From my second reading, 20 December 2025:
Norwegian Wood still holds up like it used to. It is, at once, suffuse with grief and life and death. It is tragic and beautiful. What strikes me in this go-around is
From my first reading, 1 August 2022:
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 and 20 December 2025
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.
Notes
2nd reading
- Toru as being on a different wavelength than Naoko, an almost passive cruelty
- It’s like he implicitly drives Naoko to her death
- Reiko and Toru both think of Toru as a support pillar, a connection to the outside world
- Keeps Naoko tethered to a world she’s trying to leave behind, but Toru seems unwilling to understand that his presence might be another weight than a lifeline. She needs a break from this connection to normalcy
- Reiko is working within her own framework of what recovery looks like, so it ends up driving Naoko to her death too. She misreads the situation
- Tragic in that Toru can’t save her, but his attempts to do so may have made things worse
- Naoko realises this too late, that the connection between her and Toru is harming her. It’s devastating to her b/c she’s invested so much time into it. And what else does she have at this point?
- and simultaneously, it’s like she could never let go of Toru