Memory, Nostalgia, and Regret Theme Analysis

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 of his entire life. Ultimately, Murakami uses the mixture of painful and pleasurable memories Toru recollects to show that feelings of nostalgia and regret can often be intermixed and muddied within one’s memories—sometimes, even, to the point of these two different emotions becoming indistinguishable from each other.

The world of Norwegian Wood is one based on memory. Toru’s recollection of his formative years is precise and near-perfect, yet also tinged, at various times, with the hazy wash of nostalgia and the sharp, uncomfortable pain of regret. As Toru’s memories rush back and mix together, the delineation between these two modes of memory often becomes blurry, rendering difficult moments more beautiful and pleasant ones more tense than they may have been in reality. “Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow […] It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky.” So begins Toru’s journey his past, spurred by hearing a rendition of “Norwegian Wood” as his flight touches down in Hamburg, Germany. From the very first lines of the story-within-the-story of Norwegian Wood, Murakami illustrates the simultaneous pain and ecstasy of memory. Toru admits that while he was living in the moment back then, the scenery of the day he’s recalling was just scenery—now, though, it is “the first thing that comes back.” He remembers minute details brilliantly and reverently, but when it comes time to populate the scenes of his memory with the people who inhabited them, he’s full of guilt and regret over not being able to summon faces, feelings, and other details so easily. This early scene sets the stage for the way memory is handled throughout the rest of the novel. Toru recalls a beautiful, brilliant meadow and a sky so beautiful it “almost hurt to look at”—in the physical realm of this memory, beauty and pain are practically indistinguishable. Yet as Toru begins filling in the blanks of this memory in the meadow, the bleak details press up even more closely against the inexplicable feelings of happiness and hope. The meadow is a place where Toru used to walk with his friend and romantic interest Naoko while she was housed in a sanatorium in the forested mountains beyond Kyoto, cut off from the rest of society as she attempted to heal from the depression that would eventually claim her life. The conversations Toru and Naoko had in the meadow on the day Toru is remembering were dark and full of fear—jokes about falling into a deep well at the edge of the clearing, shared distress about the impossibility of truly watching over and caring for another person—and yet Toru’s physical memory of the meadow is bright and pleasant. In this way, Murakami entangles nostalgia with regret, creating a surreal, idyllic soundstage upon which the unpleasant, hard facts of memory are then played out.

Murakami also shows how, in addition to sharpening memory in odd ways, nostalgia and regret also have the potential to dull or corrupt memory. Well past the midway point of the novel—over the course of which Toru Watanabe has described, in detail, the people, places, and conversations that defined the tail end of his teenage years—he writes, rather offhandedly, that remembering the year 1969 feels like getting stuck in a “deep, sticky bog” filled with “endless swampy darkness.” Though the memories he’s relayed thus far are seemingly accurate, detailed, and full of both sensory and emotional detail, Toru admits that wading into these memories often feels difficult, dangerous, or taxing. Toru is able to summon incredibly specific details—but admits that doing so requires a lot of mental and emotional work and a lot of time. It makes sense, then, that he would compare wading through the memories of his most formative years to struggling through a dense swamp or a profound darkness. He is essentially rebuilding his youth from the ground up, retreading painful memories and attempting to sift through the complicated feelings of regret and pain he feels at some memories while indulging the happiness and hope he feels at others. Murakami uses Toru’s journey through the “swamp” of his past to show that while details, conversations, and descriptions may be easy to summon, the feelings behind those acute memories are not so easily retrieved. Toru finds even his happy memories with Naoko tinged by the pain of her death that has echoed through the years, while some of the saddest memories in Toru’s life—caring for Midori’s dying father, bonding with the troubled Reiko, and battling his own loneliness at home and at work in Tokyo—feel more hopeful and bright than objectively happy instances from his past do. Murakami thus demonstrates the strange but profound admixture of such feelings from one’s memories, using Toru’s confusion at his own feelings to illustrate just what a confounding, mysterious realm memory often is.

As Murakami muddles the ideas of nostalgia and regret, softening the hard lines between them or blending them into one emotion altogether, he ultimately suggests that nostalgia and regret can (and often do) exist side-by-side in one’s memory of a single moment—making memory a realm both familiar and inhospitable, captivating and repellent. These extremes and opposites, Murakami argues, are what make the world of one’s memory such a compelling place, and what bring one back to one’s past again and again.