Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

In Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami men and women talk endlessly about the most trivial and ponderous subjects. One character obsesses over the mushrooms she cooked for a folk music group that were found unsatisfactory. The main character Watanabe goes to visit the apartment of a girl he met in one of his classes. Since they are going to her apartment alone, there is suspense—will something happen, will they sleep together? They talk endlessly, especially the girl, of the most trivial matters. At the end, they kiss, and the girl tells our hero that she has a boyfriend. That's it. There are several more such prolonged encounters, one of them in the hospital room of the girl's dying father. The highpoint comes when Watanabe and then the girl's father eat a cucumber. It is as if such talk is an entrée to some deep knowledge about these characters and their lives.

Watanabe's conversations with the girl he loves, Nakao, are different, but the novel brims with what seems to be shallow conversation. In addition to the long passages of trivial description and apparently shallow talk, the novel uses letters written between Watanabe and Nakao to trace the progress of their relationship.

The title, an allusion to the Beatles song, is evoked when Nakao's roommate Reiko plays the tune on her guitar during Watanabe's visit to the sanitarium where they are living. It's also a more general allusion to Watanabe's enthrallment to Nakao. The novel is an enactment of the song, in a sense, and of the Keats poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" on which the song is at least partially based. Nakao is a beautiful girl unable to recover from her boyfriend's suicide. Gripped by depression and deep psychotic trauma, she asks Watanabe to wait for her recovery. She gives him glimpses of her beautiful naked body, which she promises to him when she recovers, and he does wait.

The present time of the story is twenty years after the main events of the novel. We first meet Watanabe as a man of 37 remembering a girl whom he once loved deeply. In fact, the novel begins with Watanabe at an older age remembering himself at the age of 37, sitting in a 747 preparing to land, hearing the song "Norwegian Wood" and being prompted by it to recall his love for Nakao and his friendship with another young woman, Michiko: "I . . . looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in my life: times gone by, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again." (These words recapitulate another Beatles song, "In My Life.") Thus as is the case with this kind of retrospective novel, tension builds as we move towards the climactic revelatory events that will reveal why Watanabe lost the girl, what happened to her, what sent him to his current state of affairs in the modern world. At other points the narrative seems merely to be marking time, moving nowhere, mired in trivialities and endless talk, putting us off until those revelatory events occur.

While he waits for Nakao to recover, Watanabe meets Michiko, a student in one of his classes. Gradually a relationship develops, but it's complicated by Watanabe's love for the ailing Nakao. Will she recover? Will he realize that he really does love Michiko? Will he decide to commit himself to Michiko before she decides she can't wait any longer?

There are at least four suicides in this novel. Two characters have major nervous breakdowns. Mizuki's father and mother both die from brain tumors. This is more than melodrama—it is a way of suggesting the dissatisfaction, the inner angst, the alienation of these lives that in this novel express themselves faintly through banal and trivial talk and flirtation.

Watanabe is a remarkably passive soul. Things happen to him, but he rarely has a role in making them happen. He does seek friends out, on occasion. Be he is so caught up in waiting for resolution of Nakao emotional problems that everything happens around him.

This novel was a best seller that gave national fame in Japan to its author, Haruki Murakami. It is decidedly unlike the other Murakami novel I read, Kafka on the Shore (2006), though the layered retrospective narrative of Norwegian Wood, the unusually high incidence of depression and suicide (which creates an almost otherworldly sense of unreality in the novel), Nakao's elusive, ultimately disappearing character, and the final paragraph are of a piece with the style and method of the later novel.