Norwegian Wood Book Club Member Review

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