Norwegian Wood Themes

At the beginning of Norwegian Wood, 37-year-old Toru Watanabe is flung backward into memory and nostalgia when he hears a version of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” playing on an airplane loudspeaker. His immersive retreat into memories of the Tokyo of his youth and all that happened to him there is somewhat reluctant, and yet the sharpness of his memories from this time is astounding—soon, it becomes clear that these memories are the most important…

Norwegian Wood is a coming-of-age novel, and as Toru Watanabe grows older and grows up, his experiences with love and sex inform the kind of man he will be. Torn between Naoko, a troubled girl from his past, and Midori, a bright and vibrant student at his university in Tokyo, Toru finds himself struggling with lovesickness yet unable to define what he wants out of love or why. Throughout the novel, Toru and…

The way characters communicate with one another throughout Norwegian Wood is at once exciting and enigmatic. Murakami’s characters find themselves entangled in webs of lies, half-truths, and miscommunications. Sometimes they lie to one another deliberately in an attempt to mask their true feelings or circumstances, but other times, there are inexpressible or existential reasons why real, open, honest communication is simply impossible. As the novel’s characters struggle to get through to one another (or deliberately…

Toru, Naoko, and Midori are all university students in Tokyo during the late sixties and early seventies. All three of them—along with their friends, roommates, and classmates—have been told that a formal education is one of the most important things in the world and have spent their entire youths preparing for the rigors of academia. Once enmeshed in the worlds of their universities, however, the three of them find that the promises of…