A Book Review (of sorts) - Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

As we enter a new month and say goodbye to April - a dastardly month - I finished the novel Norwegian Wood by Japanese author Haruki Murakami - a novel which first appeared in Japan in 1987, but whose official English translation by Jay Rubin was released in 2000. 

However, before I give a review of the book, I suppose I should elucidate on why I said April is a dastardly month. Now, for some readers of this weird little blog I have going will know, my father-in-law passed away in the middle of April. However, eleven years ago, my mother also passed away in the beginning of April. And, not to be forgotten, 2 years and 3 days ago, my lovely wife Dawn passed into the great beyond. As it is often said - although whether or not this has actually been tested and verified to be true is unknown to me - things do tend to come in threes.

Now, there was something I was going to do to celebrate my mother during April - but which has failed to come out in a timely manner. Please be on the lookout for it in the near future. However, this review is for Dawn - for it was one of the last books (if not the actual last book) she was reading before her death. From what I can tell by the bookmark left in the book, she only made it halfway through the novel. So, perhaps, in some odd way, it was my duty to read and finish this book in her stead.

This is the first Murakami novel I have read - but what I have read about his other novels is that they tend to be more on the surreal side. Norwegian Wood - named after the Beatles' song of the same name - is a novel written as a memory of a 37-year-old upon his years in high school and college in late 60s Japan. It is a story as real as any story could possibly be. A story of love and of loss, of deep grief and of great hope, a story of the human experience. It is a story that is not a difficult read - at least in terms of comprehension. However, the story is not an easy story to take in. Especially - if you have had any great losses in your own life.

Toru Watanabe is the protagonist of the story - a young man in his first two years of college - studying drama for no reason in particular. And the story chronicles his relationships with two women - Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend in high school (Kizuki) - a best friend who took his own life at the age of 17 - and Midori - a fellow classmate of his in college. The relationship with Naoko is complicated by their shared association with Kizuki - and Naoko's eventual withdrawal into a mental sanatorium deep in the woods. His relationship with Midori is complicated by her mother's death from brain cancer ... and her father's "current" hospitalization for the same illness. 

There are other subplots and characters in the book - which are not only useful to show the growth of Watanabe - but also to highlight that life imitates life - that bad and/or unhappy relationships abound, that everyone's life has their own ups and downs, and ultimately only you can control your own life and what you make of it. Even if it seems that everything is being run by the red thread of fate.

So, what do I think of the book? I suppose, like life, my feelings are complicated. Don't get me wrong. It is a well written book. It is a well translated book. It is a book that appears to describe the scenes of that era of Tokyo and Japan quite well. It is a book that sucks you in and compels you to read it - even when you realized it is designed almost surgically to make you feel. Which it did. But I'm not certain I wanted to do so. 

I am only going to give one excerpt from the book - one from the final chapter:

I had learned one thing from Kizuki's death, and I believed I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: "Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life."

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as that might be, it was only one of the lessons we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko's death was this: No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

Of course, the lesson we also learn is that one must make all attempts to see yourself through the sorrow and continue to live your life. Which is hard. Because life is hard.

The novel Norwegian Wood was not written to be a self-help book. However, perhaps, it will be exactly that for me. Perhaps it is a novel I will need to read again in a year or two to see how my own sorrow has progressed. Heck, the mere fact that I think I might want to read this novel again maybe is telling me I am further through my grief than I think I am. Is it a book I recommend? Yes. However, it is with the great caveat that it may bring up feelings that you didn't really want to stir up again.