Norwegian Wood

“If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark”

3.5/5⭐

This is a difficult book to review because if I don’t look too deeply, I loved it. The writing was stunningly beautiful, and the surreal atmosphere was all-encompassing, but if I take a little time to examine the pieces that make up the whole, I start to see a lot more that makes me uncomfortable, a lot more that feels unnecessary, or, worst of all, a lot more that was uninteresting.

I have read a couple other books by this author, famous for his magical realism, and have loved them. He has an incredible way of writing stories about normal people, doing normal things, in a way that feels whimsical and a little otherworldly. Norwegian Wood is definitely his most grounded work, but it retains that wonderfully strange atmospheric feel.

This is a simple story of a college student navigating the transition into his twenties. He meets a cast of interesting characters (there are no flat characters; everyone feels real and unique) as he tries to figure out what he wants and who he is, but as the book goes on the usual love triangles and existentialism of the coming-of-age genre start to surface. The main character becomes a little too whiny, too self-pitying, and some of the magic wears thin.

On top of that, Murakami leans into some of his worst habits, creating a few uncomfortable scenes that seem more geared toward shock value than story development.

The best way I can describe this book is a bad teen movie plot, written in the most beautiful prose.

As an author, I highly recommend Murakami (Wind-up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland are good places to start) but this one was a let down.

Some underline-worthy quotes:

“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one.”

“Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.”

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it…my experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”