Norwegian Wood

Review

This is my second Murakami book, and there’s a better than not chance it’ll be my last. Norwegian Wood seems well regarded by most people, reviews on Goodreads mention frequently that it is the book “everyone in Japan has read.” It has been recommended to me somewhat highly, though not always as a ‘good’ representation of Murakami’s broader ouevre.

Unfortunately, the things I bumped against in my first Murakami read (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) are all here, and in huge force. There are maybe six major characters, and four of those are women. Our protagonist is good at most things, in that he has no trouble with school, no real problem finding work, seems to infatuate women, and apparently fucks so well that at least one of the female characters swears off sex afterwards. Do you think this sounds true to life? I’ll get back to the sex in a minute.

I get perplexed when I see people talk about how beautiful the prose in Murakami’s writing is. Perhaps I am missing something in Jay Rubin’s translations. To me, the words read as stunted and disjointed. I like sparse writing, but sometimes it feels incomplete or cold in a way that doesn’t feel right. That said, sometimes the writing does shine. I think this is probably the best paragraph in the book:

Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps. The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. The world around me was on the verge of great transformations. Death had already taken John Coltrane who was joined now by so many others. People screamed there’d be revolutionary changes—which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the “changes” that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning. I trudged along through each day in its turn, looking up only rarely, eyes locked on the endless swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.

(page 236)

I respond to these words, they ring true to me. Time passes so quickly in the long view, but second to second, sometimes feels stopped dead. This sort of writing shows up when the book turns to depression and suicide.

There are a lot of letters throughout, and almost all of them end in only, “Good-bye.” Each time, I expected the next sentence to read either, “X died the next day,” or for some rupture in narrative to happen, resulting in the contemporary Watanabe dying by suicide. The female characters are often the mouthpieces for depression, with them saying or writing things like, “I don’t want to interfere with your life. I don’t want to interfere with anybody’s life,” or this exchange between Watanabe and Hastumi:

“But there’s nothing I can do but wait for him,” said Hatsumi with her chin in her hand. “You love him that much?” “I do,” she answered without a moment’s hesitation.

A lot of the depression talk feels true, worryingly true. There were times reading this that I felt dark clouds in my own head. Those clouds don’t usually need any help at all to shroud my world, but the book certainly brought them forth. All of these characters are living in the shadow of a suicide, and the suicides pile up throughout. Watanabe thinks to himself, “Kizuki’s death had robbed me forever of a part of my adolescence.”

I read a lot about suicide and depression. There is an idea called suicidal contagion, basically an epidemiological model of suicide whereby it spreads. I read about it for the first time in Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, sometime in 2013 or 14. It’s something I believe to be true, and to be honest, a major protective factor for me for those times in my life when I have felt at my lowest, one of the three (one of the others is concern for my cat).

Anyway, all of this rings very true to me. These parts of the book are strong. I’m not sure they’re always good or great, but they are true in all the ways that matter.

One quick note on the way Reiko is described: I genuinely forgot her age until the last third of the book. All we hear of Reiko (other than that time she let a 13-year-old…) is her incredible wrinkles. I kept picturing an 80-year-old woman, an ancient relic with a map of the earth on her face. She’s like 40 years old! Fuck off, Murakami.

Let’s talk about sex. I mentioned earlier that Watanabe is apparently the greatest fuck to bless the land of the rising sun, well, his encounters as described leave a lot to be desired. Early in the book, he is with a woman who is in tears and sleeps with her, conflating bodily response with consent. When this happened, I flipped back to the start of the book to find the publication date (1987) to see what I’d be dealing with. Virtually all of the sex in the book is written poorly, but also in such a way that it seems deeply weird. Authors can write about sexual assault, rapes, suicide, and everything else under the sun. There is nothing wrong with that. But, when the writing is a combination of poor and without a sense of reality, it does not work for me.

Something I notice in the comments of some other negative reviews I’ve skimmed is a line of thought like, ‘well, there ARE people in the world like this, so he has the right to write about that.’ Sure. That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, appreciate it, or find it to be a moving piece of literature. Literature does not demand appreciation.

At the end of it all, the parts of this book that rang so beautifully true for me were weighed down until they drowned in the mud Watanabe described earlier. It all caps off with the finale of the story, which I find to be a ridiculous sexual fantasy that does not even have the benefit of being titillating to read. Grieving people do weird things – it’s true! Yet, the ending left it all feeling so bizarre and hollow as to wonder why I bothered to pick it up in the first place.

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Notes

• p5 - I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
• p8 - “Tell me how you could say such a thing,” she said, staring down at the ground beneath her feet. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. ‘Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.’ What’s the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I’d fall apart. I’ve always lived like this, and it’s the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I’d never find my way back.. I’d go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away.” . . .
• p44 - I feel grateful in my own way for the year of companionship you gave me. Please believe that much even if you believe nothing else. You are not the one who hurt me. I myself am the one who did that. This is truly how I feel.
  • TB: Like almost all of the letters in this book, it ends with simply “Good-bye.”
• p77 - “That’s the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything’s dark and you can’t see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that. I couldn’t stand it.”
• p79 - . . .Kizuki died that night, and ever since then a cold, stiffening wind had come between me and the world. This boy Kizuki: what had his existence meant to me? To this question I could find no answer. All I knew—with absolute certainty—was that Kizuki’s death had robbed me forever of a part of my adolescence. But what that meant, and what would come from it, were far beyond my understanding.
• p87 - . . .what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities.
• p111 - “The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”
• p146 - “I told you in my letter, didn’t I? I’m far worse than you think: it has far deeper roots. And that’s why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. . . .I don’t want to interfere with your life. I don’t want to interfere with anybody’s life.”
• p148 - “What makes us most normal,” said Reiko, “is knowing that we’re not normal.”
• p154 - TB: The first ¶ that starts on this page is Reiko describing a 13-year old girl starting to touch her inappropriately. Reiko uses the phrase, “dyed-in-the-wool-lesbian” which I guess might be period-accurate to the 50s, which I think is when this flashback is taking place. But it is very strange.
  • TB: From 154 to I guess around 157 we get a long and pretty detailed account of this ‘affair’ which could better be described as sexual assault, though who the victim and perpetrator are is probably open to interpretation, I guess. Reiko is 31-years-old here so it seems a little strange to imagine her as anything other than the perpetrator, but whatever. The whole account is not written like a victim describing an assault, though. It is written like a man is writing a lesbian porno while jerking himself off. I detest it.
• p164 - Every now and then as I walked along I would stop and turn and heave a sigh for no particular reason. I felt almost as if I had come to a planet where the gravity was a little different. Yes, of course, I told myself, feeling sad: I was in the outside world now.
• p174-5 - TB: long exchange between Watanabe and Mikio, where Mikio asks Watanabe to think about her while he jerks off, and then they have a conversation about blowjobs. It is a very strange conversation. Once again, it feels like a man writing what he’d fantasize a woman saying, rather than writing a character.
• p197 - People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
• p212 - It was Nagasawa, of course, who told me what had happened. His letter from Bonn said this: “Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something. This is unbearably sad and painful, even to me.” I ripped his letter to shreds and threw it away. I never wrote to him again.
• p216 - “But there’s nothing I can do but wait for him,” said Hatsumi with her chin in her hand. ¶ “You love him that much?” ¶ “I do,” she answered without a moment’s hesitation.
• p218 - TB: Watanabe ends a letter describing difficulty of rainy Sundays, and ends it (as other letters in the book are ended) with only “Good-bye.” These often feel like suicide letters.
• p236 - Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps.. The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. The world around me was on the verge of great transformations. Death had already taken John Coltrane who was joined now by so many others. People screamed there’d be revolutionary changes—which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the “changes” that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning. I trudged along through each day in its turn, looking up only rarely, eyes locked on the endless swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.
  • TB: probably the best paragraph in the book.
• p243 - No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for – and to do it so unconsciously.
• p258 - TB: Yet another letter ending in only “Good-bye.”
• p290 - . . . “How about doing it with me, Watanabe?” ¶ “Strange,” I said, “I was thinking the same thing.”