NORWEGIAN WOOD
By HARUKI MURAKAMI
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage International, 2000. 296 pages, $13

Helen Mitsios
 

Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood won him instant fame. First published in Tokyo in 1987, the book sold over four million copies and became a manifesto for the alienated youth and angst-ridden bourgeoisie of postwar Japan. Although Norwegian Wood was translated into English and published for distribution in Japan, until now Murakami's seminal book was not available in the United States.
Norwegian Wood, most simply put, is a not so simple story of the alchemy of love and loss. At its most accessible, it is about a teenager falling in love for the first time. Watanabe, the teenager, has the misfortune to fall in love with Naoko, a psychologically disturbed girl. More complexly, the novel is a Proustian recounting of time lost forever.
The novel begins as Watanabe is flying to Germany (he studies German in college and carries around a copy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain) and hears the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" on the plane. It's their song-the one that recalls his lost love, Naoko. He struggles to recapture the past and to remember Naoko, as he had promised her he always would:

And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then-Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It's true, I can't even bring back Naoko's face-not right away, at least. All I'm left holding is a background, sheer scenery, with no people up front.

Watanabe does manage to bring the fuzzy past into clear focus and draw the reader into this heartbreaking novel. Though critics in Japan cited the book as autobiographical, Murakami disagrees. He explains, "I set Norwegian Wood in the late 1960s. I borrowed the details of the protagonist's college environment and daily life from those of my own college days. As a result, many people think it is an autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not autobiographical at all." In typically understated fashion, the author says, "My own youth was far less dramatic, far more boring than his."
On the less boring side, however, Haruki Murakami used to own a small Tokyo jazz bar in the 1970s, before he became unarguably one of Japan's most famous and best selling authors. A college graduate with a degree in drama and film, he came to writing in a fittingly Proustian manner. But-instead of biting into a madeleine-on one of his rare days off from the jazz bar, Murakami was watching the opening of the 1979 Japanese baseball season on TV. And that's when the moment of inspiration hit: the Yakult Swallows' leadoff batter, the American Dave Hilton-who had yet to distinguish himself on the team-whacked a double to start the season. As Murakami watched Hilton round first base, it came to him that "I wanted to write something." That very day, Murakami bought pen and paper from the local stationery shop. And a career was born.
Norwegian Wood is a wondrous, almost too perfectly crafted novel, of lost times, lost friends, lost everything. And, paradoxically, it is only the memory of that loss that consoles Watanabe, who is more Chekhovian than Chekhov. He's a lackluster, ineffectual hero who dreams. And hopes. But mostly yearns. Watanabe is the Japanese Everyman-not particularly bright, interesting, or handsome. He says, "I'm just an ordinary guy-ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary grades, ordinary thoughts in my head." He bears the unmistakable Murakami trademark: a hero who is inherently idealistic and is forced to live in a less than ideal world. We're reminded by Naoko's friend Reiko, "All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world."
Most of Norwegian Wood takes place from 1968 to 1970. Murakami's recapturing of lost time is evocative and convincing. It's not exactly post-Haight Ashbury, but the music is right. The clothes are right. There's mention of drinking bouts, but no drugs (maybe there weren't any), and there's not much sex except for an occasional drunken one night stand. Music floats around ubiquitously, on the radio or with someone strumming a guitar. "The girls switched on an amplifier and tuned in an FM station. Blood, Sweat and Tears came on with 'Spinning Wheel.' " And a page later, "Cream came on the radio with 'White Room.' After a commercial, it's Simon and Garfunkel's 'Scarborough Fair.' "
The women in Norwegian Wood are remarkably candid. They talk openly about sex and other intimate issues. Yet, they are equally elusive. Whether mentally or physically-they are somehow always just around the corner. Midori is a plain girl who wins Watanabe (or does she?) by virtue of old fashioned wiles. She's a pre-Rules girl who cooks, turns Watanabe on, drags him to S and M films, and does everything but. She just hangs in there and outlasts everyone else. Naoko's friend Reiko is cast in the role of a sage. She's a wise older woman who denounces the world, spending years in a mental institution that sounds like it's based on Morita psychotherapy. Developed in Japan, this therapy stresses action and work, suggesting that if a patient performs positive actions, the emotions and feelings will follow. Like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain (clearly one of Murakami's reference points, along with The Great Gatsby), Reiko leaves the sanatorium in her own way. Gatsby longed for Daisy; Hans Castorp longed for Clavdia. And Watanabe has his Naoko to always dream of and remember. There is never any doubt that the novel is Naoko and Watanabe's dance. The other, secondary characters join in when appropriate, in a sad and sloppy minuet.

For just an ordinary guy, Watanabe gets caught up with amazingly colorful friends. Or is there no such thing as an ordinary guy? Or an ordinary life? Murakami is too good a writer to leave a simple postscript, and the reader can draw his own conclusion. After all, how ordinary is a love story if it happens to you?

Helen Mitsios is a New York-based writer and the editor of New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan. She is currently at work on a memoir.