Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it’s also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows–Independent on Sunday
Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar.
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami | Review and Discussion
‘Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around’ Time Out
‘Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility’ Guardian
Review
A deeply troubling yet poetically beautiful story ― Marie Claire
Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love… It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. ― Times Literary Supplement
A heart-stoppingly moving story… Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world’s finest novelists ― Glasgow Herald
A masterly novel. . . . Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami’s hand. ― The New York Times Book Review
Norwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author’s genius. ― Chicago Tribune
From the Inside Flap
First American Publication
This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student’s romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love.
From the Back Cover
“A world class writer who has both eyes open and takes big risks.”–Washington Post Book World
“[Murakami belongs] in the topmost rank of writers of international stature.” –Newsday
About the Author
Haruki Murakami is a world famous Japanese novelist. His many evocative and poignant works are focused around the themes of alienation, surrealism and nihilism and most are worldwide bestsellers. He has won The World Fantasy Award, The International Short Story Award, The Franz Kafka Prize and The Jerusalem prize, amongst several others. An important figure in postmodern literature, some of his classics include The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Kafka on the Shore.
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