I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15
Personal note: In this novel the eccentric character Midori suggests eating lunch in the Takashimaya Department store in Nihonbashi, to which the hero of the novel expresses surprise and dismay. One imagines that in 1969 a cool-cat college student like Toru wouldn’t be caught dead in such a symbol of stodgy affluence. In fact, whenever my wife and I visited Tokyo from Okinawa (1986-92), we ate tonkatsu in the Takashimaya Department store in Nihonbashi. We liked its air of resolute unhipness.
ノルウェイの森 Noruwei no Mori 1987
Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami
This novel is a first-person narrative of Toru Watanabe who in his late 30s is looking back to the late Sixties when he was a 19-year-old college student in Tokyo. The themes of the novel are coming of age, love, sexuality, mortality, mental illness, and the guilt and grief of those left behind after inexplicable deaths by suicide.
Watanabe is an ordinary guy and sees himself as an ordinary guy. But in fact he is not ordinary in the sense that he sees through bushwah and flapdoodle. For example, when he looks at student activism, whether right or left, he sees little more than empty words, half-digested theory, inflexible ways of thinking, and unbecoming intolerance for anybody that doesn’t get with their program.
Sensitive and thoughtful, Watanabe listens to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and reads serious things like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Beneath the Wheel (everybody read Hesse in the Sixties), and The Centaur by John Updike (forgotten now, it did win the National Book Award in 1964, beating Pynchon’s V). He holds himself apart from others, "hard to get" is his default setting but he listens closely and kindheartedly. His introspection and shyness make him attractive to a certain kind of female.
Why so aloof? Watanabe, at only 19 years of age, does not have the experience to come to grips with the suicide of his best friend Kizuki two years before.
Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust… It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took Kizuki, death took me as well.
Kizuki’s GF Naoko has taken the suicide badly. With symptoms of depression and anxiety, she has ended up in a sanatorium north of Kyoto. Murakami’s narrative of Watanabe's trip to visit her there is masterful. Naoko’s roommate Reiko is a fully realized character, with a horrendous story about loss of reputation.
Watanabe’s search for values in a money-mad culture rests on his determination to be responsible for Naoko and bring her back to the world of the living. Naoko is the broken angel that many readers will sympathize with, but I thought the more vivid character was the working-class Midori with her plain-spoken ways and impatience with baloney. Midori, whose father told her she should have died instead of her mother, on love:
Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don’t want it any more and throw it out of the window. That’s what I’m looking for.
Midori was smart to test Watanabe by springing on him a task: helping her take care of a sick family member in a hospital. Murakami’s narratives of Watanabe's stint in the hospital and the scene of the fire near Midori’s house were both incredible. Expressive and willing to make an impression, volatile Midori is a challenging GF. She comes on strong, lacks tact, talks unlady-like and likes porn movies, all things that challenge Toru to put the book down, stop brooding about mortality, and live a little.
Nagasawa is Toru’s crony in the dorm. He is a brilliant and has ambitions to work in the Foreign Ministry, not an easy goal by any means. His problem, like more than few spectacularly brilliant people, is that he uses his smarts and charm to use people, especially women, despite hanging with a GF with a lot of heart, Hatsumi, insightful enough to tell Watanabe that he’s not like other guys. Nagasawa identifies Watanabe’s bullshit detector to be as acute as his own, but mistakenly believes Watanabe is as selfish as he himself is.
Watanabe’s practically the same as me. He may be a nice guy, but deep down in his heart he’s incapable of loving anybody. There’s always some part of him somewhere that’s wide awake and detached. He just has that hunger that won’t go away.
Nagasawa makes the error of thinking that everybody always looks out for #1 and worldly success is going to make him happy, that he’ll reach a point where he can say, “I have arrived.” Nagasawa is as deluded about our ever-changing world as any other self-styled “alpha male.”
It’s a sad novel, filled with characters that can find no way past the realization of the sadness of life. The realization that marks adulthood, Reiko claims, is “Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.” Death puts a period on everything but it’s a part of life that gives life meaning.
Murakami, to my mind, is a Japanese writer because we always know what season it is and what the weather is doing. He even works in cherry blossoms and the pathos of things (mono no aware 物の哀れ)!
After I read it, I stayed on the porch and let my eyes wander out to the garden, full now with the freshness of spring. An old cherry tree stood there, its blossoms nearing the height of their glory. A soft breeze blew, and the light of day lent its strangely blurred, smoky colors to everything.
Plus, novels starring miserable college students haunted by suicide go back to Natsume Sōseki. So does the Meiji era theme of “what are we Japanese, where are we Japanese going, how did we get here.” Like poet Matsuo Bashō and many other writers, the protagonist goes on a hitori-tabi (ひとり旅 solo wandering) after a tragedy. So, I think critics that say Murakami isn’t “Japanese enough” are missing elements that clearly appear in this novel.
Marakami isn’t so Japanese, I guess, when he makes constant references to pop jazz and classical music. He also injects utterly unexpected unsettling scenes. e.g. the description of the well by the lost character of pale Naoko; e.g. the episodes of casual and meaningless sex that Toru subjects himself and various women to; e.g. Midori presenting herself wearing not a stitch before her father’s memorial portrait on the family altar.
It’s as an existentialist cosmopolitan Murakami seems to be saying to avoid being depressed, anxious, suicidal, and in an asylum, don’t be tools and victims of terrible events, jobs, companies, causes, mass media, mass education, mass advertising, the entire shithole of online shit.
Other Books about Japan
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