Going on cathartic walks together every Sunday, the two grow closer, sharing their lives with one another as they struggle through two very different issues: depression and existential angst. Starting in suburban Japan with his initial encounter with her via best friend Kizuki, their lives intersect again in a chance encounter one year after the suicide of their lover and friend. Late 60s Tokyo is the setting for the novel, in which university student Watanabe’s relationship to Naoko forms the backbone of this narrative.
He translated lots of US authors and is steeped in western culture. It’s intentional, I think, as Murakami frequently references The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye – two books that Norwegian Wood definitely isn’t but certainly owes debts to, if only for establishing the genre it participates in: the bildungsroman (coming of age Murakami is *very* westernised. It would be easy to remove the Japanese names and be left with a book that could be easily mistaken for any one of its American counterparts. Considered the book that everyone in Japan has read, Norwegian Wood is what author MG Harris calls Murakami’s most Western novel, and I’m inclined to agree. Norwegian Wood might be most famous as the song by the Beatles, but there’s also a Japanese book to which it lends its title.
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