Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood is Haruki Murakami's 1987 fifth novel, the structural breakthrough that made Murakami a literary celebrity in Japan and the work that established the broader Japanese-translated-fiction American market for his subsequent catalog. The structural premise is Toru Watanabe, a thirty-seven-year-old Japanese businessman, hearing the Beatles song that gives the novel its title on an airplane descending into Hamburg in 1987 and being thrown back into his memory of the late-1960s Tokyo college years that defined him. Toru's best friend Kizuki killed himself in their senior year of high school. Naoko, Kizuki's girlfriend, has been carrying the weight of that suicide for the two years between then and the start of college. Toru and Naoko reconnect in Tokyo and slowly build a relationship that has Naoko's mental-health-collapse trajectory at its center. Midori, an extroverted classmate of Toru's at the all-male Tokyo university, enters the novel midway through and becomes the structural counterpoint to Naoko.

Murakami's structural method is the patient first-person Toru narration across the late-1960s Tokyo college period, with the realist-Tokyo register that distinguishes Norwegian Wood from the magical-realist Murakami of A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) and the later The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995). The 1960s Tokyo university-student-political-movement texture is rendered with the kind of patient sociological specificity that contemporary Japanese-translated-fiction has not historically committed to at this depth for the broader English-language audience. The Naoko-Ami-Hostel chapters in the middle third (the alternative mental-health sanatorium where Naoko is institutionalized and where Toru visits across the novel's middle period) are some of the strongest contemporary Japanese literary prose about a specific kind of late-1960s alternative-psychiatric setting. The Midori-Toru relationship in the back half carries the structural emotional weight that the realist register requires the novel to deliver.

Recommended as required contemporary Japanese-translated literary fiction reading, as the structural Murakami entry point for readers coming to him before The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, and as the canonical contemporary Japanese realist literary novel in English translation. The 2010 Tran Anh Hung film adaptation extended the readership. The Patrick Wallace audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.