Norwegian Wood in Around the World

Mar 20, 2012 Nivas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There was a phase in my life, confused where it was leading, no studies, no job; the only solace I found was in books, reading a book after a book, trying to escape the circumstances. I never gave a thought to writing down a review about what I was reading, about how the words made me feel, and the silence that followed finishing reading the end page. The only thing I used to do was highlight my favorite lines. As time passed, the color of highlighted lines wore down and left a trace hardly visi ...more

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May 27, 2013 Ankit Agrawal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, asia, armchair-travels-2019-challenge

4.5 Stars

Sometimes life leaves you hanging at a signal, a signal where you can't move forward due to some emotional reasons but if you stop for too long and don't move forward then you are in danger of being crushed (in this case mentally) by an onrushing car. What do you do when you know someone you love dearly is going to die? What if that person is the only one you love more than your life? How do you not only find the strength to accept the truth but also find a way to move on?
You are so i 4.5 Stars

Sometimes life leaves you hanging at a signal, a signal where you can't move forward due to some emotional reasons but if you stop for too long and don't move forward then you are in danger of being crushed (in this case mentally) by an onrushing car. What do you do when you know someone you love dearly is going to die? What if that person is the only one you love more than your life? How do you not only find the strength to accept the truth but also find a way to move on?
You are so indebted and in love with your past that fear moving on will hurt your past and emotionally or ethically you don't feel burring the past while it is still there (since you know it's going to happen and there's no future with your past) moving on is the right thing either

I liked Murakami's lifestyle even though it was a bit flat and lacked variety. The reason being there were a lot of dialogues in this book. Lots of chatter which didn't lead to anywhere but they construed a story on their own. Murakami didn't leave anything to interpretation that way. Everything was as clear as daylight because it was said verbally in conversations. I liked this simple flow of the book

It's not all good though. The writing can easily become uninteresting and boring to some people for a few simple reasons:

1) In total there are 4 suicides mentioned in this book. Quite absurd.

2) The book has lot of sex in it (not penetration). I guess you have to read it to understand what exactly I am writing here. The book is set in late 1960's. So I found it stunning and quixotic that how the characters back then were so open and hungry about sex. Even in a contemporary book so much talk about sex would be unfeasible. Maybe Murakami mentioned those stuff because of a lack of creativity.

3) Just like sex there's an overdose of drinking and smoking. Like whenever a character was sitting idle doing nothing or just chatting with another character then he/she would either drink or smoke

4) There are very few characters in this book. Only 5 main characters, one of which disappears in the first quarter of the book and one other only appears from the halfway point. One concerning part for me was Toru's (the protagonist) family wasn't mentioned in the whole book. You go through three years of his life in university and yet not once did he talk with his parents let alone go and meet them. It was like he didn't care for them at all and didn't have any feelings towards them

But still I like Norwegian Wood because of it's deep rooted meaning and the fact that it hits you on the hard reality of life. It tells you how difficult and unbearable life can get and how as an individual you are forced to move on from your past (your loved one's) once they are on the verge of death and if you don't do that then you risk ever being happy in the future.
Norwegian Wood takes you through the story of a teenage boy (Toru) in his university years. He falls in love with a girl with whom he shares a very sorrowful past of a mutual friend which leaves them both despondent. Both are leading their lives on their own despondently after that past but they bump into one another once. They find comfort in each other to get away from that mutual past and slowly fall in love. Whilst Toru finds a way to heal himself from that past, the girl he loves can't do the same and instead is dragged more and more into it and she has a mental breakdown every now and again and cuts herself from the outside world. Toru tries his best to drag her out of it but as time moves on and another girl moves into his life he is forced to accept the truth that the girl he loved would never find a way to move on from that past as he did. And so begrudgingly he is again forced to choose between his past, a past which he now realizes has no present and no future and his present which he knows is very much and he can have a future with.

“Let me just tell you this, Watanabe," said Midori, pressing her cheek against my neck. "I'm a real, live girl, with real, live blood gushing through my veins. You're holding me in your arms and I'm telling you that I love you. I'm ready to do anything you tell me to do. I may be a little bit mad, but I'm a good girl, and honest, and I work hard, I'm kind of cute, I have nice boobs, I'm a good cook, and my father left me a trust fund. I mean, I'm a real bargain, don't you think? If you don't take me, I'll end up going somewhere else.”

While reading this book is that I didn't quite like the protagonist or let's say I didn't have any affection towards him. The feeling that you have when you like a character and you only want the best for them wasn't there. Yet at the same time I could make sense with every single thing he was going through and almost everything he did.

Norwegian Wood isn't just a love story. It is about being alive (life) and death and how certain circumstances forces a man to take decisions which he doesn't want to take. Only the message is conveyed through a love story. In a way the theme is quite similar to A Man Called Ove, the difference being the protagonist is quite young so can make decisions for his future and move on with his life

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May 04, 2014 Katya added it

Shelves: japan, audiobook

In every book I read by Murakami everything gets stranger, and relationships get more complicated.
So what do we have in this book? Three suicides, two love triangles and tons of various sexual relations. I wouldn`t mind all that if the author explained the reasons his characters had to commit a suicide or just do what they did.
But still I loved his slow-paced narrative and the type of character he always has in his books - an independent person, who doesn`t care about the society and lives his ...more

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