Murakami’s book filled with nostalgia

Book: A young college student’s coming of age journey in the 1960s

By David Hayes
Theater/Book Editor

Before writing Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami was a virtual unknown when it came to the international writing scene. After the book's 1987 debut in Japan, Murakami's name was itself a new entry into Japanese culture, so much so that his readership exploded into the millions. Superstardom and fame had never hugged an author as tightly as they did with Murakami; and, this was all due, in part, to the youthful appeal of Norwegian Wood. It is the youth, after all, and their ascension towards adulthood that is so nostalgically and tragically celebrated in Norwegian Wood. Toru Watanabe, the main character, is such a youth; a young man whose journey into adulthood in 1960s Japan stamps itself onto one's soul like a ghost's footprints.
The novel begins with a grown Toru, thirty-seven years old and in a German airport, "just feeling kind of blue." This melancholic feeling paces the entire novel and one can't help but feel that Toru will never know any other feeling. His thoughts travel backwardstwo decades backwards in factto his college years and his first true love Naoko. Flung together under the harsh glare of tragedy, Toru and Naoko must each learn to deal with the suicide of their best friend in their own way. For Toru, it is to retreat into an existence of loneliness, one where the past is continually fed upon like a drug, life is lived through books and memories, and every face is a blank, boring oval. Similarly, Naoko enters into a solitary life, rarely talking and becoming horribly emotionally unstable; that is, until she opens up to Toru.
Like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Norwegian Wood is, first and foremost, a coming-of-age novel, its main character dancing in a school setting and dealing with young-adult issues, just like the infamous Holden Caulfield. Each book also has a tight fondness for the past, especially that period before the horrible truths of adulthood steal the sunshine smiles from children's faces. However, Norwegian Wood takes it one step further, fleshing out just how hard it can be for a young man to deal with these horrible truths.
In his journey from college freshman to college senior, Toru meets a variety of characters that take him further down the path to adulthood, teaching him even more about loss, beyond the loss of a best friend, and introducing him to the curse of nostalgia. From the quirky Midori who brightens up Toru's life like a firefly while he's separated from Naoko to the wise, chain-smoking Reiko whose sad life-story reminds one of a dried-out, pillaged watermelon, Toru will journey throughout Japan meeting a variety of women that echo and enshrine his relationship with Naoko like a Greek chorus. All will eventually leave him but one, the rest will be left to the past.
Be forewarned, Norwegian Wood is a very heavy, very "blue" book. Its themes are adult in nature and every joy of Toru's college-life is tinged with the scent of sadness. Murakami's writing style reflects this incessantly, the haunting tone and precise diction of the narrator exactly taking on the feel of a middle-aged man looking back on a life of loss. His prose evokes the distinct feeling of an autobiography; Norwegian Wood feels that authentic and personal. All of this works to bring about characters that become like dear friends to the readers. The reading of the final page is an act that most certainly seems like a forced goodbye. Toru, Naoko, Midori, Reikoall of
Murakami's characters will haunt readers for weeks after the completion of Norwegian Wood, their stories penetrating the everyday like the memory of a fabled and deceased grandfather.
Indeed, it is the face of the past that dons the paperback cover of Norwegian Wood. The enlarged face of a young Japanese girl, her eyes at first seeming like a blank stare, her lips and pug-nose as catchy and cartoon-like as a "Japanimé" drawing, becomes quite chilling at the completion of the novel. The picture turns from a cutesy cartoon to a colored obituary; it seems like a picture that one could never forget. Toru probably felt like that too, when looking into Naoko's eyes or Midori's, but two decades later at the age of thirty-seven, while sitting in an airport, he wrote: "I do need that time, though, for (her) face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minutelike shadows lengthening at dusk."

Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 142, No. 08 (Monday, January 22, 2001), beginning on page 8 and ending on page 9.