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Toru
and Naoko's college romance might have been perfectly simple and
predictable. They might have been confronted with the ordinary issues
of becoming young adults in a large foreign city. They might have
helped each other deal with the rites of passage into adulthood
despite the unusual circumstances of being a student in 1968. They
even might have faced up to these pressures and weathered through
together.
This might have been the case, were it not for the suicide of Kizuki,
Toru's best friend and Naoko's lover, a few years before. The reality
is much more bleak than what might have been. The repercussions
of Kizuki's death continue to spiral out and multiply, affecting
both of them deeply, marking their university days with difficult
questions about mortality, youth, and love.
Once close high school friends in a small town, Toru and Naoko stumble
into each other on a crowded Tokyo train and quickly revive their
friendship. They share a certain intimacy that neither has managed
to recreate with any one of their new classmates or dorm mates who
know nothing about the tragedy of their past. The renewal of their
friendship, however, does not help them to move forward. While together
trying to overcome the sadness of their adolescence, Toru and Naoko
find their grasp on the present-day spinning out of control. Toru,
the narrator, recounts how, on Naoko's birthday he felt "There was
something strange about Naoko's becoming twenty. I felt as if the
only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to
keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen
would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But
she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the
dead stay seventeen forever."
Despite his belief that they should remain rooted in the past, Toru
falls in love with his dead best friend's beautiful and unpredictable
girlfriend, waiting patiently for her to accept him as a lover in
his own right. Naoko, in turn, is unable to love him; she has only
a tenuous grasp on the present and values Toru most as a connection
to the past. Only years later does Toru realize what Naoko had understood
so much earlier, that they had no future together. He recounts how,
"The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply
I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to
forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories
of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to
forget her, to remember that she had existed."
NORWEGIAN WOOD is a simple story, simply told, with an emotion and
quiet retrospection characteristic of Murakami's trademark style,
especially in works like SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN. First
published in Japan in 1987, it is this novel that propelled him
into the forefront of the literary scene and made him Japan's biggest-selling
novelist. His characters are unpredictable and quirky as they share
poignant insights into growing up in the late '60s, losing loved
ones and accepting undeserved tragedies of youth.
--- Reviewed by Alison Kim
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