“What happens when people open their hearts?” Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this. “They get better,” she said. — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood begins with a flashback. A thirty-seven-year-old Toru Watanabe hears a cover of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and is transported back to his youth, reliving the story of his first love. In this Proustian moment, he ruminates on the elusive nature of memory: “Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail.” For Toru, memory is fleeting, but the feelings of love and loss that defined his youth endure beyond its transience.

Since its publication in 1987, Norwegian Wood has become a bestseller, catapulting Haruki Murakami to literary stardom in Japan and beyond. Named after the iconic Beatles song, the book follows Toru Watanabe, a college student grappling with grief after the suicide of his best friend, Kizuki. In the wake of his death, Toru grows closer to Kizuki’s ex-girlfriend, Naoko, and they embark on a shared journey, navigating the trials of young adulthood in Tokyo. Several developments complicate their relationship, including Naoko’s mental illness and Toru’s burgeoning relationship with Midori, a vibrant character who serves as a foil to Naoko. Despite their struggles, these characters continue to resonate with readers as ordinary college students. Their verisimilitude is, in part, what makes the book compelling.

Despite their struggles, these characters continue to resonate with readers as ordinary college students.

However, Norwegian Wood is more than a love story. While Toru’s relationship with his love interests might be readily summarized by the first two lines of the song “Norwegian Wood”—“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me”—Toru’s relationship with death is far more complicated. 

Toru is both fascinated and haunted by the idea of death, having been so impacted by Kizuki’s suicide that he feels it killed him too: “When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.” The rest of the novel chronicles Toru’s attempt at understanding how to continue living in spite of the great paradox of life, that is by living, “we nurture death.” He comes to a profound realization: “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.” Armed with this truth, Toru gets closer to finding words for his inexpressible grief. 

Yet, these poignant moments are lost amid the relentless drag of the book. Its greatest insights are confounded by Toru’s inability to progress beyond them. Perhaps, this is intentional; grief is, after all, not a linear process. Still, much of the book is bogged down by the weight of Toru’s existentialism and the tedium of his life—slowing the narrative to a crawl and making Murakami’s fixation on ennui feel unrelenting by the book’s midpoint. 

Yet, these poignant moments are lost amid the relentless drag of the book.

While Murakami’s portrayal of Toru’s struggles is at times moving, it’s also undermined by the incessant, repetitive nature of his sexual encounters. Make no mistake, sex in Norwegian Wood is far from erotic. At one point, Toru reflects on having sex with Naoko: “I am having intercourse with you now. I am inside you. But really this is nothing. It doesn’t matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies. All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh”—not exactly a description that stirs the loins.

Rather than an act of passion, sex serves as a symbol of yearning for intimacy, nostalgia, or release—making it an expression of Toru’s inner longings, a physical stand-in for what he fails to articulate through words. In Norwegian Wood, everything seems to lead to sex, but sex is about everything but sex.

This preoccupation with sex also feeds into the common critique of Murakami’s depiction of women. The usual argument is that the female characters are present only for sex, and because sex is a stand-in for Toru’s emotional turmoil, the women become one-dimensional characters reduced to symbols of his pain or relief. In other words, the women in the novel function less like fully realized characters and more like reflections of Toru’s mental state. This is particularly evident in the brash and sexually-liberated Midori, who seems to embody the manic pixie dream girl archetype.

In Norwegian Wood, everything seems to lead to sex, but sex is about everything but sex.

These criticisms are valid, but Murakami’s portrayal of the women remains oddly sympathetic, perhaps excessively so. Although Toru disparages his casual hookups, he adopts a more caring, nearly paternalistic attitude towards Naoko and Midori. Their flaws—Naoko’s mental illness and Midori’s professed selfishness—seem to only further endear them to him, in a way that almost diminishes the severity of their issues. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Murakami fetishizes their fragility, his fixation on saving the women from themselves does seem to evoke a certain kind of male fantasy.

Ultimately, Norwegian Wood conveys a poignant lesson about choosing life over death, although this message becomes muddled by the novel’s tedious pacing and its awkward portrayals of women. Still, for all its flaws, it’s easy to see why this novel gained Murakami a cult following. Its central message on the enduring human experience of navigating love and loss continues to resonate: “The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”

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HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Norwegian Wood can be purchased here.