Norwegian Wood

Toru Watanabe, hearing a Beatles song on a landing aircraft, is thrown back to 1969 and his first years at university in Tokyo. His closest friend Kizuki died at seventeen; Naoko, Kizuki's girlfriend, and Toru are the two people left holding it.

Naoko enters a sanatorium in the hills near Kyoto. Meanwhile Toru meets Midori, who is direct, alive and wants things, and the novel becomes a choice he cannot bring himself to make.

Two people survive a suicide and try to work out what they owe each other afterwards.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Murakami drops the surrealism entirely here. The prose is plain, first person, and unusually still: long passages of walking, cooking, listening to records, sitting in rooms.

That flatness carries the grief. Nothing is dramatised, and the effect of the death is shown through what has quietly stopped being possible.

Nothing is dramatised, and that is how the loss registers.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The book is about the survivors of suicide and about depression as a condition rather than a metaphor, and it is careful and unsentimental with both.

It contains several deaths by suicide described plainly, and readers for whom that is difficult should know in advance. Murakami has said the novel is the one he found hardest to write for that reason.

It sold in extraordinary numbers in Japan and briefly made Murakami unable to live there. He has described it as an experiment in writing a completely realistic novel, which he did not repeat in the same way.

For readers who find his surrealism a barrier, this is the entry point. For readers who love the surrealism, it is the outlier.

The novel is set during the student occupations, and Toru's detachment from them is deliberate: he walks past barricades on the way to a lecture and finds the politics theatrical. Murakami uses the period as the thing his characters are conspicuously failing to join, which is part of the book's argument about private grief occurring inside public events.

Naoko, bound to a shared past and to an institution in the hills, and Midori, noisy and alive and demanding attention now, are constructed as an explicit choice between remaining with the dead and continuing. Murakami is unusually schematic here, and the novel's power comes from how unresolved Toru remains between them.

One of them is the past and one is the present, and he cannot bring himself to choose.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The mountain retreat where patients and staff live on equal terms, farming and talking, is the book's strangest and best sequence. It is presented without irony as a genuinely decent way to live with mental illness, and it functions as a place outside ordinary time that Toru must eventually leave.

The older woman who shares Naoko's room, plays guitar and tells her own long story is the novel's most sympathetic figure and the one most readers remember. Her account of how her life came apart is a complete novella embedded in the book, and she carries the ending.

This is the Murakami novel with no talking cats, no parallel worlds and no wells — a straight, melancholy campus romance. He has said the popularity it brought was uncomfortable and that readers arriving from it to his other books are frequently disappointed, which is worth knowing in both directions.

Suicide is central and is described more than once, including a death that opens the book and another late on. The novel does not sensationalise it and does not explain it away, and it is written with a flatness that some readers find honest and others find bleak past the point of usefulness.