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.

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