Utterly enthralling.
Okay, listen. This book comes with a pretty big catch. You might’ve seen others say this, and I think it’s worth repeating again. Murakami’s writing of sex scenes is god awful, and at times the female characters he writes seem one-dimensional. It’s true of this book to some extent, and to try to enjoy it means to ignore or put aside these aspects of his writing. I thought the rest of the book largely overshadowed these flaws.
Murakami is stylistically best known for literature in a magic realist style. While Norwegian Wood is decidedly rooted in reality, he does a good job of capturing what feels like the absurdities of everyday life and the book feels no less strange than some of his other work is (I refer specifically to his short stories) at times. How people approach pain and grief and even human relationships is oftentimes surreal of its own merits, and Murakami explores these themes with this in mind.
The prose is great: really fun and just a pure delight to read at times. Murakami weaves an almost masterful cast of characters, all completely distinct from each other and all somehow steeped in the same trauma and frustrations pervasive throughout the book. It’s remarkable at times - how Midori and Toru’s banter and the choking pain Naoko held and later passed to Toru both exist in the same novel. Truly stunning.
This was a good novel - not much more to say.
5/5
Written 1 August 2022
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.