When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
*** [I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg airport] ***(Vintage, 4 July 2003, first published 1987, paperback, 389 pages, bought from Amazon, Popsugar 2018 Reading Challenge, a book with song lyrics in the title)
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I'm quite a fan of Murakami and have read a few of his books now. This was my favourite so far. There's something I always enjoy about Murakami's writing, his style, the prose he uses, the way he gradually builds the story. Norwegian Wood is no exception. The book is dark and disturbing at times but so well written I was engrossed. The book is dark and touches on suicide in a raw and unflinching way. This focus may be a bit too much for some people but it's handled very well. The characters are complex at times and not always likeable. Watanabe is actually pretty horrible at times, treating Midori and depressed, suicidal Naoko as expendable but the author manages to create sympathy for him. Norwegian Wood is not an easy book to read and very different than Murakami's other books but I thought it was great.
