Adrian Curtin's Reviews > Norwegian Wood

This is somewhat a novel about indecision and lack of purpose, which truthfully might have made me like it more in my current state. My first reading of this author, Murakami's writing expressed a smooth and seductive melancholy that made me feel immersed in each detail. Toru is a young man of nearly 20 drifting through events of no consequence that he can yet grasp. The back of the book wished to tell you how he struggles between two women, but it is not a love story. The narrator's reflection of this is less about his own internal struggles, but rather the way that the world twists and turns around him. It evokes some resemblances to Catcher in the Rye, in that the oddity and futility of the world is blindingly apparent the narrator but the cause and purpose are completely lost. Reflecting on the past, the narrator recalls his story as a "deep sticky bog", that he was "never sure where he was, never sure he was headed in the right direction, knowing only that he had to keep moving". His brooding reflects both the listless wanderings he experiences and his own realization that even without purpose, we still have more to lose.
The book is an entanglement of sex and death in a way that many will find unappealing or depressing, but it can move you.