Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #616 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me" "Norwegian Wood" (Lennon/McCartney).

With Norwegian Wood Murakami, best known as the author of off-kilter classics such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland, finally achieved widespread acclaim in his native Japan. The novel sold upwards of 4 million copies and forced the author to retreat to Europe, fearful of the expectations accompanying his new-found cult status.

The novel is atypical for Murakami: seemingly autobiographical, in the tradition of many Japanese "I" novels, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age tale set, primarily, in 1969/70, the time of Murakami's own university years. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the backdrop of the novel but the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs and the pain (and pleasure) of growing up with all its attendant losses, (self-)obsessions and crises.

The novel is split into two volumes and beautifully presented here in a "gold" box containing both the green book and the red book. Young Japanese fans became so obsessed with the work that they would dress entirely in one or other colour denoting which volume they most identified with. And the novel is hugely affecting, reading like a cross between Plath's Bell Jar and Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, if less complex and ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical, work. He captures the huge expectation of youth, and of this particular time in history, for the future and for the place of love in it. He also saturates the work with sadness, an emotion that can cripple a novel but which here underscores the poignancy of the work's rather thin subject matter. --Mark Thwaite

Synopsis
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

From the Publisher
One of the nine titles in the Vintage East promotion

Customer Reviews

Love and sex and death
I read one Murakami book a few years back, couldn't make head nor tail of it, and forgot about him. Then I picked this up in a charity shop and was intrigued and then totally immersed as I read it in a couple of days. The variety of the responses here is interesting too.

At heart, the plot is very simple: teenager falls in love with his best friend's girl, but the relationship is stuck. Enter a second girl, who he also loves. Add lots and lots of one night stands with anonymous other girls, and there you have it. It's set in the late 60s but the period doesn't really come through; adding a few Beatles songs does not make it a novel about the 60s.

Sure, the lead character's detachment is unsettling, and the two girl friends put up with a lot. There are sections that are not really needed or relevant to the central plot. And the ending gets way too sentimental for me. But I still enjoyed it, and think it's far far better than off the wall stories about sheep or elephants. He should leave the magic stuff to Jonathan Carroll!

Incredibly Bad!
Having read Kafka on the Shore which I absolutely adored I then read this and was I shocked!! Was it the same author? It was childishly pornographic and the explicit way the author described sexual activity was cringe making. Kafka had a fair amount of sex in it but it was justified and done well. This book had too much banal sexual description, totally unnecessary, and it left me feeling a little uncomfortable with the author's state of mind. As another reviewer said 'this is not literature'. I totally agree. If I had read this book first I would not have read Kafka which would have been a shame. But I am now reluctant to bother with anymore.

A wonderful book
I hadn't read Murakami before and so picking up this book was a new venture- exploring a work that I had wanted to read for a while but not really knowing what to expect.
The novel has a central protagonist, a young man starting university, leaving his family for the first time but learning to cope with the recent suicide of his best friend. As he starts his studies in Tokyo, we are gradually drawn into his world and the tensions he feel. Whilst the novel is set in Tokyo in the late 1960s, the detail of the characterisation and the tenderness and clarity of the emotional journey the characters face, means that the novel has a real resonance, evoking the nostalgia with which we all look back at those difficult and confusing years.
There is much to love about this book- Storm Trooper the annoyingly tidy roommate from hell; the energy and beauty of Midori and the tenderness of the scene in the hospital as Watanabe feeds cucumber ot her dying father. There is also the sense that we gradually realise that Watanabe is a complex and confused figure, that he makes mistakes, that he treats people poorly and that he cannot always understand his own actions and reactions. The more we read, the more we begin to appreciate the detail of the depiction of this character.
This is a special nove and one I would like to read again and again.