Education Theme Analysis

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 education’s benefits and advantages have been false all along, and that meaningful learning demands much more real-life experience than book-learning or test-taking. Ultimately, Murakami argues that real education doesn’t happen in the classroom, but rather in the wider world—and even within the depths of one’s innermost self.

Throughout Norwegian Wood, Murakami’s characters struggle with the realization that their educations ultimately look very different than the ones they were promised. Amidst student protests and widespread revolt, changing social and sexual mores, and the throes of existentialism, Toru, Midori, and Naoko all find themselves securing their educations in decidedly nontraditional spaces. Toru has come to Tokyo to pursue an education—but as classes begin, he chooses his major, drama, at random. Toru submits to his education in a passive, almost compulsory way. As the students around him become swept up in the revolution sweeping the globe throughout the spring, summer, and autumn of 1968, Toru remains aloof from their struggle and uninvolved in their protests against the very structure of the university itself.

Toru’s education ultimately becomes less about what he’s learning in the classroom than what he’s learning about himself, his relationships, and his vices. His lectures are often interrupted by student protestors, and Toru finds himself struggling to pay attention in class as his romantic problems with Naoko and Midori intensify. Toru meets few friends in his classes or around campus and refuses to participate in academic or extracurricular activities, instead scrounging up a social life through his friendship with Nagasawa, a serial womanizer who takes Toru out on the town weekly in search of one-night stands. Toru struggles to find the real-life application of the ancient Greek dramas he’s studying and, as Nagasawa daydreams of making big money and studies hard for exams that will allow him entrance into the Foreign Ministry, Toru skates by with mediocre grades and takes odd jobs, never once giving thought to a career. Toru’s academic education doesn’t fail him—he fails his academic education, quickly subscribing to the belief that life, not school, must be his teacher. Toru’s burgeoning existentialism turns to nihilism as he shirks the social and academic responsibilities of being a student. He knows his parents are spending everything on his education, and yet is unable to even affect the pretense of being interested in what he can learn within the walls of a university.

Midori enters the same public university as Toru, grateful to be done with the stifling private school she attended throughout her youth. Away from her rich high-school classmates for the first time and able to meet other people like her, Midori, too, finds herself reconceiving of what education means. For Midori, too, it is her extracurricular trials and tribulations that form her “education.” From dealing with her father’s death—just a couple of years after the death of her mother—to selling off her family’s business in its wake, Midori finds herself contending with problems that few of her classmates have even had to consider. Midori, like Toru, is studying drama, and like Toru, she seems to have no real sense of where her studies will take her in terms of a career or a future. Unlike Toru, however, her decision to study something impractical seems deliberate rather than random. Midori knows, from her background at an elite yet snobby and miserable private school that the trappings of education don’t actually equate with one—she knows she must make her own way in the world and be her own teacher.

Naoko moves to Tokyo with no big career prospects or academic dreams, but she enrolls in a university, just like Toru does. Before the end of her first year, however, Naoko’s studies are derailed when she suffers a major depressive episode and retreats into the hills of Kyoto, where she checks into a sanatorium to begin healing. Naoko’s “education,” too, is decidedly nontraditional. She learns not from books or lectures but from the people around her. She occupies herself with simple but rigorous tasks: gardening, tending animals, and helping her fellow patients maintain the integrity of the lush, wooded place that is their retreat from the outside world. Naoko learns about honesty, openness, and the need to confront her emotions from her roommate, Reiko, and learns about communal responsibility from the other patients. Naoko reads, studies guitar, and takes French classes at the Ami Hostel. In doing so, she finds a way to continue with a more traditional education even as she allows for the possibility that her education is (and always was) meant to include much more than simple book-learning.

Ultimately, none of the characters in Norwegian Wood follow the paths to education they once thought they would. Finding the university to be an unstable, unreliable, and perhaps even evil institution, they are forced to consider alternative forms of “education” as they learn lessons about themselves, one another, and the harsh cruelties of the real world.