The recap
Hearing an old Beatles song, Toru Watanabe, now thirty-seven, is carried back to his student days in late-1960s Tokyo. Back then he was a quiet, bookish young man drifting through university while protests flared on campus, still shaken by the loss of his closest school friend, Kizuki. In the city he begins a tender, uncertain intimacy with Naoko, who shares his grief for Kizuki and whose fragility seems to deepen as the months pass. At the same time he meets Midori, a vivid, outspoken classmate who helps run her family's small bookshop and who meets life with startling, comic frankness. Pulled between memory and the living present, Watanabe has to learn what loving someone truly asks of him. Murakami tells the story in a plain, melancholy key, full of music, long walks and late-night talk, and the book has become a touchstone for readers who remember being young, in love and unsure. It is a novel about first love and grief that rewards rereading.
Why read it
For anyone who has loved two people at once or carried a first love for years, and for readers drawn to quiet, wistful novels steeped in music and memory.
Fun facts
- 01
The Japanese title, Noruwei no Mori, is the standard Japanese rendering of the Beatles song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), a favorite of the character Naoko.
- 02
The book was a phenomenon in Japan, reportedly selling more than four million copies after its 1987 release.
- 03
Murakami built the novel's opening section out of an earlier short story of his, Firefly.
- 04
Jay Rubin's 2000 translation became the authorized English edition; an earlier translation by Alfred Birnbaum was issued mainly in Japan.
- 05
Tran Anh Hung directed a film adaptation in 2010.
