Norwegian Wood

Supposedly this book is what catapulted Haruki Murakami to international stardom. In retrospect, I struggle to see why. Was there a taste for a certain aesthetic in books in the late 1980's?

The book is just OK. It reads like the personal diary of a boring, aimless college kid who, after a while, you just learn to roll your eyes at and pray that he grows up really soon. There are plenty of scenes in the book that made my eyebrows raise to their maximum limits. Lots of content within the book is explicitly sexual, which in and of itself isn't a problem, but it read entirely too much like a perverted male fantasy: tons of subservient, horny women who were more than eager to have unprotected sex and there are somehow zero consequences for all of these encounters: no STI's and no pregnancies. What a magical world!

The redeeming aspects of this book are mostly twofold: 1) the poetic nature with which Murakami describes human emotion, and 2) the tangential view of the very real cultural epidemic of suicide in Japan. The sadness is palpable as viewed through the lens of the protagonist, Toru Watanabe.

A final nitpick of mine is that we as readers know immediately that the book is being narrated by Watanabe 20 years after the events take place. However, the book's story abruptly ends in the past without returning to the narrator's present. There's no closure on how Watanabe survived 20 additional years of unspeakable sadness and what he made of his life as he became a man. We never find out what the hell he's doing in Germany and if the intense physical problems he was said to experience in the beginning of the book signaled to something more morbid. If it was obfuscated on purpose by Murakami, then that's a pretty sloppy way to leave readers hanging.

If you're brand new to Murakami, as I am, then my advice is to skip this one entirely.