Why I Chose… “Norwegian Wood” (Haruki Murakami)
The question every reader both loves and dreads to answer is
this one – what’s your favourite? There are never any short answers – and very
often, the result is a long list.
There are books which you read every summer, or every
winter. The ones that remind you of being five, or fifteen, or your college
years or your first love.
The books we remember fondly are the ones whose lines we
memorise and drop into conversation; whose characters we wish we could be like;
the ones whose worlds are those we could almost step into, which strike a chord
so deep we feel we’ve always known them and afterwards change our perception
slightly of our own world.
Norwegian Wood is one of those books.
It is a bittersweet tale of looking back, of an acutely felt
nostalgia for past youth and past loves. From hearing the Beatles song,
“Norwegian Wood”, Toru Watanabe is reminded of his first love, Naoko, and his
days as a university student in Tokyo negotiating the tumultuous change of the
Sixties. We are drawn into his reverie – the intoxicating detail of his
experiences, where each meal, each place and each person is minutely examined
and drawn – but with a warning that memory is falliable, liable to change or
fade away entirely. The books’ sadness lies not in that things are of the past,
but that we might forget them – that people and experiences which meant so much
to us and that we felt so intensely can be forgotten.
Even though the book deals starkly and honestly with issues
such as teenage suicide, mental illness, political protests and sexuality, it
is not a depressing book.
Trust me, it’s actually a pretty funny book, with dark
humour, comically eccentric characters and full of absurd happenings. If
Watanabe is the brooding mind of the novel, who organises and analyses the
story he’s telling, in an attempt to create meaning by telling a story, his
girlfriend Midori is its heart (and an absolute scene stealer). Her frank
conversation, open mind and emotional honesty teach Watanabe, and the reader,
that while the stories we make up in our mind to shape experience and meaning
can be beguiling, they are nothing compared to the courageous honesty of living
truly as ourselves in the present moment. His first love, Naoko, is tragically
haunted by her past and being stuck in a story which she feels can only have
one ending. Midori shows us that our choices are our own.
So, would I still choose “Norwegian Wood” as my favourite
book in a year’s time? Or in ten years, or even ten minutes? I hope so, and
believe so. For however many stories and worlds I discover and love in the
meantime, as the novel itself shows, we can never resist revisiting what we
once loved.
April Cursons
Beautifully written April, thank you!
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