Synopsis:
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student’s romantic coming-of-age,Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love
Review:
I’ve finally finished Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and much to my dismay it was rather unexpected. I wanted a really sappy love story, two lovers, separated for a time, then reunited. To say I didn’t want any of that would be a flat-out lie, because, I really did want that.
This book is a classic and from what I’ve read around can be correlated to the fame Twilight has received in the Western world. Though, to say their fame is relatively alike, their content and quality is DEFINITELY NOT. I haven’t read Twilight myself but I know better than to show up in public with a “Team Edward” shirt, sign in hand, proclaiming Twilight’s dominance to Harry Potter. Trust me, I know better.
The book started off great. Although it wasn’t eye catching or “on your toes” amazing, it was the author’s-Haruki Murakami- ability to flow his ideas so strongly and uniformly while maintaining his beautiful craft in transforming the most simplest objects/ideas into masterpieces. If there was one reason why I felt motivated to read this book, it would be the anticipation to read another one of his crafty descriptions.
Like I said in the opening of this post, I expected a “cry on my bed ’till I can’t cry anymore, while listening to beyonce’s irreplaceable” kind of book. Ok, not really, cry on my bed , but definitely beyonce’s irreplaceable. I felt like I had to put in a reference to her best love song.…Anyways, the book started off normally, and it wasn’t until I found myself constantly putting off important things (school) just to read this book that I realized their was something special in the book.
The plot consists mainly of 4 people. The main character, his best friend who later commits suicide, his best friend’s girlfriend who ends up becoming the most tragic character ever written, and the main character’s “love” who i’ve decided is a sex addict and needs to be checked out. The first three become very close and it’s at this point where I wish that the author focused more on the interactions of the three. Given the amount of space dedicated to the remembrance of his best friend’s death, I felt like a more strong description of their bond before his death would have aided more in terms of me feeling any sort of emotion to his death.
Which brings me to another one, death is a major part of this novel, but it becomes such a large part of it that I feel it no longer holds its emotional “impact”. Death makes people cry, this book had tons of it but they didn’t hold enough force to make me seclude myself in my room and release tears.
For most of the books I’ve read, the main character becomes my absolute favourite. Was this the case for Norwegian Wood? Not-at-all. I felt like I was reading the grinch’s autobiography before he became all naughty. He was indecisive, and passive. A point in the book came where an event occurred that SHOULD have turned his world upside down for the worst. Did he feel sad? Definitely, he decided to turn himself into a homeless person for a whole month. Did he cry? Yep. Did I feel like he was emotionally traumatized by this horrible event? I would say yes, but I just can’t. The message in the book is to learn from your sorrows. Unfortunately, having sex with a women 19 yrs older than yourself who you knew to be your now deceased best friend’s friend doesn’t exactly make me feel provoked to cry nor feel like he learned anything.
All in all it’s a great book. Not boring at all, and if you’re into sex…there’s a lot of it in here. Though I criticize the book’s ability to fully induce any sort of “sorrow” or “sadness” in me, I am going to blame it on simply my desire for a sappy love story. I assure you, if that’s not what I wanted, I wouldn’t have written what I just did. Fact of the matter is, I wanted to cry. Did I? No.
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