Norwegian Wood: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

On Monday morning, Toru tells his dorm head that he’s taking a short hiking trip for a couple of days, then heads to the Tokyo Station and boards a bullet train to Kyoto. Once there, he takes a bus to the northern suburbs and, from there, another bus that will take him deep into the mountains. As the bus drives down the winding mountain roads through a dense cedar forest, Toru feels a bit carsick. Every once in a while, the bus passes through a clearing and arrives at a village. After passengers disembark, the bus heads into the forest once again. Soon, Toru is one of only four passengers left on the bus, and by the time he reaches his stop, he is in a truly rural area.

Toru disembarks from the bus and follows Naoko’s map. Soon he reaches a sign which indicates that the Ami Hostel is near. He walks to the guard gate and, after ringing a bell, summons a gatekeeper who lets Toru onto the property and tells him to ask for Doctor Ishida in the main building. Toru wanders the idyllic grounds until he reaches an old country house. Inside, a receptionist invites Toru to sit and wait for Doctor Ishida. As he sits on a couch, he marvels at the quiet surrounding him. 

Soon, an older woman approaches Toru. She sits beside him on the couch, takes his hand, and examines it. The woman has many wrinkles on her face, though she appears to be only in her late thirties. Her hair looks to have been recently chopped, but its wild style suits her. The woman asks Toru if he plays any instruments, and Toru says he doesn’t. She takes a cigarette from her pocket and lights it, then tells Toru that she wanted to talk with him before letting him meet with Naoko. She invites him to join her in the dining hall for some lunch.

As Toru enjoys his delicious lunch, prepared entirely from things grown and harvested on the Ami Hostel’s property, the woman tells Toru to call her Reiko. He asks if she is Naoko’s doctor, and Reiko explains that though the others call her “Doctor Ishida,” it’s only because they think of her as a “Music Doctor”—she is, in fact, another patient who has been at the hostel for seven years, and is Naoko’s roommate. Reiko begins describing the “unusual” workings within Ami Hostel.

The place is not, Reiko says, as much about treatment as it is about convalescence. There are doctors on staff to analyze and talk with patients, but the gates of the property are wide open, and people are free to leave at will. While the model at Ami Hostel doesn’t work for everyone and some patients need to leave to seek special treatment, many benefit from simply being around other patients and experiencing a normal daily routine. Patients help one another to recognize, understand, and assume accountability for their flaws, and total honesty is a paramount part of patient life.

Toru stops Reiko and asks her why she’s been at the hostel for so long, since it seems to him that there’s nothing wrong with her. Reiko explains that she has nothing waiting for her in the real world, and after so long inside, worries she’d be overwhelmed by the world if she left.

Toru asks how Naoko is doing, and Reiko says she’s “headed in the right direction” but laments that Naoko didn’t get help for her problems sooner. When Toru asks what kind of problems Naoko is working through, Reiko says he should ask Naoko herself. Before he can see her, though, Reiko says Toru needs to understand one of the rules: visitors aren’t allowed to be alone with patients, so Reiko will need to observe Naoko and Toru’s interactions. Reiko tells Toru not to feel self-conscious around her—she already knows everything there is to know about what happened between Toru and Naoko. Reiko says she’s hopeful that the three of them will be able to “help each other.” When people open their hearts to one another, Reiko says, they always get better.

Inside Reiko and Naoko’s apartment, Reiko shows Toru to a sofa bed in the living room and tells him she’s going off to do some work until five. After that, she and Naoko will both come back to the room. Reiko leaves the room and Toru dozes on the sofa bed, and after a while, Naoko comes into the room by herself. Even though they’re not supposed to be alone together, Naoko says, she’s snuck off to see him so that they can have a moment for just the two of them. Naoko approaches Toru and presses her face into his neck for a moment, then leaves the room again. Toru falls into a deep sleep, comforted by the sense of Naoko’s presence all around him.

Around five thirty, Naoko and Reiko return to the apartment. Toru greets Naoko as if he’s meeting her again for the first time. The three of them talk and tell stories for a while before heading down to the dining hall for supper. Toru is surprised by the pleasant atmosphere and polite conversations happening all over the dining room—it is not what he expected out of a visit to a sanatorium.

After dinner, Toru showers in the apartment while Reiko and Naoko visit the communal bath. He sits in the dark waiting for them to return, admiring the bright moon and stars through the window. When the women return, Naoko lights some candles and Reiko pours everyone some wine. Reiko takes out a guitar and plays some Bach, then asks if Naoko has any requests. Reiko tells Toru that Naoko is always begging her to play The Beatles. Naoko requests some Beatles songs, including “Norwegian Wood”—her favorite, she says, even though it often makes her feel sad, as if she’s wandering alone in a deep forest. 

As Reiko continues playing, Naoko and Toru talk about their lives. Naoko asks a lot of questions about school and Tokyo, and Toru tells her about his friendship with Nagasawa—and Nagasawa’s serial pursuit of women. Naoko says he sounds like a “sick” person. Toru tries to tell Naoko how brilliant Nagasawa is and how ordinary he himself feels in comparison. Naoko assures Toru he isn’t ordinary, which is why she slept with him in the first place. She asks him how many girls he’s slept with since, and when he tells her he estimates about eight or nine, she chides him for his promiscuity. Toru explains that he was hurt and lonely, and believed Naoko still loved Kizuki more than him.

Naoko tells Toru, at last, why she and Kizuki never slept together. She explains that though they tried to have sex, it never worked between them—Naoko says she couldn’t get aroused, and that her body “never opened to him.” They engaged in other sexual activities but never had intercourse. Naoko says that she now believes her close, almost symbiotic relationship with Kizuki prevented her from being able to love other people. Naoko begins sobbing violently. Reiko takes Naoko in her arms and calmly suggests Toru go for a walk for about 20 minutes. As he leaves, she winks at him and reassures him that Naoko’s tears aren’t his fault. Toru goes outside and walks through the moonlight into the woods beyond Naoko and Reiko’s building.

Half an hour later, Toru returns to the apartment to find Reiko playing guitar on the floor—there is no sign of Naoko. Reiko tells Toru that Naoko has gone to bed for the night and offers to take Toru on a walk so they can talk a little. Toru and Reiko head outside and walk down the paths around the property, discussing their interests and making small talk. Toru asks if he hurt Naoko or asked her too many questions. Reiko insists it’s better for Naoko to cry and emote rather than keep everything bottled up, since people have to confront their emotions if they want to heal.

Reiko warns Toru that if he truly wants to be with Naoko, he may have to wait a long time for her to recover. She asks Toru if he loves Naoko enough to wait for her, and Toru admits that, like Naoko, he doesn’t know what it really means to love someone else. He confides in Reiko, however, that he believes he and Naoko “have to save each other.”

Reiko says she understands Toru’s dilemma—she was once a 20-year-old herself. Reiko begins reminiscing about her life. She explains that she trained from childhood to become a concert pianist. Her senior year, however, just before a major competition, a finger on her left hand became paralyzed. Though doctors could find nothing wrong with the finger, one suggested Reiko was having a physiological response to pre-competition stress and urged her to recuperate away from school. As Reiko attempted to forget about piano, however, she began to believe she was nothing without it, and her mind snapped. She spent two months in a hospital, and upon getting out, was told she didn’t have the fortitude to be a concert pianist.

After several stints in and out of mental hospitals, Reiko began taking on students at home. Soon, one of her pupils, a man just a year younger than her whom she’d never touched or even kissed, asked her to marry him. Reiko said she’d need to see him regularly to decide, and after three months of dating, Reiko accepted the kind and generous man’s proposal. Though his well-to-do family disowned him after finding out about Reiko’s background, Reiko and her husband were happy, and she believed that as long as they were together, her mind would never snap again.

When Reiko was 31, her daughter had just entered kindergarten, and Reiko decided to start playing again. She found that playing made her happy again, and when a neighbor asked about lessons for her 13-year-old daughter, Reiko agreed to take the girl on as a pupil. The girl was angelic, precocious, and unusually beautiful—but Reiko didn’t yet know she was a pathological liar who would soon prey upon Reiko.

Toru asks Reiko to go on with her story, but Reiko suggests they check on Naoko. Reiko promises to finish the story tomorrow. Back at the apartment, Naoko is sitting on the sofa. When she sees Toru, she apologizes for frightening him. Toru sits down, and the two of them discuss Kizuki. Naoko tells Toru that as she and Kizuki, who had been together since childhood, grew older, they both found themselves fearing adulthood and responsibility. They were too close, too codependent, and didn’t believe they could thrive on their own. Naoko tells Toru that he was, in many ways, both her and Kizuki’s only friend and connection to the “real” world.

After their intense discussion, Reiko makes Toru and Naoko some cocoa, and then all three of them get ready for bed. Toru falls asleep quickly on the sofa bed but wakes up in the middle of the night to find Reiko sitting at the foot of the bed. As she and Toru lock eyes, she begins unbuttoning her nightgown. Toru stares at Naoko in the moonlight, marveling at her body. After a few minutes, Naoko rebuttons her nightgown and returns to the bedroom. Toru lies awake the rest of the night, unable to sleep.

In the morning, Reiko steps out of the room while Naoko makes breakfast. Naoko asks Toru how he slept, noting that his eyes are red. He tells her he didn’t sleep very well at all and asks how she slept. Without any cheekiness, she replies that she slept “like a log.” As the morning goes by, Toru helps Reiko and Naoko with their chores and wonders whether he really saw Naoko last night, or whether her appearance was part of a dream.

After lunch, Toru, Reiko, and Naoko check out with the guard at the front gate and head out on a trail up into the mountain forest. The steep trail winds Toru, but Naoko and Reiko press on easily. Eventually, they arrive at a plateau, and soon after, pass through an abandoned village. There is only one house in the village that’s occupied, a coffeehouse where the three stop to rest and have a snack.

After a while, Reiko suggests Toru and Naoko go for a walk. Though they aren’t supposed to be alone together, she says she’ll keep their secret—she knows there are probably things they’d like to talk about in private. As Naoko and Toru head out, Naoko hangs on Toru’s arm and apologizes for crying the night before. Toru tells Naoko it’s okay—all he wants is to be able to understand her.  

As the two of them continue walking, Naoko confesses that she sometimes fears she’ll never get better—sometimes, she says, she believes she can feel Kizuki “reaching out for [her] from the darkness.” Toru and Naoko reach a meadow and sit down in the grass. Toru holds Naoko close, and they share a kiss. Naoko tells Toru that they’ll have to wait to sleep together, but in the meantime, reaches into his pants and strokes his penis until he orgasms.

Naoko and Toru continue their walk. Naoko begins telling Toru about another trauma from her youth—her older sister’s suicide. Naoko idolized her smart, capable older sister, but at seventeen and without any warning, Naoko’s older sister hung herself in her bedroom. Naoko, then in sixth grade, was the one to find the body. Naoko also tells Toru that a year after her sister’s death, she learned that her father’s brother committed suicide when he was young, too. Naoko has come to believe that there is something in her blood is making her depressed and warns Toru that he should move on. Otherwise, she says, she might “tak[e him] with [her.]” Toru says he’ll wait for Naoko and promises her that when she’s ready to leave the Ami Hostel, she can come live with him.

Back at the apartment that evening, Toru and Naoko play cards while Reiko serenades them on the guitar. After a while, Reiko asks Toru if he’ll take a walk with her to pick up some grapes from a neighbor. After getting the grapes, Toru asks Reiko if she’ll resume her story from the night before, and she agrees. Reiko tells Toru to head for a storehouse near the tennis courts, and, after settling in and lighting a cigarette, Reiko picks up where she left off.

Reiko explains that she was giving her new pupil lessons every Saturday morning. Reiko was a good teacher, but because her new student was “nothing special” technically, Reiko knew the girl would never be a professional musician. This took even more pressure off the lessons, and Reiko came to enjoy spending time around her new student and helping her experiment with different ways of performing different pieces. The girl soon proved herself to be a star pupil—though she was not technically perfect, she played with passion and personality. After lessons, Reiko and her student would have tea and talk—but Reiko had no idea that her pupil was manipulating her and lying about everything.

One afternoon, in the middle of her lesson, Reiko’s pupil said she felt sick and began sweating. Reiko brought the girl into her bedroom and helped her lie down. Reiko’s pupil asked Reiko to stay with her, and Reiko agreed. Then, the pupil asked Reiko to rub her back. Once Reiko began doing that, the pupil asked Reiko to take her bra off, claiming it was hurting her. Reiko’s pupil began crying and telling Reiko how much the lessons meant to her, painting a horrible picture of her own home life. As Reiko comforted her pupil, her pupil began touching Reiko’s breasts and pulling off her clothes. Reiko felt as if her pupil “had cast a spell on [her]” and felt powerless to resist the young girl’s advances. Reiko pauses to admit that she’s embarrassed by the story, but when Toru tells her not to be, she continues on in great detail.

Reiko describes how her pupil touched her, inserted her fingers into Reiko’s vagina, and even performed oral sex on her. Reiko cried as the strange seduction was happening, miserable but at the same time feeling in “paradise.” Eventually, Reiko smacked the girl in the face. Her pupil tried to convince Reiko to continue with the encounter, but Reiko hurriedly dressed. She told her student to leave and never come back, at which point her pupil’s eyes turned flat, dead, and lifeless. As her pupil gathered her things and left, the girl accused Reiko of being a closeted lesbian, and warned her she’d never be able to hide the truth.

The following Saturday, Reiko’s pupil did not show up for her lesson. After several weeks went by, Reiko was relieved that her pupil had disappeared from her life but could not escape a creeping sense of dread. Soon, Reiko began to realize that her neighbors would stare at her and whisper about her when she left the house, and soon, a friend visited to tell Reiko that rumors were swirling about how Reiko had tried to seduce her piano student. What’s more, Reiko’s pupil’s parents had looked into Reiko’s background and found out about her hospitalizations.

Reiko told her husband her version of events and was relieved to find that he believed her. Reiko begged her husband to move their family out of the neighborhood right away, but he expressed reluctance to move so quickly. Reiko warned her husband that she felt she’d soon snap again—still, he urged her to wait until a more opportune time to sell their home and move. In the meantime, Reiko tried to commit suicide. She woke up in a hospital room, and though her husband promised he’d stay with her, Reiko filed for divorce—she didn’t want to subject him to the burden of being married to her any longer.

Reiko stubs out her cigarette and tells Toru that her terrible past is the reason she’s so afraid to leave the Ami Hostel and reenter the world. Toru tells Reiko he believes she can do it, but Reiko offers only a weak smile in response. 

Back at the apartment later that night, after Naoko and Reiko have gone to bed, Toru is surprised when Naoko enters the living room and crawls into bed with him, claiming she can’t sleep. The two of them kiss, and then Naoko heads back to her room.

In the morning, after breakfast and chores, Toru packs up his things. He walks with Reiko and Naoko to the front gate of the property, where they bid him goodbye and wish him safe travels. As Toru leaves the Ami Hostel and walks through the woods to get the bus, he is overcome with a sad feeling: he is “in the outside world” again.

Back in Tokyo, Toru drops his things in his dorm and heads to work at the record store. Throughout his shift, as the shop floods with drunken customers, Toru feels his head becoming fuzzy. He wonders what he’s doing in Tokyo at all, and what everything means. Toru’s boss crudely talks to him about his recent sexual conquests, and Toru listens grimly. After his shift, Toru returns to his dorm and crawls into bed, where he masturbates as he thinks of Naoko.