Book Review: Norwegian Wood
“I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me?” begins one of my favorite Beatles’ songs, “Norwegian Wood”. The novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami begins with a man on a plane, hearing this song and becoming instantly taken back to his lost love, Naoko. We never return to that man on the plane. He merely begins the story and tells it back without any reflection on the present moment.
Naoko’s favorite song is “Norwegian Wood,” so she must put a hundred yen in the jar to hear Reiko, her roommate, play it. She says, “This song can make me feel so sad. I don’t know, I guess I imagine myself wandering in a deep wood. I’m all alone, and it’s cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me. That’s why Reiko never plays it unless I request it.”
It’s funny because I feel the same way. In the song, the girl serves as a “temptress” and the man, someone who either loves her or just wants to sleep with her. The girl is eccentric and unknowable. When she leaves in the morning, the man burns down her house, “Isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood?” Rubber Soul (the album of this song) is often called the Beatles’ “pot album”; once they weren’t the good boy band or the total acid-heads, they were the guys in fur on the Rubber Soul cover. I think that’s where this song gets a lot of its mystique. When I hear this song, I feel warm. It’s a comforting song for me. Moreso, I get this feeling like love happens to come and go, while we watch it happen. To me, the narrator seems so content at the end, just as I should be content. I don’t feel alone, but I don’t feel alone. I exist in a place of understanding.
When I was sixteen, I particularly liked this song. I liked many Beatles songs. Some of their songs will bring me back there, to that exact moment, where I listened. The same as when Toru hears “Norwegian Wood” and thinks of Naoko begging him to promise not to forget her, I hear “Dig A Pony” and think of our first date at Queeny Park. Not Norwegian Wood, though. Norwegian Wood only belonged to me. Sharing so much of yourself with someone makes it difficult to keep loving those things as you depart from that person. I thought of this as I attempted to rid myself of any triggers of nostalgia, old photographs, and text messages. But I can’t erase the music that I listened to at that time. Songs he showed me, songs I showed him, still linger in his essence, even though I rarely think of them anymore. But “Norwegian Wood” exists entirely for me. And well, this book does too.
The book title is probably perfect because the story feels like the song stretched across 300 pages. It’s about a girl (Naoko) whom a boy (Toru) feels a passionate connection with, despite her mysterious nature. She lures him and then leaves him. Now, everything from here on out will be a spoiler.
First, I’d like to say I have two big criticisms. The main one is that there’s a lazy technique to justify why characters go into long monologues about their backstories. The author creates a sanatorium where it’s repeated that the only way someone can get better is to tell the truth. This leads us to getting to hear about characters more than we would otherwise know just from Toru’s perspective. Still, this criticism has a caveat. The main character we hear from is Reiko; we get to know everything about her. But, Naoko, the other “truth-teller” in this setting, tells us quite a bit, but not everything, not nearly as much as Reiko. Reiko gives herself up completely to Toru, through telling him her whole story and later having sex with him, and she can leave the sanatorium and get better. Naoko, who cannot tell him her whole story and can only get him hand jobs and blow jobs, dies in the sanatorium. This leaves us with the message that to enter into the real world, to improve ourselves, we need to be honest with ourselves and others. I just wish the confessionals came more naturally because it felt artificial, especially when they continually justifying it.
My second criticism was also touched on within the first criticism: there’s far too much sex. Some of it feels necessary; for example, Naoko and Toru’s intimate night. Sex is used as a stand-in for vulnerability. But especially at the end, Haruki Murakami just needs to chill out. It was giving erotica.
Now, for the main thing I loved about it: how reading it made me feel. Even though it’s about suicide and death, I felt comforted nearly the whole time. It’s almost inexplicable the way that it brought peace into my life. I can only think of a few books that have actually done that. And what’s weird? I have no idea why it did that. Fantastic answer, I know, but I don’t think we need to understand why literature makes us feel certain emotions to appreciate the emotions that it insights in us. I guess that’s kinda shitty to, in the analysis of a book, throw my hands up and say “it is what it is”, but that’s the truth. “It is what it is.”
I’ve loved the motif in movies and songs where the narrator is telling us about something happening in his youth. Something that I referenced earlier in this review, but is particularly interesting to me, is the fact that the narrator on the plane doesn’t return. A song brings him back to a memory, but he becomes sucked into the memory. He is no longer on the plane. It’s all-consuming. We don’t know where he is physically when he finishes the story, but we know where he is mentally. He’s twenty years old again. Memory works in strange ways. I think Tennesse Willaims said it best, “has it ever struck you that life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you can hardly catch it.” What happened to me thirty seconds ago exists in my mind the same way something three years ago exists. Toru experiences that on this plane: the memory being right up close. As he describes the entire story, he has the clarity of someone who has ruminated on it but still knows the reality of his feelings: why he acted in the way that he did. Even though he claims not to understand his actions, he understands the emotions behind them. Because we never return to the present, we don’t know how the later relationship with Midori impacts his storytelling. These are questions that sadly can’t be answered because none of this actually happened. But it would be fun to re-read it, knowing what happens at the end, and speculating on how that changes his current perception of the past.
I guess being that age, nineteen, almost twenty, made me relate in particular to certain quotes. So much so that I began writing them down in a Google Doc because I couldn’t highlight the library copy. My favorite of which made me cry as I copied and pasted it into this very Doc was “What I want to say is: I’m going to turn twenty soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen and seventeen has already vanished, and no amount of crying will bring that back.” It’s hard to accept that something is over and gone forever. And as someone “going to turn twenty soon”, I don’t know if I’ve accepted that yet.
One not totally depressing thing about this read was that I found myself feeling a deep kinship with Midori. She does not have the same allure as Naoko; she has a different allure. Both feel perfectly unrealistic and unobtainable, but something about Midori feels more relatable. Maybe it’s just because she also cuts her hair short, but I feel like I act that same way around guys, except for one weird scene where she’s weirdly trying to coerce Toru into sex (not cool).
In the end, I wish I hadn’t recommended it to my high school English teacher. But I picked the perfect time to read it, and it’s going in my Goodreads favorites shelf.
