Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Published by Vintage Books, 2007, softcover, 388 pages, condition: new.

I found Norwegian Wood to be a beautifully optimistic book in the end. But it was a painful journey to arrive there. It is a wonderful book filled with some of Murakami's most beautiful prose. Our hero is Toru Wanatebe, a charming, honest, straight forward, no nonsense young man. Toru is perhaps Murakami's most easily identifiable lead character in all his books. Toru is wise beyond his years, a very deep thinker, and reads classic literature ~~ Mann, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. And he is very f***ed up.

The story is told by Toru ~~ again, let me be clear on this. Norwegian Wood is the story of Toru's journey into adulthood; Norwegian Wood is not the love story of Toru and Naoko. To make it so limits what Murakami achieves ~~ and what he achieves is brilliant. Toru moves to Tokyo for his university studies because he wants to get away from a difficult event ~~ the suicide of his best friend Kizuki. Kuzuki's death has shattered Toru; his only way forward is to move on.

Naoko, the girlfriend of Kuzuki also comes to Tokyo for the same reason; a chance encounter one day brings them together. Toru is in love with Naoko but Naoko cannot love him back; she is broken. She is filled with a darkness that no one can penetrate. She isn't fighting demons; she is the demon.

Into this world comes Midori; she is the anti-Naoko ~~ fun, vivacious and full of life. But as with everyone else in this world, Midori is broken as well. Midori falls in love with Toru; but the road to love is filled with obstacles. They each struggle to keep their demons in check in this world built upon passion, grief, sex, denial, friendships and death ~~ lots of death.

Maruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.

Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years. His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (199495), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (200910); the last was ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (19892019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts. His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for his use of magical realist elements. His official website cites Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has named Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently active writers. Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a memoir about his experience as a long distance runner.

His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world". Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", and is praised as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.