Norwegian Wood

The work that made Murakami’s name, Norwegian Wood is my first exploration into his novels, and it is an introspective bildungsroman centered around Toru Watanabe. Watanabe is 19, and what makes him interesting and endearing is his utter lack of any extraordinary qualities. The story develops around his relationship with two women, Naoko and Midori. Naoko is beautiful and reserved, and her mental illness makes their relationship necessarily more distant. Midori is Naoko’s foil as she is tomboyish, spontaneous, and practical and overall plain adorable - I personally could not help but fall in love with her. The book is heavy on themes of mental illness, loneliness, and death, and through these darker themes Watanabe explores the joys and dangers of youth. What made me love the novel was Watanabe’s strange pull, just like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, to make us completely empathize with him despite how different our lives are from theirs in reality.

Murakami makes it clear that he is a huge Fitzgerald fan, and in the novel there are some really interesting connections. Naoko with mental illness and Watanabe as the patient boyfriend-therapist is reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, of Dick Diver being the husband-therapist to the schizophrenic Nicole. As time goes on, Watanabe visits Naoko in her sanatorium and upon leaving, he compares the receding light of her room to the green light across the bay that Gatsby reached his hands out for, and at this moment Watanabe’s relationship with Naoko becomes as distant and spiritual as it was with Gatsby and Daisy. And a final connection, just as Fitzgerald was a masterful tragedian in engineering circumstances to make his protagonists fall, Murakami is similar in breaking Watanabe’s youthful nonchalance and replacing it with lonesome pragmatism towards the end of the novel. As dark as the work is, it is a gem and I’m really looking forward to reading more of Murakami’s works.