Why You Need to Read Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Hi there! First off, I want to say thank you to everyone who liked, subscribed, shared, and viewed. Honestly, your support means everything. Welcome to Retro Sunday, the Sunday edition of my Intellectual Sunglasses newsletter where I discuss culture, global trends, and some neat stuff in between. This is a special weekend edition in which I review a book initially published before 2005 and explain as lovingly as I can why they are worth reading. For copyright purposes, I won't be featuring any long quotations from the novels. This is just as well because they tend to distract from the conversation between reader and writer. These reviews are a little different from the stuff I put out on weekdays when I'm much more about what's going on in the world. So, find somewhere comfy, uncork some wine, and relax. And if you love what you read, you can click all the subscribe and share buttons at the end of the newsletter. Shall we begin?
I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
— Norwegian Wood by The Beatles
All of sorrow is a function of memory. Pain has an immediate relationship with living: you feel it in that very moment. Sorrow is different. The affairs it maintains with time can only be retrospective. Haruki Murakami takes this insight and runs with it, producing a profound examination of loss and regret.
Norwegian Wood is not Murakami's best work. It is not even Murakami's usual work either. It features no joyous liberties with the structure of reality, no willful exercises of the imagination. There are no parallel worlds, talking sheep, or dream pregnancies. Instead, Murakami takes a web of friendships as his mundane starting point and with warmth and restraint, explores what occurs as they dislocate.
Watanabe, the book’s central character, is in thrall to Naoko, a beautiful but mentally disturbed young lady who was his dead best friend’s lover. What Naoko is drawn to is made explicit quickly. Early in the story, she speaks of a deep, dark well which calls to her. The tragic undertones of the novel communicate to us that Naoko will eventually plunge into this abyss. The book’s foremost question is whether her pull on Watanabe will draw him too.
There is a recurring theme in Murakami's novels of hapless men manipulated by sexually assertive women keeping important secrets from them. Indeed, this intersexual deception is the premise of Men Without Women, Murakami's slim volume of short stories. But there's hardly any manipulation in Norwegian Wood, rarely any significant acts of concealment; people do inadvisable things out of desire rather than misrepresentation.
Perhaps, this is because Murakami recognizes that the mere existence of any relationship is to some degree a kind of misrepresentation. We are never who we fully are with other people. Necessity dictates a measure of detachment between our personalities and our selves. When this detachment is stretched to extremes, our relationships may be nothing more than consensual illusions. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami's most notable work, Toru Okada raises these concerns in a rhetorical question.
Norwegian Wood predates those concerns. Naoko is enrolled in a sanatorium ostensibly full of people with significant mental health conditions. And yet, these people live ordinary lives and spend these lives negotiating ordinary difficulties. The boundary between madness and sanity, Murakami alerts us, is too thin to be observed from the outside. Even dancing on the edge still feels like, still is, solid ground.
And so, we are led to ponder. If Naoko is psychologically brittle, what dangers will this constitute for Watanabe and their romance? What decisions should he make?
If anything, Watanabe does not decide early. Midori is introduced instead as a light-hearted foil to Naoko's Sturm und Drang. When Watanabe is with Naoko, his world shrinks passibly until it's just both of them and their tenuous relationship. When he is with Midori, it expands like spilled juice on a tablecloth into other places, other people, other things.
A lesser writer would suggest Midori is the better, wiser choice. Murakami does not trade in such simplicities. He licenses Watanabe's complicity in these romantic failures. And if he sometimes lets the story drift a little too much between these two competing possibilities, it is a familiar flaw of his fiction.
This tendency of permitting the story to follow its own internal logic is one reason why compressing a Murakami plot is so damn difficult. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which is arguably his best work is famously unsummarizable because it encircles everything. Norwegian Wood is unsummarizable because it sieves everything out. What is left is a love triangle that will not quite realize itself, one whose three lines consistently refuse to meet.
Norwegian Wood's evocative use of memory brings to mind Mine Boy, Peter Abrahams’ classic South African novel. On first glance, these are extraordinarily different pieces of literature. But look beneath the distinct themes and the differing writing styles, and at their heart are the little things, casual throwaways that illuminate the entire novel.
When Mine Boy opens and concludes with the same sentence, you feel how the meaning of a string of locations has drastically changed by virtue of everything that has happened in between. Norwegian Wood is full of these things: the old man chewing a piece of cucumber, Hatsumi's brief, pregnant glance, Naoko's silence at the end of her dark well monologue. Each of these snapshots constitutes a vivid foretelling of how the past will intrude upon the future and fix itself with a retrospective significance.
The story’s most salient event occurs when Naoko commits suicide which Reiko, her friend, announces in a letter. It is a beautiful touch because she does not call him. We infer she's trying to express the tragedy as delicately as possible even if it is a tragedy with very little surprise. For all the omnidirectional quirkiness of Murakami's literature, you can often predict how his stories will end. We know Naoko will die. We suspect Watanabe and Reiko know this as well. Yet it is no less painful.
At this juncture, we may ask ourselves whether a sudden death is more saddening than an expected one? Is the grief death carries lightened by foreknowledge? The rational answer is yes. Logically, the certainty of a tragedy should dilute its effect. But, perhaps, the better argument is that it's the other way around, that as we witness a life relinquish itself, we are crushed both ways. We don’t just grieve out of our affection for the deceased but also due to our shattered hope in some possible deferral.
Naoko's death exerts these effects on Watanabe, pulling him away from Midori into a rather lazy authorial decision to let him wander peripatetically. He sleeps with Reiko who urges him to return to Midori. We do not know whether he does. The novel ends without giving us an answer.
Norwegian Wood is ultimately about the futility of hindsight. All the clues are obvious only from a distance, long after they have materialized into history. The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote that the great tragedy of life was that life was lived forwards but could only be understood backwards. Kierkegaard's own disappointing experiences in romance and much else lend the quotation a personal legitimacy.
Norwegian Wood implicitly says all these and more. It possesses the same lethargic restlessness which underpins much of Murakami's fiction. Here, applied to a few broken people who never manage to truly understand each other, it offers a polished window into the fundamental tensions of love, life, and the human condition.
TILL NEXT TIME, STAY COOL.