Author: Haruki Murakami
Year: 2008 (1987)
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish
You may have heard people say that “Norwegian Wood” is Murakami for people who do not like Murakami. By this, they usually mean that it contains no talking sheep, no parallel worlds, and no wells of metaphysical ambiguity; in short, none of the magical realism that Murakami is famous for. The novel is, by the author's own admission, his most conventional book.
And yet it
contains everything that makes his fiction unmistakable: the passive young man,
the strong women who orbit him, the search for meaning, and the loneliness that
no amount of love appears to dissolve (cf. review of “A Wild Sheep Chase” of
December 2021).
Toru
Watanabe narrates the novel from twenty years' distance, looking back at his
student years in 1960s Tokyo and at the two women who defined them: Naoko, the
fragile girlfriend of his dead best friend, and Midori, the irrepressible force
of appetite for life who demands that he be present in his own existence.
Watanabe seems to rarely be present in his own existence. He drifts through the
student unrest of 1968-69 with the interest of a man casting a quick glance at
a dramatic car crash but then returning to his sudoku; he cooks, irons, reads
The Great Gatsby, waits at bedsides, and lets the women in his life set the
pace and direction of his emotional education. When Midori finally loses her
temper with him, accusing him of being perpetually elsewhere, the reader feels
the justice of the charge. Watanabe is a boat that has stopped believing in
harbours. Or never knew them in the first place.
Whether
this passivity is a character flaw or a diagnosis is the question the novel
quietly poses. Watanabe's stillness is grief-management: his childhood friend
Kizuki killed himself at seventeen, and Watanabe's entire adult life is
conducted at a careful distance from anything that might be lost. The character reminded me of Meursault in Camus's The Outsider (see review of April 2023), though the
comparison flatters Camus with more philosophical resolve than Murakami allows
his hero. Meursault is indifferent by conviction; Watanabe is numb by injury.
And yet the
novel's true subject is not the lonely man but the loneliness itself, a
loneliness that persists inside love, which is a far bleaker proposition than
loneliness endured without it. The characters of “Norwegian Wood” show each
other genuine tenderness, and it avails them nothing. Naoko, sealed in her
private grief at the mountain sanatorium, cannot let Watanabe across; the
sanatorium's own ethic insists that its residents help one another precisely
because they do not demand mutual rescue. Watanabe loves two women and reaches
neither. Like sound does not travel in a vacuum, love cannot transcend an empty
emotional space. The fear is not that others are distant; it is that distance and
closeness can become irrelevant.
It is here
that the triangle, the novel's true architecture, reveals itself. For Norwegian
Wood is not organised around a living couple but around a dead centre. Kizuki
dies a teenager, and the bond between Watanabe and Naoko is his absence; their
intimacy is a shared mourning conducted at the graveside of the man they both
loved. The triangle’s hub is still. There are no rivals. Watanabe never
competes with Kizuki or his ghost; he inherits his position and discovers it is
cursed.
The
contrast is instructive. In Salman Rushdie's “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” (see
review of September 2025), a novel built on a mirror-image geometry, the
triangle is fully populated: Ormus and Vina are the living great love, and Rai
is the friend-photographer who orbits them, loving Vina from a distance he will
never close, surviving them both to narrate them. Rushdie's triangle has one
mourner circling a living pair; Murakami's has two survivors orbiting one dead
man. In Rushdie death is the resolution; in Murakami death is the beginning.
What makes
the comparison more than an idle symmetry is that Rushdie runs the control
experiment for Murakami’s hypothesis. Ormus is the anti-Watanabe: the Orpheus
figure who does everything passivity forbids: pursues Vina across decades and
continents, descends after her, fights for the love with mythic force. And Vina
dies regardless. Mythic action fails exactly as Watanabe's paralysis failed.
The boats that row hard sink with the boats that drift. One is tempted to
conclude that both novelists believe the ocean is insuperable, and differ only
in the noise they make about it: Rushdie's boats collide in thunder while
Murakami's drift in silence.
“Norwegian Wood” is a quiet meditation on the insufficiency of love against loneliness. If you like this book but dislike Murakami’s other novels, it may not be Murakami you dislike, but the idea that the world might just be a bit different than your mom told you it was.
