Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1070 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-17
• Original language: Japanese
• 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

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

About the Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo.

Customer Reviews

Norwegian Wood
I believe the most important thing about fiction is the creation and build-up of the characters - and there is no finer at doing this than Haruki Murakami. This is essentially a coming of age book depicting Toru Watanabe through his university years - post best friends death. His first love is always on his mind - confused because she was his best friends girlfriend, and lost from his own desires and fears, he befriends a sordid and charismatic fellow dorm resident by the name of Nagasawa, and so he gets tangled up in uneasy friendships formed by casual sex, desire, loss and fear.

It's interesting to read in which Murakami almost writes as if it's not fiction but biographical, and perhaps in some ways it is as I often believe writers include problems and thoughts from their own life in their writing. Murakami is a "realistic" writer who creates characters so wonderfully believable that you feel you are right there talking to them yourself, and the dialogue is so precise and important that it is truly beautiful to read - it flows from the pages to your heart and leaves you feeling both broken and alive. He has a knack for emotional wordplay, and his writing is the kind that can keep your emotions locked up, benign until the flood gates are opened - and so you will be drawn into the lives of these wonderful characters.

A remarkable book from a remarkable writer - the first of which I have read of his work, and most definitely not to be the last. Murakami really must "rank among the world's greatest living novelists".

Enticed
Murakami's 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle' entranced me and 'Norwegian Wood' has done the same. Murakami describes worlds that seem so normal yet so eccentric.

I was disappointed by the translation of 'Goodbye Tsugumi' by Banana Yoshimoto because it seemed too American for me, but I found the language used here didn't get in the way of my enjoying the story.

I look forward to my next adventure into Murakami's world.

Wonderful
This book is superb. Set in 1960's Japan and named after the Beatles song it is an absorbing, poetic beautifully written tale of first love. It has entered my top 10 books ever, it was completely compelling and I couldn't put it down. Buy it now.