“What happens when people open their hearts?"
“They get better.”
- Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood is a teenage love story/coming of age story set mainly in Tokyo and the mountains of Kyoto. The name derives from the eponymous song by the Beatles.

I have very mixed feelings about the book. On one hand, the book has a very pulp feeling to it. There are too many sex scenes described with unnecessary details (the scenes aren’t even interesting, just teenagers jerking each other off) and every conversation between the protagonists eventually converges towards sex, love, and masturbation. The protagonists are all immature teenagers mostly self-centered and suffering from the ever so familiar teenage angst.

On the other hand, interspersed between these moments of promiscuity are moments of death and sadness, one learns about the suicide epidemic in Japan, the detachment of the youth from the society. The teenage protagonists in this book see more death in a span of a few years than can be possible healthy for them. Suicide seems almost like a career choice, something to do when you think you need a change in life.

The main protagonist, Toru Watanabe, is a very ordinary loser college student, innocent, lacking ambition, depressed and lonely for most part of the book, falling in and out of love with two girls in his life in a really complicated manner. The poor guy’s life in Tokyo starts casually and before long gets completely out of hand and extremely tangled thanks to these two girls, who themselves lead extremely convoluted lives. Cherchez la femme.

The book is very poetic, the name of the book is after all inspired by a Beatles song. Murakami describes the travels in Tokyo, the bus rides in Kyoto, Toru’s college dormitory life, the season’s of Japan, with the gentleness and flair of an impressionist painter. A lot of conversations are about sex and love, but they’re also very honest and sincere. Toru is a non-judging person and hence a perfect observer and listener, a person to whom everybody else seems to speak their minds freely, and every few pages there would be a deeply incisive and insightful statement about the human nature.

I used to listen to a lot of Beatles songs but I only ever paid attention to their musical qualities and listened for their entertainment value. But after reading this book I now have a greater appreciation of the Beatles, I now think of them as more than musicians, I now understand better why they were so popular, why their music affected so many. When you read this book you feel the same gentleness you feel when listening to “My Guitar gently weeps” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, reading this book makes you acutely aware of it.

You should read this book for it’s staggering honesty and it’s vulnerable and deeply flawed protagonists. It is a story without a moral, a poetry without reason.