Set against the upheaval of the student movement in Japan, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is a marvellous tale about love, death, loss and friendship.
The story circles around the narrator, Toru Watanabe, who enrols in a private university in Tokyo to escape his past in Kobe – where Murakami grew up.
Told retrospectively, 37-year-old Toru recalls an exquisitely painful period of time dating back to his college years. The memory is conjured by the sound of the Beatles song Norwegian Wood playing in the background on a plane that has just landed in Hamburg, Germany. In an attempt to preserve the minutest details of his past “with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones,” Toru’s “imperfect” memories begin to unravel in an eleven-chapter book, and it’s a whirlwind of love, sorrow and heartbreak.
The story itself becomes a tale about the aftermath of turmoil and the ways in which one deals with the result of a painful event. Those who have seen Oscar nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, will recognise a similar focus on the aftershock rather than the crime. Quite cleverly, everything centres around the incident without actually portraying it once on screen, a structural technique you might find in murder mysteries (although some dramas tend to have spoilers or flashbacks). In this sense, Norwegian Wood is a love story told with similar features to a murder mystery.
However, Murakami’s novel isn’t completely bleak. Rather than dwelling on the process of grief and mourning, Toru finds modes of travel to distract his mind. In fact, the novel is permeated with various travel episodes, predominantly focusing on the aimless wanderer or the flâneur figure. On Sundays, Toru’s boredom leads him to walk for miles and miles in and around Tokyo, often without any particular reason or sense of direction:
“Where are we?” asked Naoko, as if noticing our surroundings for the first time.
“Komagome,” I said. “Didn’t you know? We made this big arc.”
“Why did we come here?”
“You brought us here. I was just following you.”
A very similar promenade scene is mirrored six chapters later during the early stages of Toru’s friendship with Midori Kobayashi. The act of getting lost in the big city is the greatest distraction for these young characters: they amble, potter, stroll, trek and wander for hours on end in an attempt to distract their minds, even if they don’t say much to each other along the way.
“Still, I’m glad we had a chance to talk. We’ve never done that before, just the two of us,” I said, trying without success to recall what we had talked about.
The backdrop of Tokyo’s incredible scenery and lively city life intertwined with the exploration of love and relationships is a reminder of Lost in Translation. With similar moments of alienation and isolation, Tokyo’s cityscape is riddled with things to do to pass the time if you dig deeper. For Toru, this might be grabbing a bite to eat with his fellow drama classmate and potential lover Midori, or stumbling upon a quiet café somewhere along the way.
Attending these strolls and city adventures behind the eyes of Toru will certainly instil a bit of wanderlust in you, so prepare to be inspired and captivated. Haruki Murakami might not write fairy tales, but if he were to release a Tokyo travel guide, he might just have another bestseller. I know I’d have a read!
Title picture: Rinko Kikuchi as Naoko in the film version of Norwegian Wood
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