Not a Review: 02

I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me.

- Norwegian Woods by The Beatles.

TW: Death, Depression, Sex, Suicide.

Norwegian Woods by Haruki Murakami is not a love story as many of the readers have labeled it. At least for me, it is not. It is not the doomed story of two lost people. It is, as the author has himself called it, ‘A simple story.’ This book is a journey; it is about life. And death. And everything in between. And in the midst of all these, we have Toru Watanabe, a 20-year-old boy, trying to navigate his feelings and emotions in a fast-changing world.

This work of Murakami has had its share of bad reviews from readers. For me, the fact that I had not read any other work of Murakami before this was an advantage as I went into it with no prejudice.

The subtle comparisons and contrasts that Murakami draws between Life and Death and between the past and the present are what attracted me from the very beginning of the book. The deaths in this book come in a very unexpected fashion that almost feels personal and yet somehow very otherworldly. It is probably why I had expected to cry but didn’t; I couldn’t mourn for the loss of the characters because they were somehow very alien to me. All I could feel was hollow inside me and just as Watanabe describes, it felt as if a part of me got lost with the deaths of those people.

The book has quite a lot of explicit sexual moments which I find are not really enjoyed by most readers. It felt mechanical to me as well; just descriptions of sexual intercourse. If I try to explain it, I think Murakami deliberately wrote it in that way to show the meaninglessness of it all; or maybe I am a little bit biased because there are certain moments in the book that have made me sadder than I ever thought a book could make me. Those moments in the book overshadow this one small discrepancy, for me. Although, I must say that at the beginning, I found myself deeply affected by the way women are portrayed in the book but as the book progressed, I understood the fact that the book is set in Japan around the 1970s and is told from the perspective of a teenager. Anyways, treat this as a statutory warning that you'd have to keep an open mind while navigating this book.

Norwegian Wood is such a work that feels like it never should have ended. It’s probably why it ends on such an abrupt note and as a reader, I have an unexplained obsession for abrupt and unclear endings even though they leave me in an utter state of confusion for days on end. But I like to put my own meanings to those endings and that’s why this novel would remain really close to me because, in my interpretation, I think Toru finds that his life is meaningless without the people he develops a deep connection with.

Lastly, the literary and the musical references in this book make it a little bit more special to me. For books like Norwegian Wood, I don’t really have the words to describe how I feel. All I know is that this book will always have a special place in my heart.