Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami Reviews

I read this book having a very limited prior knowledge of Japanese culture so some of the concepts were fairly alien to me. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful book that handles some very difficult issues, particularly teen suicide, in a thoughtful and sensitive manner. The narrative is very well written, and it's engaging. I read the entire ...  Read the complete review

Background Haruki Murakami is perhaps the most popular novelist in Japan and one who has achieved world-wide fame for his post-modern, surrealist fiction over the last thirty years. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood (1987, first published in English in 2000), his attempt at a "simple love story" and his most famous ...  Read the complete review

At risk of sounding like an M&S advert, this isn't just a love story - this is a Haruki Murakami love story, and when Japan's master of the weird & wonderful riffs on love, loss and a bit more loss, the results are compelling, captivating and quite incomparable. As spellbinding as Norwegian Wood might be, it hasn't ...  Read the complete review

Before my friend started going on at me constantly to read some books by this 'Haruki Murakami', i'd never even heard of him. My friend was so annoyed by my lack of motivation that they bought me a copy of norwegian wood and told me to read it straight away, at the time, i only started to read it in the hope that my friend might just ...  Read the complete review

This was my very first Murakami experience. I loved the gold presentation box and the two books: one with a red cover and the other in green. It was first published in 1987 in Japan and was later translated into English. The story is set in the late 60s. Watanabe is the main character who has many love affairs. He hears the ...  Read the complete review

Hearing the song Norwegian Wood by the Beatles, Toru Watanabe's mind wonders back to his University days in the sixties, when he first fell in love. The girl in question was called Naoko, but their relationship was complicated - Naoko was the girlfriend of Toru's best friend who committed sucide and she had her own mental health ...  Read the complete review

The writing of Haruki Murakami is nothing short of spell-binding. Forget magic in Harry Potter, embrace the magical realism of this wonderful Japanese fiction author. Transport yourself into the world of Toru Watanabe, who encounters a situation uncannily similar to that found in 'Norwegian Wood', the Beatles song, experience the beauty ...  Read the complete review

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. ...  Read the complete review

“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 ...  Read the complete review

Excuse the Joy Division song title for this opinion, it may not be the most relevant opinion title I can come up with but it's all I can think of that's somewhat fitting. It's better than 'Not European Porn' as a title which I first had in mind... Anyway, when 'Norwegian Wood' arrived at my house in ...  Read the complete review

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 ...  Read the complete review