Truth, Lies, and Communication Theme Analysis

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 work to remain alienated), Murakami argues that people can only genuinely know and understand one another through honestly, radical openness, and a commitment to transparency. 

As the characters in Norwegian Wood attempt to find solace in their relationships with one another, they are constantly forced to confront the ways in which lies, half-truths, and miscommunications derail and even decay their abilities to truly commune with another person. Ultimately, Murakami shows the sweetness in the fleeting moments of clarity, transparency, and communion his characters do get to experience—while also highlighting the painful reality that, more often than not, humans deliberately seek to make themselves unknowable to one another. Toru and Midori’s relationship is one of the novel’s most interesting examinations of the shadowy line between truths and lies within a friendship or romance. When Toru and Midori meet, Toru is immediately struck by Midori’s long-winded wordiness, her absolute frankness, her bawdy sexual ribaldry, and her emotionally fraught stories of childhood. Midori seems like an open book—and, compared to the inscrutable, introverted Naoko, she is a breath of fresh air for Toru. Their relationship seems casual, open, and honest, and they regularly communicate about their feelings just as easily as they trade stories from their pasts. Toru soon discovers, however, that Midori has been lying to him about something major for the entirety of their friendship: Midori’s father, Mr. Kobayashi, is not retired and living in Uruguay, as she once told him—he is dying in a local hospital, the victim of a malignant brain tumor. Midori unveils this truth as if it’s no big deal and apologizes only offhandedly for lying. Toru and Midori’s relationship is dogged by failure of communication in other ways. For instance, when swept up in feelings and doubts about Naoko, Toru walls himself off from Midori and doesn’t even tell her he’s moved apartments. Midori is furious and refuses to see or speak to Toru until she’s calmed down, at which point she still finds him too closed-off and writes him a letter denigrating his self-obsessed, self-contained ways. Midori clearly takes pride in her own openness, whether or not it’s an affect engineered to make her seem more emotionally available than she really is. She demands the same of the significant people in her life, demonstrating that while she may still be struggling with certain aspects of communication and truth, she is striving for transparency, openness, and honesty.

Toru’s relationships with Naoko and Reiko, too, center around the practical and emotional difficulties of communication—especially when one’s relationship or friendship is dogged by issues of grief or mental illness. Toru is devastated when Naoko—his friend and, later, lover—leaves Tokyo for a sanatorium in the hills of Kyoto. After a frustrating and drawn-out written correspondence with Naoko leaves Toru wanting more of an explanation for what’s happened between them, he visits her at the first opportunity he gets. At the private, quiet Ami Hostel, Naoko’s roommate, Reiko—a veteran patient—explains that the most important, valued part of life at the hostel is complete openness and honesty. Long talks and the divulging of secrets are hallmarks of daily life at the hostel, and Reiko warns Toru that if he wants a relationship with Naoko, he must be prepared to lay it all on the line and be honest about everything in his life—in exchange, she, too, will uphold the values of honesty and transparency. Even after Toru and Naoko embark on a new phase of their relationship—separated by distance but engaged in near-constant written correspondence and bound together by their commitment to honesty—Toru struggles to really uphold the values to which he’s pledged himself. He pursues an increasingly intimate friendship with Midori, engages in one-night stands, and struggles with looming moral and existential questions in his friendships as Tokyo undergoes social revolution. Though Toru writes to Naoko weekly (or even more often) his letters offer very little insight as to his emotional state even as they describe in detail the mundanities of his daily life. Toru wants to communicate with the women in his life with integrity and openness, but often lets himself prioritize the mere appearance of transparency over actual emotional honesty. 

At its heart, Norwegian Wood is a novel about the perils—and the rewards—of surrendering to vulnerability and attempting to form a real, lasting connection with another person in the face of grief, doubt, and the temptations of solitude. As characters struggle to overcome their fears of intimacy, Murakami shows just how fleeting and ephemeral real connection often is—while also suggesting that truthful, honest communication is the key to enlivening and extending one’s bond with another person.