Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is an incredible book. Please read it. And then please tell me what you think of it.
If you haven’t read The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye you’ll perhaps miss some of where the author is starting from, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. They’re both really short, if you want to read them. It’s OK, I’ll wait.
The book was originally published in two small volumes, a red one and a green one. Legend has it that when it came out, the Japanese teens who hang out in Tokyo commercial districts wearing weird outfits started wearing red or green themes to show which half of the book they liked. Alas, my copy is just one volume, with no indication of where the original division lay.
I don’t usually like reading book reviews, so I’ll attempt not to write one here. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that it’s one of those books I feel (as you can see) the need to tell people to read. Here’s a passage from the book - the place where it suddenly hit me that I was reading something special:
Once inside the cab, I asked Hatsumi, "Where do you want to go? Back to Ebisu?" Her flat was in Ebisu.
She shook her head.
"OK. How about a drink somewhere?"
"Yes," she said with a nod.
"Shibuya," I told the driver.
Folding her arms and closing her eyes, Hatsumi sank back into the corner of the seat. Her small gold earrings caught the light as the taxi swayed. Her midnight-blue dress seemed to have been made to match the darkness of the interior. Every now and then her lightly made-up, beautifully formed lips would quiver slightly as though she had caught herself on the verge of talking to herself. Watching her, I could see why Nagasawa had chosen her as his special companion. There were any number of women more beautiful than Hatsumi, and Nagasawa could have made any of them his. But Hatsumi had some quality that could send a tremor through your heart. It was nothing forceful. The power she exerted was a subtle thing, but it called forth deep resonances. I watched her all the way to Shibuya, and wondered, without ever finding an answer, what this emotional reverberation could be that I was feeling.
It finally hit me some dozen or so years later. I had gone to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlour, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red - my hand, the plate, the table, the world - as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything. In the midst of this overwhelming sunset, the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained - and would for ever remain - unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, almost burnt-in longing: forgotten for years that such feelings had ever existed inside me. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears.
Amazon link, fan bibliography
