Norwegian Wood

Rating:
Summary: The best Murakami novel ever! Read it and weep!
Review: True, the earlier translation by Birnbuam was very good. A kind of lie is being generated by the media and the publisher. In fact, Norwegian Wood, which is by far Murakami's best work ever, and a milestone in Japanese literature, was translated into English before and attracted many fans. Me, too. But the publisher decided that releasing WOOD in the early 1990s would not be good for Murakami's career in the US, (read: reviews and sales), because they wanted to develop his image first with his other books. Which they did. But it is not true to say the Haruki didn't authorize a translation before or that there was legal action problems. No, it was a pure marketing move by the editors in Japan and New York, and it was dishonest. Fans have been waiting for years for this book, and it is a real crime to have kept the book back under the pretense of publishing poppycock. That said, let Murakami someday tell the truth in an interview (he will, he will); meanwhile, read the book. It is by far the greatest piece of Japanese literature in the last 50 years and if you really want to understand the Japan that is today Japan, read this book...and weep. Murakami got it right. His publishers should confess to the public and stop this marketing PR spin. Give us a break, Haruki! So, yes, five stars, ten stars, this book will go down in history as Murakami's best!

Rating:
Summary: beautiful little love story, but much more
Review: i don't understand why murakami has been so reluctant for this work to be released in english. while it is on the surface a much simpler tale than "wind up bird" (although there are springs!), it's still poetic, beautifully sad and often quite profound.

toru, his japanese everyman, tries to be a good person and get through life with as little interaction as possible. unfortunately he's surrounded by death, which takes many terrible and beautiful forms.

murakami is always up to sly literary tricks: toru brings a copy of mann's "magic mountain" with him on his first visit to the otherworldly asylum where naoko is "hospitalized". it takes quite some time before someone asks what he's reading, and her reaction is delightful.

my only (tiny) reservation would be that it lacks the feeling of open-endedness in conclusion- there aren't enough loose threads, something i've come to enjoy in murakami's work.

still, a splendid and deeply emotional work.

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite pain
Review: This is one of the more magical and sensual books that I've read this year. Toru Watanabe is a Tokyo student at the end of the sixties. Western culture abounds (the novel is named after the Beatles' tune). 'Norwegian Wood' is Naoko's favourite song, and one that she pays her friend Reiko to play. It's a song that seems destined to torment her for the rest of her life. In his own subtle way, Murakami suggests to us the power of great art. This novel also belongs to that class. Once you've started to read 'Norwegian Wood', you'll become addicted to it. Murakami creates characters that reside in your mind as real beings. They're people who you will come to love. His fiction also transcends cultural barriers, in that 'Norwegian Wood' could have been set anywhere. Its emotional centre is that of painful adolescence, so any casual reader will have a great deal to identify with the main protagonists from the off. Just as Toru is forced into the past by a single note of 'Norwegian Wood', this book will also compel you to confront your own past, the people that you have loved and maybe lost. The sixties student rebellions seem to have shook almost every part of the world, and Murakami's novel does feature such a revolt. No doubt the fuel blockades currently afflicting Britain and Europe will be similarly remembered in future years. In one revealing scene, Murakami has Midori articulate that great truth that when higher education chooses to debate the class struggle, it often does so in terms that exclude the working class (note my indoctrinated and ironical use of 'articulate'). Of course, I read a translation (in the Harvill edition, presented like a box of Cubans, "hand-rolled on the thighs of maidens"), but the power of Murakami's prose shines through. Toru extols the exquisite prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Murakami cannot have had a better writing tutor, where every word is a wonder in itself.

Naoko and Reiko have decided to exile themselves away from the mental torments of everyday life in a remote mountain community. Toru comes to visit Naoko, his sometime lover. Together, they share the memory of Kizuki, Noako's boyfriend, who inexplicably killed himself at the age of 17. Naoko has far more difficulty expressing her feelings than Toru, something that he finds both beguiling and painful. Under the loving care of Reiko, Toru and Naoko try to explore their feelings for each other. What was the truth behind their night of shared passion? Reiko believes that Toru may be the best tonic for Naoko (such great irony), but Naoko has her own reasons for pushing Toru away, despite knowing how much she needs him. In one telling episode, Naoko reveals herself to Toru as she sleepwalks, a troubled soul reaching out for help.

Denied physical contact with the one woman he really cares about, Toru satisfies his bodily needs with a series of one night stands, out on the town in the company of his twisted but content friend Nagasawa. But even as his body is sated, Toru cannot help but feel disgust. However, his torment is tempered by Midori, who pushes her way into his life. She does not seem to mind that Toru is alienated, and far from content to be the Norm. She loves the peculiar way Toru talks and almost consults him as if he were a guru, demanding that he relate his carnal fantasies to her. Midori has been to an all-girl school, and seems to have an endless fascination for those pleasures that she has yet to experience. However, she too has her pain and a peculiar kind of madness. Inevitably, it seems, Toru is torn between his feelings for the inaccessible Naoko, and Midori's passion for him... Will Toru be forced down the path that has led so many of his friends to self-oblivion?

'Norwegian Wood' is a great, powerful novel. The kind of art that stays with you for the rest of your life, the kind of music which makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand tall, to force a shiver of delight and pain through your body, to make your mouth starch dry. There are excellent characters, from the lowly Storm Trooper, to the warm and loving Reiko. There is also great subtlety, surprising in such an emotional novel. This is, above all, a very sensual work of art, with every feeling touched upon and plucked with the greatest of skill.

Rating:
Summary: Cool, mysterious, and fantastic.
Review: While not as complex and creepy as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", "Norwegian Wood" is far more affecting, and set me off on a Murakami kick. Although some seem to dismiss the book as a simple love story, Murakami's penetrating eye raises it above potboiler status. Toru's travails are ultimately universal, despite the iconoclastic story-telling, replete with Murakami's usual quirks. The greatest thing about the book, I think, is the gentleness of it, the silence. Even though it is chock-full of Western references (beginning with the title), the book has the simplicity and inevitable quality of a Japanese brush painting. And it only took fifteen years for an authorized English translation...

Rating:
Summary: The long wait for reprinting was worth it.
Review: I was hooked on Murakami when I read the first page of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronical" and have since read all of the novels he's written that have been translated into english. I anxiously anticipated the the reprinting of Norwegian Wood and could not break myself away from the novel as I read it through the night. Until I discovered Murakami, Nabakov was my favorite author. Murakami digs into your psyche and lets loose your imagination like no other author, except maybe Pynchon. In Norwegian Wood, Murakami paints the words on the pages that not only create vivid images, but images which transform the reader into the characters own minds, evoking their feelings and emotions. I can still visualize and "feel" being on top of a water tower with the images of a lone lightening bugs' dim (sorrowful?) illumination leaving it's trailing path imprinted on my retina. I can "feel" what the character is feeling at that moment and almost hear and smell the city beneath. That is what Murakami does best of all. Reading him is better than Zen. (And if you are out there Haruki, shut yourself in a room with a bottle of whiskey and don't come out until you've written another book -- please.)

Rating:
Summary: HYPNOTIC AND CHARMING
Review: If you think Murakami can only write about the weird things in life, then be prepared to be shocked by this deceptively simple tale of young love in modern Japan. Similar in tone to the recent "South of the Border, West of the Sun", though written many years earlier, this won't dazzle you with its invention, but Murakami's deadpan, heartfelt style fills the book with more feeling and heartbreak that amply makes up for its simplicity.

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for the book, 3 1/2 stars for the new translation
Review: Why Murakami didn't allow a widespread English release of Alfred Birnbaum's translation is cause for some serious head scratching. Although Rubin does a more than adequate job (his translation work was better in WIND-UP BIRD), he lacks the pacing and pitch-perfect understanding of language that was the hallmark of Birnbaum.

That said, Norwegian Wood is such a special book . Read it once and it will change your life.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to find, but good to read
Review: If you ever find yourself in Japan, or at one of the Kinokuniya branches in New York or San Francisco, be sure to pick up a copy of "Norwegian Wood," the runaway bestseller that made Haruki Murakami a superstar in Japan, now reasonably priced and available in the same attractive gold-boxed, two-part, red-and-green paperback volumes that Japanese schoolgirls supposedly used to carry to school every day, according to which volume coordinated with their outfits. It's hard to believe that this book was such a huge hit in Japan, given its intensely individualistic, introverted, isolated focus, which seems to clash so strongly with the collectivist Japanese orientation; it's even harder to imagine this being a book read widely by schoolchildren, with its themes of drunkenness, promiscuity, infidelity, masturbation, lesbianism, child molestation, brain damage, mental illness, suicide, and death (all made lighter, however, by humorous tales of college dorm life and canny references to pop songs from the 60's). At any rate, this is definitely one of Murakami's best books, surpassed only by "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (in ambition, but not in quality of writing). Murakami fans will find themes from his other works in "Norwegian Wood"--the theme of choosing a long-lost fantasy lover over a more realistic current partner from "South of the Border, West of the Sun," or the theme of choosing to live in comfortable isolation or complicated reality from "Wonderland," for example. The book that "Norwegian Wood" probably most resembles, though, is "Wind-Up Bird," in its protagonist's prolonged, agonizing quest to come to terms with his past and secure a solid identity for himself. "Norwegian Wood" works in almost the opposite way from "Wind-Up Bird," however--whereas in "Wind-Up Bird," the main character isolated himself in a fantasy world so he could reflect on how to recapture his real life, in "Norwegian Wood," the main character tries to plod along in the real world, all the while idealizing a former fantasy life he still wants to keep real.

"Norwegian Wood" is almost impossible to get a hold of, but for fans who can manage to find it, it's a real treat and worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: Love, Nostalgia and the Beatles
Review: I read Norwegian Wood years ago when the English language version was first published in Japan, and even today I can't hear the Beatles song without drifting back into the nostalgia of this book. I hear the song and suddenly I'm on a plane thinking back on college days, and thinking of the pain and love of the tough relationship between the Toru and Naoko, the book's two main characters. I've read other books by Haruki Murakami since then, which I enjoyed, but none of them gripped me, or stuck with me, like Norwegian Wood.

Rating:
Summary: Norwegian Wood will cement Murakami's career
Review: Forget all of Murakami's other books: this is the book to read and remember. Why the publisher waited so long to publish it in the USA is really a crime and should be the subject of a major literary investigative piece, but with-holding it from English readers for so long was really a dis-service to the author and his readers. Money should not enter into things like this. NORWEGIAN WOOD will hit the USA like no other Murakami book; it will be the subject of countless reviews and interviews and there WILL be a Hollywood movie. I read it in 1991. Absolutely the most beautiful Japanese novel ever ever ever! Bravo Murakami! Boo his timid publishers for with-holding the book so long. Good marketing, terrible literary manners!