Norwegian WoodHaruki Murakami
Harvill, 2 paperbacks, boxed, 247 pages each, £15.00
Published May 2000
ISBN 1860468004
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
Murakami’s more recent volumes clutter the shelves of our better libraries, but this new Jay Rubin translation marks the first opportunity most English speakers will have had to read the novel that elevated Haruki Murakami from merely successful to being a Japanese literary superstar. (An earlier edition was approved by the author solely for English teaching at home.) And, as befits the event, Norwegian Wood is initially being presented here by Harvill in an exquisite translation of its original packaging: the book comes as two shrunken paperbacks – one red, one green – nestled in a golden (cardboard) box.
Such devotion to detail, however, rather belies the almost prosaic turn of the novel itself. For Norwegian Wood was the book that steered Murakami away from the surrealism that haunts Wild Sheep Chase, Dance, Dance, Dance, or his masterpiece, the vast Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It will be familiar, though, to readers of his most recent, the surprisingly slim and impossibly elegant South of The Border, West of The Sun.
‛I have never lied to anyone, and I have taken care over the years not to hurt other people,’ claims narrator Toru Watanabe with no little justification. ‛And yet,’ he continues, ‛I find myself tossed into this labyrinth.’ For the 37-year-old, the Proustian jab of The Beatles’ ‛Norwegian Wood’ at an airport ignites around 500 pages of painful reminiscence. Of his friends, of being at university in the late 1960s, of old lovers and, again and again, of suicide. Watanabe’s life is punctuated by self-inflicted death, both of those close to him – his best friend Kizuki when they were both just seventeen – and others within his orbit. He grows close to the fragile Naoko, Kizuki’s erstwhile girlfriend, but finds that love is entangled in her steady mental disintegration and eventual enrollment at a benign but remote and vaguely sinister sanatorium.
Back home, too, there is the willful but vulnerable Midori, with whom Toru shares dinners and porno movies and, he suggests, something else. But here all too starkly is his dilemma, his ‛labyrinth’ – to choose between the ideal and the visceral, the physical and the idealized. He’s passing through, a ghost in his own life, playing the cards how they fall, but aware that tragedy dogs him always. ‛Death exists,’ he tells us, ‛not as the opposite but as part of life.’ Later he resignedly concludes that, ‛by living our lives, we nurture death.’
Norwegian Wood is ostensibly a stylistically drab novel. We hear Watanabe muse on day to day existence, nagging fears. Else, there are epic conversations with Midori and Reiko, Naoko’s middle-aged roommate. With the largely silent Naoko, though, there are few words. This is a book about communication, between friends, between lovers, between generations. It is frequently sexually explicit.
The devil, though, is inevitably in the detail. Murakami has the ability to pile language and incident high. His prose is immediately accessible but acquires a cumulative power over the long haul. Without a metaphysical crutch he is forced to isolate significance in the mundane: a firefly; a butterfly hair-slide; motes of dust, even. And in the potency of cheap music – the text is suffused with everything from The Beatles to John Coltrane. Norwegian Wood is a sober book without ever becoming sombre or dour. And as a portrait of the Japanese society of that time (when Murakami himself was at university, although this is definitely no autobiography) it will startle a western audience. Remarkable.