Haruki Murakami’s, Norwegian Wood- A Haunting Tale Of Individual Crisis.
Goodreads Synopsis: When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire — to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Norwegian Wood is a difficult book to sum up. It leaves us with open ended questions and just in a general state of confusion. However, I believe it is the lack of conclusion which allows each reader to draw something personal from the story.
It is a postmodern love story, which entails that there is a very unconventional approach to love and sex. The societal idea of monogamy and an almost sacred approach to love is discarded in the book. Murakami creates a space; the cosmos of the novel is enveloped in disassociation. All the events that occur in the novel seem to take place in a distant landscape. There isn’t any typical magical realism, as common to a Murakami novel. However, everything within the novel still feels distant and spaced out. It is an incredibly honest exploration of sexual relationships. Murakami beautifully trades in gray areas, avoiding the binaries. The protagonist in the novel, Toru Watanabe, is analogous to a sponge. He rarely opposes or imposes on others. Rather, he is a passive receiver in a number of stories and shared experiences. Another point of focus that I found fascinating in the book is- routine and monotony. Most of our days are usually uneventful and we all go through a cyclical existence around regularity. Watanabe’s age and time reflects this regularity. The book talks about memory- of how you can essentially shape up your memory, distort it, or become obsessed with it. Norwegian Wood also has an interesting stance on death and living. It accepts death as a part of life, rather than being a far-off event in the future. It accepts that death is everywhere. And sometimes, choosing death over life is that much easier. There is an interesting dimension between the thin lines of life and death. In this viewpoint, food plays a pivotal role. Many of the interactions between the characters often centers around food. Toru and the other characters share a meal and bond over them. The book beautifully portrays this very essential and almost primal desire to eat and to stay alive through meals. While starvation and the lack of food is connected to death; life centers around sharing meals. The writing of the book (translated) is lucid and very easy to get through.
This book will probably not be enjoyable to everyone who reads it, and it certainly helps to read it when you have gained the maturity of mind. It could simply be read as an overcomplicated love story. But, there is more to the story than just that. In a way, this book cherishes the universal theme of individual crisis- how we all go through their threads and how we all cope up. I would also advice to read the book with the most non-judgmental mindset you can muster. As for me, I found the book incredibly melancholic and incredibly honest.
