Norwegian Wood (Hardcover)

Author Haruki Murakami · Publisher Minumsa · Publication Date 2017-08-07 · ISBN 9788937434488

About the Book

Of loving someone and living through an era
A masterpiece of modern Japanese literature that vividly captures the loneliness of modern people and the wandering of youth.

▶ A work with vivid descriptions full of Haruki Murakami's unique symbolic possibilities, forming a clear and delicate structure. ― The Guardian
▶ 『Norwegian Wood』 shows Haruki Murakami's clear imprint. ― The New York Times
▶ Haruki Murakami's works are literature for tomorrow. His language is special, and his focus is on humanity. ― Reason for selecting the Kafka Prize


『Norwegian Wood』 is a work like a sketch that vividly depicts almost all aspects of human life, such as disconnection and communication, loneliness and love, past and memory, life and death, with vivid sensibility. Set in Japan in the late 1960s, an era when the dazzling rapid growth led by the older generation and the resistance culture brought about by the new generation coexisted, this work squarely examines the most important issues in an individual's life, 'love and death,' through the eyes of a young man named Watanabe.
“Don't ever forget me, remember that I was here.” Hearing the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" playing in the plane that had just landed at Hamburg Airport in Germany, Watanabe goes back through time, remembering the earnest request and the woman who made it.
Watanabe was always with his close friend Kizuki and his girlfriend Naoko during high school. However, their happy times as close friends came to an end with Kizuki's sudden suicide. At the age of nineteen, Watanabe enrolls in a private university in Tokyo, leaving his hometown with sad memories. Soon after, Naoko also comes to Tokyo, and they share a special compassion and affection that only those who have shared sadness can understand. However, one day, after a period of no contact, Naoko sends a letter saying that she has entered a sanatorium, and Watanabe visits her there, finally realizing that his feelings are love. Meanwhile, Midori, whom he met at the same university, is a completely different type of woman from Naoko, and she boldly enters Watanabe's daily life. Sharing small everyday moments with Midori, who is lively, vibrant, and unpredictable, and occasionally visiting Naoko, who has not yet overcome Kizuki's death, Watanabe lives through the beautiful and precarious time of his twenties.

What I want to say is this. I'm almost twenty, and some parts of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen or seventeen have already disappeared, and no matter how much I lament, they will never come back. I can't explain it any better, but I think you'll understand what I felt and what I'm trying to say. And I think you're probably the only one who can understand such things.
-Page 428

The act of one person loving another, and living through an era with that person. It means having a language with which they can understand each other, just as Watanabe and Naoko, Watanabe and Midori, and Kizuki and Naoko did. And the language engraved in this work eventually comes to all of us readers, reviving our youth, our love, our memories, and those moments.
The fact that the pain of a young man in Japan in the 1960s resonates with us today, and the universality and immutability shown in Haruki Murakami's literature, are sufficient reasons to encounter this work again as "a classic of today" and to eagerly await that encounter.
A day in one's twenties where memorable aphorisms, the meditative and melancholic melodies of the Beatles, sensory urban landscapes and lyrical forest scenes, and unredeemed love and redemption through love coexist.
Furthermore, the carefully selected translation and editing, which delicately polished the beautiful language and expressions that illuminate the novel, will double the joy of encountering this work, which is called the essence of Haruki Murakami's literature.

Table of Contents

Norwegian Wood 9