Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

The first thing I should say about my reading of Norwegian Wood was that in a single particular it was not faithful to the Japanese print run, which is that mine was a single printed and bound edition, and not the red-half, green-half you might come across.... having got that out of the way, I can tell you about the contents. Norwegian Wood is a rather condensed moment of poised literary brilliance. I approached it with trepidation, since it was so widely lauded and applauded and that, in the spirit of wilful cynicism, always throws a spanner into my appreciative works. But in this case, I was willing to go with the crowd, not in a loud, baying way, because ...

“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me... She showed me her room, isn't it good, Norwegian wood?” Haruki Murakami is an author I have only recently stumbled across. Living in Germany as I do, there is usually only a limited selection of English language books available in the bookshops, which means I sometimes have to be adventurous and pick up a novel by an unknown author. One of the things that helps me decide if an author might be good is the publishing house, and one of my favourites has to be the Harvill Press. Their books have distinctive covers with a band of colour along the side and most of the books they publish are by ...

This was the first of Murakami's books that I came across. I was intrigued by the way that the book was packaged ? consisting of two small books, one red and one green, each about 250 pages long, presented in a gold cardboard box. As far as I can make out, the book has only been packaged in this way to make it faithful to the original Japanese print - there's no obvious reason why the story should be split over two books, and there's no difference in style between the two. In fact in the English edition, the break comes halfway through a chapter, if anything, breaking the flow of the story! The book has sold over 4 million copies in Murakami's ...