Murakami - Norwegian Wood

The Japanese title of this novel is ノルウェイの森 (Noruwei no Mori), which means "Forest of Norway." This is a blatant mistranslation of the meaning of "wood" in the Beatles' song. But it's not Murakami's fault—it's the official translation of the song's title into Japanese. In the song, the "Norwegian wood" refers to the furniture in the girl's apartment, which is later set afire by the "I" voice of the song.

At any rate, Murakami works the forest, the fire, and the strange interaction with the girl in her apartment into his novel. It's set in the early 1970's during the student movements, and our hero (like many first person narrators in Murakami's works) seems to stand in, pseudo-autobiographically, for Murakami himself. This narrator, though, does warrant his own fictional name. He's enamored of foreign literature and foreign music and two very, very different girls.

In the original Japanese (and later British) release of the novel, it was published in two volumes. The first volume was red and the second green. The first volume details the narrator's strange courtship with the girlfriend of his dead best friend, who committed suicide near the end of their high school years. As the strange relationship grows, in the midst of student activism and in the absence of the dead friend, it twists and crumples, leading to the moment when the two make love—the crisis of the first volume (and maybe of the novel) directly inspired by the lyrics of "Norwegian Wood."

Murakami has said that he wrote Norwegian Wood as an experiment, to try to write a typical, un-surreal, Japanese romantic drama story. He succeeded, in a spades, from a commercial standpoint. The novel became incredibly popular. Fans of the book took to wearing red or green sweaters to show which volume of the novel they identified with the most. Murakami was so overwhelmed by his success that he fled Japan, avoiding TV invitations and interviews, and trying to escape a fame that he never wanted. He lived in Europe and then Hawaii before returning to Japan many, many years later.

The second volume, the green one, is about the narrator's budding relationship with an loud and "genki" girl in one of his classes. Her name is Midori (which means "green"). She lies with abandon, but confesses her lies, creating narratives and exploring potentialities while constantly testing our narrator's limits of patience and openness. The two develop a friendship of convenience and circumstance that blossoms into something more fierce and powerful, with resentments, passions, disappointments, and promise. The fire from the song becomes a house fire near Midori's house, where she's made lunch for the two to share, and while watching it, they share their first kiss. It's a forbidden thing, as they're both involved with other people, but it's the spark that grows to consume them both, and in some ways it destroys their friendship. But it is also the beginning of a passion that has the potential to replace that friendship with something more.

Norwegian Wood is a powerfully sad novel. It's about suicide and loss. It's about futility, disillusionment, and the hollow future for many of Murakami's generation. It's about broken people who often share little beyond their brokenness, but create bonds from those fragments they have left and find some solace. It's about liminal spaces on the edge of things—the entry to the forest, the foot of the mountains, the moment before the match strikes against the box, the space between life and death for the suicide survivor and their family and friends, the political upheaval of the times, and the transition from youth to adulthood. It's also an unapologetic rejection of tradition and the norm, while it avoids embracing the popular flavors of change of the day. Ultimately, like much of Murakami's work, it celebrates (quietly with a bottle of wine, a few beers, and small meal set against a backdrop of American music) the individual in a collectivist society, a society that seems to drive most such individuals out of the country or toward taking their own lives.

In some ways, this is standard Murakami storytelling, as far as narrative style and mode, but the narrator here is a bit more impassioned and angry at times than most of Murakami's (usually much older and unnamed) first person narrators. But it avoids the surrealism and language play that infuses much of Murakami's other works. It definitely has, though, one thing that Murakami always seems to bring to play, and that's nostalgia and an ache for something lost or wasted. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a good place to start reading Murakami, but if your taste doesn't run to surrealism or highly metaphorical allegory, then this is probably the one Murakami novel to pick up.

A film version of Norwegian Wood is currently in production.