Murakami makes no promises to tell you anything profound, and ironically, that’s what draws you into Watanabe’s world. It’s all very mundane there are no lessons to be learnt here. Then some of them pop back up for no reason. What’s most interesting about the book is the events are actually the people he meets during these years.Ĭharacters show up, then are cut away abruptly, kind of like how it happens in real life. Norwegian Wood summarizes his years of Uni. Watanabe is a smart undergrad who has enrolled at a private University in Tokyo just to get out of his hometown. The EventsĪ 17-year-old boy navigates through life in Tokyo in the aftermath of momentous (read big, bad) changes.

That’s why Norwegian Wood actually works. And therein lies that challenge: take what you will from it. This happened, then that happened, and then the next day this happened. Murakami traces the early years of his protagonist - Watanabe - with the industriousness of a factory supervisor. Often when we remember the past, its easy to attach our own shades to it - nostalgia, romance, regret, and then some.īut there is little emotional reminiscence in this story. While the whole story is just a guy remembering his young adult days, it’s written like a traveler’s account. The novel was released in 1987, a little before I was born. Norwegian Wood is one of the initial works of Japanese gem-of-an-author, Haruki Murakami. When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.” It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. The night Kizuki died, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. “Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life.

Books like norwegian wood