Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

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Why I Picked It Up

I've had this one on my shelf for forever. I opened it and a receipt from years ago fell out. I think I'd started it but wasn't in the mood (I am tragically such a mood reader) so I wanted to revisit it. Last month, I realized I'd seen and loved a lot of quotes from the book. So it was time.

What It's About

At its core, Norwegian Wood is a deeply lonely book. A belief repeated throughout the book is how people get stuck in their cycles and in their own minds.

And it's all very symbolic, so I'd love to book club this one; you know how there's that joke about teachers saying "the curtains were blue to symbolize x" and the author says, "actually, the curtains were just blue"? Well, in Murakami's narrative, the spatial metaphors of isolation / connection, inside world / outside world, etc,. feel incredibly intentional and ironic, highlighting the narrator's obliviousness to operating the exact same way as the lonely girl he observes. It's fundamentally a book about the dangers of cutting yourself off.

Basically, the book's about Toru, a college student in Tokyo, reconnecting with his childhood friend's ex-girlfriend after his suicide. It starts as company on Sundays, and turns into a strange intrigue and understanding the two of them share. He tries to convince Naoko to engage with the outside world and others—exacerbated when she goes into a treatment center or becomes unresponsive to his letters—as she retreats further and further into herself. Of course, she's convinced she's sick and unchangeable.

“That's the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust.”

And then Toru is also making friends at college, becoming fascinated by Midori, a sexually adventurous friend who teases him and wants to replace his Sunday company. He reflects on Kizuki, their deceased friend, and his weakness. He trolls for hookups on the weekends with Nagasawa, who does what he wants and doesn't give a damn, and reflects on Nagasawa's sweet girlfriend Hatsumi, who is maybe the only one of the cast who's actually hopeful.

But the curiosity of the book is in Toru's rotation between people, and how his only close-to-meaningful connections are with those who are so walled-up that they relate to each other but have no desire to let the other in. Everyone has some form of stubborn disconnect.

“'We’re finally getting used to it, though,' she said. 'This is the way we should have been living all along—not having to worry about anyone else’s needs, just stretching out any way we felt like it. It made us both nervous at first, like our bodies were floating a couple of inches off the floor.'”

The narrator's interesting though because he is simply curious. He's detached throughout, even when seeming to care about others, and offers an impressive façade of self-awareness without actually being so.

It raised the question for me about whether love is better or worse than understanding (as George Orwell says) or whether it actually might be better for each of these characters to be loved by people who don't understand them—because the basis of their (purely intellectual) connection is built off how they're each unable to connect to anyone with genuine care or emotion. Ouch.

Toru is fundamentally a conditional lover and friend, whereas he would need unconditional love to ever know how to feel better—but those characters who could occupy that role for him deserve better. (Modern Internet slang would call that "breadcrumbing.") It doesn't make him a villain, though, but just someone who doesn't realize how much he's burying himself. So what's the right answer?

You can see the glimmer of awareness peeking out for him, that hint. His isolation doesn't keep him from being lonely when it's not going his way. But the longer each character remains stuck in their misery, the harder it is to leave.

The book is called a romance. It is not. I don't find any of it romantic. The relationship between Toru and Naoko isn't a romance because it has the appearance of depth with each character while they're actually just being absolutely blind to the other. Which, sure, happens in other romances and that's how reality can work, but there's an intention in those.

Toru is fascinating because of his paradox:

• He only treats people as real when they're an idea he can't have, but
• He can only treat people as an idea once they're real.

“I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. You’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.”

Someone will finally have enough of it and tell him they can't do it. And that's when he'll finally—after ages—start to consider them. Their absence takes up more space inside his head than their presence. It's not a conscious cycle, but it's a persistent one.

“I thought of Midori's father, which reminded me of how flat and tasteless my life had become without Midori and put me into a foul mood. Without my being aware of it, she had become a huge presence inside me.”

“Too many memories of her were crammed inside me, and as soon as one of them found the slightest opening, the rest would force their way out in an endless stream, an unstoppable flood.”

He's miserable, listless, alone. But if they try to connect, he circles back to the same.

“'Don't you have any idea how painful and lonely it's been for me without you these past two months?' This took me completely off guard. 'No,' I said. 'It never occurred to me.'”

It's either abandonment or shutdown. He only regrets not connecting after someone's gone. And people disappear frequently. (Multiple characters commit suicide.) When someone does cut him off, he suddenly longs for them, but as soon as they reconnect, he loses interest because he finally has the chance to execute his thoughts on love or loneliness or whatever. He just doesn't realize that he's disappeared into himself too, just like the girl he's looking at.

“'Let me just tell you this, Watanabe,' said Midori, pressing her cheek against my neck. 'I'm a real, live girl, with real, live blood gushing through my veins.'”

“'I need time,' I said. 'I need time to think and sort things out, and make some decisions, and I'm sorry, but that's all I can say at this point.'”

And so on it goes.

Nagasawa is self-centered but at least honest about it. A total foil. (Oh, by the way, the narrator's perception of getting women totally flattens them too, but that aligns with everything about his characterization. But also, people say Murakami is pretty misogynistic, and that seemed accurate. The boys had such a dehumanizing formula for women wanting to sleep with them that totally removed any accurate perception of women as actual people.) He accurately calls out Toru for being the exact same but just not aware of it yet. So Toru also pretty thoughtfully symbolizes how every first-person narrative is in some way unreliable. And there's a tension between Nagasawa and Toru that springs up when he points this out—so maybe bringing it up to Toru isn't the right call either (and that's not why he does it, anyway.)

“'We're a lot alike, though, Watanabe and me,' said Nagasawa. 'Neither of us is interested, essentially, in any thing but ourselves. OK, so I'm arrogant and he's not, but neither of us is able to feel any interest in anything other than what we ourselves think or feel or do. That's why we can think about things in a way that's totally divorced from anybody else. That's what I like about him. The only difference is that he hasn't realized this about himself, and so he hesitates and feels hurt.'”

“'Where Watanabe and I are alike is, we don’t give a damn if nobody understands us,' Nagasawa said. 'That’s what makes us different from everybody else. They’re all worried about whether people around them understand them. But not me, not Watanabe. We just don’t give a damn. Self and others are separate.'”

Toru has the same thoughts about Nagasawa that others have about him. Recently I've been thinking about how hypocrisy could actually be a good thing—it's what lives in the gap between awareness and desire to move differently. You want to tell Toru you're so close to getting this, but that would defeat the entire purpose of his worldview. I think there might be a kind of loneliness that only sneaks up when you think you've chosen it.

“Well, if I were you, I'd leave him. I'd find someone with a more normal way of looking at things and live happily ever after. There's no way in hell you can be happy with that guy. The way he lives, it never crosses his mind to try and make himself happy or others happy.”

Norwegian Wood is very much about getting too much in your own head and how, once you're disconnected from the outside world, it feels impossible to claw your way back—not even just doing it but wanting to. Instead, characters are convinced that they can't and shouldn't change, that instead of a temporary framework or operating system, their worldview is permanent.

“Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.”

And part of why this affects me so much is because I do believe we're all active and responsible for ourselves (which includes striving for self-awareness even when it complicates your view of yourself), that neuroplasticity proves we can literally change our brains, and even that we can change what we want.

But you can't always reach those who are walled-off so entirely that they're not even open to those ideas. Helplessness, and hopelessness, is what gets to me the most, especially in regards to caring for others. You can't get anyone to want something for themselves. Is his solitude even a choice or an involuntary pause?

“And because questions of beauty and happiness have become such difficult and convoluted propositions for me now, I suspect, I find myself clinging instead to other standards—like whether or not something is fair or honest or universally true...Just as each person has certain idiosyncracies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncracies in the way they think and feel and see things, and though you might want to correct them, it doesn't happen overnight, and if you try to force the issue in one case, something else might go funny.”

Toru's loyalty (distinctively not love) for others only kicks in when some setback prevents them from actually occupying the reality of closeness; instead, he can comfortably treat them like an idea instead of a person. The book uses the same metaphors of disconnection as lightness as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which psychology aligns with too—connection as burden, weight, subordination, etc,. The dependency paradox. He's repetitive in that he only wants someone when they're gone. And he gets devastated when that happens, too, but can't seem to see how his cycles cause that.

Or when it starts to itch at him, he's never quite willing to change them because that's just who he is. He's quiet and measured and assumes he's being honest, and to change his essence would feel in some ways like a betrayal to what he's been able to do already. But maybe, like he says about Nagasawa, he would be happier if he chose to suppress the discomfort of change enough to try.

(Maybe that's the grief talking, but we don't know what he's like before his childhood friend dies either—before Toru reaches his conclusions about how active death is within life. I'd be curious as to whether anyone thinks Murakami's done chosen the limits of the coming-of-age on purpose: specifically not showing Toru's childhood and before, or just narrowing in the scope with no greater intention.)

“I spent three full days after that all but walking on the bottom of the sea. I could hardly hear what people said to me, and they had just as much trouble catching anything I had to say. My whole body felt enveloped in some kind of membrane, cutting off any direct contact between me and the outside world. I couldn't touch 'them', and 'they' couldn't touch me. I was utterly helpless, and as long as I remained in that state, 'they' were unable to reach out to me.”

The book is effective because it shows the same pattern across multiple people, who each operate differently too. (I thought briefly of Magnolia Parks—a very different type of book—and its musings on the complexity of different kinds of love.)

Otherwise, it wouldn't be clear that he's resistant to closeness itself and not the people on the other end. How do you escape that cycle? He's inconsistent with his affections, aware of his misery only when on the bad end, can never forgive himself because it only hits him once it's too late, but he's unaware that he could make everything materially different just by forcing himself out of his box. Even death and loss end up being about his regret rather than the concrete reality of the other person.

“Whenever I get involved in something, I shut out everything else. But then I began to think about how I would feel and the tables had been turned and Midori had moved somewhere without telling me where or getting in touch with me for three weeks. I would have been hurt- hurt badly, no doubt... What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for—and to do it so unconsciously.”

But Norwegian Wood isn't judgmental either; it gives you a lot of material, and relies heavily on the unspoken, but it largely leaves the questions up to the reader—which is why it feels in some ways abrasive to me but might align neatly with someone who feels like Toru. The book shows his pain, and Toru isn't wrong for trucking ahead the way he does. It's a chosen ache rather than an involuntary ache, and maybe that gives him peace. There's a lot of subtlety here to sort through and appreciate, regardless of your stance.

But as Toru mulls over, the book makes it very clear that everyone is most vivid as a memory, and even those eventually fade. He disappears into himself frequently, but that's what he knows how to do. But I'd like to believe there's a way out for him and that he takes it. (I'd be curious to know what you think about the ending.)

The Tone & Voice

The tone overall is pretty bleak and sad. It reminded me a lot of Good Old Neon and self-fulfilling prophecy, and it did put me in a funk for a minute after. I appreciated Murakami's storytelling and lines about the imperfections of memory (and could definitely trace the symbolism of memory vs. the girls he "loved"), the role of sex as he saw it, the fundamental transformation within Toru as death became an active part of life for the first time, etc,.

“The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute—like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness...Now though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts.”

“Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely.”

It's not great at characterizing women, but I'm thinking that's because of the character's refusal to see other people as people.

“'She was nice,' I said. 'I enjoyed sleeping with her, and I miss her now and then, but finally, she didn't move me. I don't know, sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.'”

“Nobody likes being alone. I just hate to be disappointed.”

And it's also very sexual, which is a little fascinating because their hookups do cross into the land of the living, so to speak, and "show not tell" some of Toru's warped ideas about when he's drawn to someone and why. But also, it does feel a little perverse that he's largely only attracted to this incredibly depressed girl when she's practically suicidal because she's so unreachable that she doesn't threaten his ideals. So it's definitely not a read for everyone.

Let's Take a Beat to Analyze

Towards the tail end of last year, I also read about attachment styles and distance, and how you escape the trap of connection itself feeling dangerous. (It's all totally about the dependency paradox.)

I'm personally not great at being "emotional available" because I have a lot of knee-jerk sensitivity to the feeling of my independence being encroached upon (which always happens when I start to get close to others or feel vulnerable—a suffocation to push past), and I do value my independence a lot. But that's not what this book is about. This is different: about the literal concept of intimacy being what makes the alarms go off. And a lot of that really is unconscious.

In Norwegian Wood, the characters believe they can never change, which was frankly so depressing. Of course, they were grieving the death of a friend, but part of why they got stuck in these cycles is because they assume they are deeply sick and incapable of feeling differently. (Even writing this review is making me very sad, truthfully.)

I empathize, though; I've only ever gone into dark places when it feels like there's no light at the end of the tunnel, but even when I'm sad, I can snap myself out of that tendency because I know our brains are literally always changing and each season can feel and be so different. As the book articulates beautifully, we are so, so good at forgetting how we feel and what we do from phase-to-phase. As Toru does whenever he completely repeats the same pattern of shutting down.

Even in December, I realized how I'd basically slotted so quickly into a different routine that I'd basically forgotten what November felt like, and the key is always knowing how to go back or provoke a completely different framework. (The psych backing: Mind in Motion. Thought provokes action. Or The Brain That Changes Itself.) But that requires openness to at least the little things, the subtleties. And no character in Norwegian Wood will ever really unlock the door.

Overall Thoughts

I think anyone who reads this will admit that it is not a 'Grace' book, in the same way that my high school book club apologized to me after we read American Psycho together. The helplessness and anxiety pervading it goes against a lot of what I tend to love from my books—that even when there is a crisis, or a sadness, or a weight, that there is always a way out. Stay active.

Even after spending the last few days reading books to rinse this one out of my brain, per se, it still haunts me.

Which, paradoxically, is also something I seek from my favorite books: that they feel impactful (in whatever way) and distinctive. Norwegian Wood is definitely that too, so I understand its role in litfic and our canon of classics. I'm glad I read it and don't regret doing so, but wouldn't reread; this is a one-and-done for me. It can fade as a memory, thanks! Still, it does have a lot of value.

Related Reads

fiction—isolation within yourself / Good Old Neon (story) by David Foster Wallace

fiction—friendships like Naoko / Looking for Alaska by John Green

fiction—emotional distance / Dear Life by Alice Munro

fiction—similar disoriented loss / The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

attachment / Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller

changing your mind or worldview overall / The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

changing when you don't feel like it / Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky