Death, Suicide, Grief, and Existentialism Theme Analysis

Though only 19 years old throughout most of the events of the novel, Toru Watanabe encounters a staggering number of individuals—many of whom are his age or younger—who are either grieving a loved one, dying themselves, or seriously contemplating taking their own lives. Beginning with the unexpected, gruesome suicide of his high school friend Kizuki, Toru finds himself practically surrounded by death. As Toru watches his friends Naoko, Hatsumi, and Midori struggle with (and, in some cases, succumb to) their grief, Murakami suggests that everyone, at some point, must face down the deeply existential dilemma of whether to continue living and participating in a cruel, chaotic world, or to escape into death.

The world of the dead and the world of the living are in constant competition with one another throughout Norwegian Wood. The two realms tug unceasingly at Toru, Midori, and Naoko, forcing them to choose between the pain of living and the escape of death. Influenced—or haunted—by the deaths they’ve witnessed, the three main characters struggle to understand the point of living, and dive deeper and deeper into existentialism as the novel unfolds. Toru Watanabe is shocked when his best friend, Kizuki, commits suicide without warning at the age of 17. Toru is shaken by the loss of Kizuki, the first major death he’s experienced. As Toru heads off to college, he finds himself ruminating almost endlessly about the thin veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead. “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life,” Toru finds himself thinking early on in his college career. He has been rattled by the pull that death exerts upon the living—but is, at a relatively young age, able to understand a profound and frightening concept. Death is not life’s opposite or endpoint, necessarily, but a fabric woven through the very structure of daily life—something that must be contended with and pushed back against time and time again.

As the novel progresses, Toru encounters more and more experiences with death that only remind him of the fact that there is a constant struggle between the world of the dead and the world of the living—a struggle compounded by the grief, confusion, and hopelessness of coping with death. Toru watches his friend Midori nurse her father day after day in the hospital, and even helps her care for the dying man one day. Midori, who has already lost her mother, admits to feeling a certain “relief” at the idea of her parents dying and their suffering coming to an end. This admission allows Toru to once again reframe his concept of death and see it less as a predator upon the living but a kind of escape. The second death in the book doesn’t actually occur within the timeline of its events—rather, Toru flashes forward into the future to report that Hatsumi, his dormmate Nagasawa’s girlfriend, would take her own life several years after graduating from university in a grisly, bloody way. Toru states that the death of Hatsumi—a girl he only met a couple times—nonetheless shook him so profoundly that he never again spoke to Nagasawa, her two-timing boyfriend whose callousness Toru believes motivated Hatsumi’s suicide. Toru knows that life is a constant struggle against the pull of death—the idea that Hatsumi succumbed to that struggle makes Toru angry toward the one person he believes pushed her into death’s escape.

The most significant death in the book occurs toward the very end, when Naoko—who seemed to be on the verge of recovery from her depression at last—hangs herself in the woods on the edge of the Ami Hostel’s property. Naoko’s grief over Kizuki’s suicide, her own fears and insecurities about sex and love, and her uncertainty about living and subjecting herself to more pain and suffering ultimately reach a boiling point, and she takes her own life. Toru’s grief at the news of Naoko’s death is immense and uncontainable. He had been waiting for Naoko to get better, stoking the hope that they’d be able to make a life together in spite of their shared grief and increasing existentialism. After Naoko’s death, Toru leaves behind his studies, his friendships, and his burgeoning relationship with Midori to travel the countryside aimlessly. While drinking to excess, sleeping outside, and wandering from village to village over the course of a month, Toru finds himself assaulted by visions and dreams in which Naoko appears to him and talks to him about death. “Death is nothing much,” she says to him in one such vision; “things are so easy for me here.” Murakami shows Toru himself struggling against the pull of death. His best friend and his lover have both taken their lives, and so the idea that death is the better, safer choice eats away at him, and he seriously flirts with ending his own life. Ultimately, Toru chooses to go on living—but at the end of the novel, he still finds himself haunted by the chasm between life and death, stuck in a “place that [is] no place,” unable to fully enjoy the swarming, thronging city life around him.

“By living our lives,” Toru ultimately concludes, “we nurture death.” Having lost Kizuki and Naoko to suicide, Toru struggles, for much of the novel, to see the larger point of continuing on in the “real world.” But in the end, Toru is at last able to accept that existentialism is a part of life. By realizing that he’ll always be torn between the world of the dead and the world of the living, Toru is able to adopt a kind of nihilism that allows him to commit to continuing on—even if, from time to time, the waves of death lap at the shores of his life.