I Once Had a Girl (Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
Date:	08/02/02 (486 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Engrossing read

Disadvantages: Ending a little odd

“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 authors who are famous in their homelands, but mostly unheard of abroad. Through their books, I have already become acquainted with the likes of Peter Høeg and Javier Marías.

So, a few months ago I took the leap and picked up a Harvill Press book by an author I had never heard of – Haruki Murakami – with the title “A Wild Sheep Chase”. The book was … well … different I suppose would be the best word to describe it, but very well written and enjoyable. Since the I have also read “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and a collection of short stories called “The Elephant Vanishes” by the same author. All these books are laced with surreal situations that take place firmly in the real world, although even the real world of Japan and Tokyo that Murakami writes about is alien to the Western reader. Anyone to have read my “Love in the Time of Cholera” op will know that I am a fan of magic realism, but Murakami seemed to take this one step further – creating his own blend of magic SURrealism, as it were.

“She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair.”

Initially, I was expecting the same from “Norwegian Wood”, and that
was when I got a big surprise. On the face of it, this book is a simple love story told in Tokyo in the 1960s. Simple, that is, in terms of what Murakami usually writes. This is perhaps why it is his most successful novel to date, one that made his a household name in Japan, as a result of which he felt forced to flee the country for a number of years to get away from the press attention.

The book tells the tale of Toru Watanabe, a student living in university dorms in Tokyo, and the consequences of his encounter with a childhood friend one day on the train. The friend is a girl called Naoko who used to go out with Toru’s best friend Kizuki. Early in the book, we learn that Kizuki committed suicide while the friends were still at school and gradually Toru and Naoko begin to spend more time together and an unsure form of love begins to bloom.

At this point, I thought the book was going to be nothing more than a love story, but it was precisely then that my expectations were confounded. Naoko is still plagued by the memories of her dead boyfriend and these memories refuse to be buried. Despite Toru’s best efforts, the pressure builds and Naoko is eventually driven to a mental breakdown. Toru is left alone while she disappears for treatment, until, that is, a new girl enters his life – Midori.

I don’t want to give away any more of the plot apart from to say that the book ends up being about two love stories, or … on second thoughts, maybe it is three love stories. Murakami manages to show how life doesn’t always work out as we expect it to and the way there is often no “right” or “wrong” way to act – we just have to blunder forwards and hope that we are not hurting too many people along the way.

“I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine.
We talked until two and then she said, "It's time for bed"”

The book manages to pain
t a vivid picture of student life in Japan the 1960s. Toru himself is distanced from much of what happens, but we see his reactions to living in a crowded student dorm, the student riots during the summer vacations, the free-and-easy approach to sex at the time. The Japan that Murakami describes is obviously the one he remembers from his student days and the details he fills it with make it easy for the reader to picture exactly what he is writing about.

As I said, the novel looks at the attitudes to sex at the time. A number of sexual encounters are recounted in what is often quite a detailed way, which did make me look up a couple of times when I was reading on the bus to check that no one was reading over my shoulder! But, somehow, Murakami makes his descriptions detached and impersonal, they are certainly not gratuitous or just there to titillate. Toru’s relationships with the women he meets are usually clouded by some form of sexual tension, and it is ironic that it is those he falls in love with that he feels compelled to keep his distance from.

Toru himself is a fascinating character. He is obviously an outsider and at times he spends months on end without having anyone he can turn to as a friend. The story is told in the first person, but I never got to feel that I was actually in Toru’s head – there is always an element of distance. Toru does not think of himself as strange in any way, but most people he speaks with during the book find him eccentric and comment on his odd turns of phrase or mannerisms. Although detached from events to a certain extent, he is deeply emotional and his dilemma over whether to wait for Naoko to recover from her breakdown or commit himself to Midori is entirely believable.

“She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath”

Toru’s detachment from the world around him means that the
whole book has an ephemeral, dreamlike quality to it. The prose is sparse, but still full of emotion and meaning. This seems to reflect the way that Toru drifts through life, guided not so much by his own ambitions (about we hear very little), but rather by events in the wider world and how other people want him to behave. An example of this would be when Midori says she doesn’t want to talk to him because he did not notice her new hair-do. Toru then patiently waits two months until she is willing to speak to him again and then is willing to continue as if the pair have been friends all along.

Another feature of note is the very Japanese-ness of the book. The characters are still bound by senses of honour and duty associated with the older generations, although they are slowly beginning to break away from these and define their own way of life. However, one of these traditions that still holds strong is the tradition of suicide that has always been seen as a dignified end to life in Japan. The whole novel is interspersed with suicide, all of it needless and presented as a sad waste of life. Other, less serious, aspects of Japanese life are also presented such as sushi bars and the bullet train.

The book is a translation from the Japanese, and the translator has done an excellent job. The language is clear and yet an element of foreignness has been retained. As a translator myself I was delighted to see a “Translator’s Note” section at the end of the book. It is always interesting to see how and why a translator has opted for a certain approach and, although the section is mostly just background information on Murakami, it was a welcome addition.

This is a book I can recommend to anyone who likes a good, thought-provoking read. It asks a lot of questions about love, morality and youth – many of which the reader is left to answer for himself. As well as that, though, it is a love story that can be enjoyed as suc
h and does not have any of the more surreal elements that appear in Murakami’s other novels. And, when you finish the book and next listen to the song “Norwegian Wood”, you can easily see exactly why Murakami chose to call the novel what he did.

“And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn't it good, Norwegian wood.”

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