things running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that?"
  • Midori Kobayashi

• "They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'?"
  • Midori Kobayashi (In reference to college 'revolutionaries')

• "And what is a revolution? It sure as hell isn't just changing the name on city hall."
  • Midori Kobayashi

Chapter Eight

• "If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit."
  • Nagasawa

• "I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a damn thing, and then they bitch."
  • Nagasawa

Chapter Nine

• "When you start at zero, you've got a lot to learn."
  • Midori Kobayashi

Chapter Ten

• "Just remember, life is a box of chocolates"
  • Midori Kobayashi

• "Just remember, life is a box of chocolates"
  I shook my head a few times and looked at her. "Maybe I'm not so smart, but sometimes I don't know what on earth you're talking about."
  "You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like,and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. 'Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK.' Life is a box of chocolates."
  "I suppose you could call it a philosophy."
  "It's true, though. I've learned it from experience."
  • Dialogue between Midori Kobayashi and Toru Watanabe

• Death had already taken John Coltrane, who was joined by now by so many others. People screamed there'd be revolutionary changes - which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the "changes" that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning.
  • Toru Watanabe (In describing the year 1969)

Chapter Eleven

• Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life."
  • Toru Watanabe

External links

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Norwegian Wood (novel)