BY MICAH HORWITH and SONIA VALLABH

In print | Published September 22, 2005

Haruki Murakami is Japan’s most widely read contemporary author, though much of his material is written elsewhere; the influence of western — and pop — culture is so pervasive in his work it hardly warrants remark. Overseas, he is a critical favorite for novels whose genre might be called metaphysical detective sci-fi straight-faced absurdist. “Norwegian Wood” has been described as his most loved book. It lays genre-bending and surrealism aside to produce romance, of a sort.

The novel follows the early adulthood of introspective college student Toru Watanabe as he struggles through disaffection and towards emotional attachment in 1960s Japan. Toru was wounded in high school by the suicide of his best friend Kikuri, a tragedy that linked him to frail Naoko, Kikuri’s girlfriend in life and his mourner in death. Told through curtains of memory, an older Toru recounts his long wait for Naoko’s psychological convalescence. His passivity casts him as a Don Juan figure, who moves by chance through the lives of a series of women. Toru’s conflicting loyalties and preternatural familiarity with death make him worth reading, but his self-absorption and lack of direction prove frustrating. Though the book deserves credit for dealing with the heavy-handed emotions of a college undergrad, Toru’s deep uncertainty about his future may frustrate Swarthmore seniors facing graduation.

“Norwegian Wood” has a plot that meanders but remains unpredictable. It is full of sadness without the regret and unusual realism that is characteristic of this author. Murakami’s more bizarre predilections emerge in scenes that lend immediate interest to his characters. Naoko’s sanatorium roommate gives a startling account of her near-seduction by a demonic schoolgirl, and Toru’s friendship with a classmate is sealed when they play guitar as a neighborhood building burns to the ground. Even misty Naoko calls attention to herself when she warns of invisible bottomless wells ready to swallow the unwary. But the simple and unexplained tragedies near the heart of the story are allowed to stand on their own, and the novel is better for it; Murakami’s usual representation of chaos through the surreal would be inappropriate in a story this quiet and self-contained.

Sex permeates the novel, but not in a spectacular way. Though forever on Toru’s mind, the act itself is mundane and often sad. By handling it with so little ceremony Murakami conveys the way in which sex is a facet of life as rife with disappointment as any other, perhaps all the more so for all the hopes brought to it: dreams of transformation or escape, of connection. By emphasizing the ways in which sex isolates people from each other even as it brings them together, these scenes feed into the book’s larger questions about isolation and normalcy. Every character comes to this book from a place of profound solitude. Even Toru, whose narrative links them all, is a loner who can’t seem to handle more than one close friend at a time, and who turns to such distant figures as Gatsby for company.

Pocketed off from the world, against what standard can one judge the normalcy of one’s own life? Playing out sexual fantasies with your 13-year-old piano pupil … normal? The book seems to suggest that it’s no more abnormal than plenty of what passes in the workday world. Many of the most pleasant, routine moments in the book take place at a sanatorium for the mentally unstable. Outside, ordinary people just trying to hold their lives together are dying one by one.

There are many things of which Norwegian Wood is not afraid. Sex is one. Cliches are another, though it could afford to be slightly more cautious here. Some of the big, windy philosophy with which Murakami paints death and healing cloys in its familiarity. However, in staying close to Toru and the specifics of those he knows, Murakami avoids miring his story in this trap. He is also not afraid of silence, even awkward or painful silence, and here he reaps big benefits; the interactions he depicts read as honest, if not always pretty, because of it.

In the end, Toru’s lack of ambition reflects back upon the novel, the sparseness of which leaves us to wonder about the world outside Toru — his family background, childhood circumstances and 1960s Tokyo itself. Though Toru tells the story two decades removed, there is an odd lack of perspective, and indeed a disinterest in anything beyond the restrictive world of Toru’s college years. An isolated and bracing exception comes halfway through the novel, when we glimpse one character’s fate and witness the following scene in a completely different light. More of this reevaluation of the past would have been welcome, but even so, the depiction of a young man wrestling with death is uncommon enough to support an interesting and very readable novel.

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