Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

I seem to mostly read Murakami’s books while I’m travelling. I started this book on the way to Japan and finished it when back home for a while. Murakami’s breakthrough book and seemingly his most widely-read, I thought this could be more exciting and engaging than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. However, I found it very similar – but lacking the charms or intriguing strangeness of that book. And I can’t say it was my favourite. So no, I wouldn’t say I recommend Norwegian Wood, either.

It seems that Norwegian Wood is actually Murakami’s plainest story. No passing through possibly-figurative walls at the bottoms of wells here, nor peculiar psychic powers. No odd gruesome war stories or mysterious dirty phone calls.

Norwegian Wood is a simple, melancholy love story. Watanabe’s best friend dies, and he has a brief romance with the dead friend’s former girlfriend. She ends up institutionalised, while Watanabe drifts – seemingly like all Murakami’s protagonists. He muses on how ordinary he is while enjoying the arts, and meets several intriguing girls. All the girls fall for him and talk to him in very quirky ways, often about sex. This, too, seems a staple of Murakami, and again strikes me as the very same sort of wish-fulfilment for lonely, horny young men that is seen so often in seinen manga.

If I thought that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was frustrating because it always seemed like exciting events were on the brink of happening but never really did, Norwegian Wood is worse. There isn’t really any drive to the story, none of Watanabe’s relationships seem to get beyond superficial games of intrigue and the climactic final action has been coming all along and unfolds with turgid inevitability, neither causing the reader any surprise nor sadness.

I must say, I don’t understand the fuss around Murakami. His characters constantly have to tell one another how interesting they are so that they actually seem that way. They always get told how odd their way of thinking is, how charming their speech is, how they have a special and intriguing outlook, but other than a few pleasingly poetic musings, I don’t see the evidence for it. I could understand if Murakami championed the ordinary, overlooked sorts in life and made the reader empathise with a dull character who in fact had great hidden strength, but he instead seems to just have these ordinary men suffering from sad pasts yet constantly surrounded by attractive women who find their plain speech, simple favours and occasional compliments terribly fascinating and interesting.

Occasionally Murakami does bring up interesting questions. I did have an emotional reaction to the utterly horrible friend of Watanabe’s who has great ambition but a callous mind and is constantly torturing his poor girlfriend, but his part in the book is very minor. Some musings about sex and loyalty also resonated with me, even if my conclusions were essentially opposite from Watanabe’s.

Otherwise, I must confess I was bored. Almost nothing happens in this book. It’s a collection of unrealistic conversations with unrealistic women. As a translation, like most readers I forgive stilted dialogue, awkward pacing and peculiar sentence structure, as condemning the style of a writer isn’t fair when it comes through the filter of another writer from another language altogether, but it’s the substance of this book that I found lacking.

My defining impression of Murakami novels, one that will likely prevent me reading another, is that he shows us an engaging everyman, clever but innocuous and always good with the girls, and puts them in a situation where it seems that something interesting is just about to happen to them. But at the end of the book, nothing very interesting ever does. Or if interesting things do happen, the character simply drifts on in the same manner. I don’t want melodrama or wailing and gnashing of teeth – but I do want some kind of impact on character and narrative. But once again I was left unsatisfied. 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

I’ve been meaning to actually read one of Murakami’s novels for years, since I read his After the Quake short stories some time ago. But it never really felt like a priority until a few weeks ago, I felt like reading something more contemporary and he seemed ideal. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his breakthrough novel, was the one I found first. I found Norwegian Wood a little later and get the impression it may be a better place to start with him, but it was too late. And I will get to Norwegian Wood next anyway – for while I can’t say I think Murakami is the genius he’s often made out to be, nor that I truly loved this book, there’s something about his writing voice that is incredibly compelling and makes him eminently readable. That’s a rare and intersting thing.

That said, the thing that struck me most about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is that it’s really not worlds away from the kind of thing you find in light novels. The kind that get adapted into anime series and get lots of fanservice-heavy merchandise. In fact, early on in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was strongly reminded of Bakemonogatari. Sound far-fetched? I don’t think it is.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle centres on a very normal everyman character named Okada. When first his cat and then his wife go missing, he begins to meet a whole lot of girls, many of whom have special powers or hidden oddities about them. There’s the mysterious and standoffish clairvoyant. There’s the clairvoyant’s little sister, a beauty with an odd story about being born in extreme pain until she tried to kill herself, whereupon she could feel nothing. Then there’s the precocious loli, who at sixteen is too young for Okada but teasingly flirtatious. Then an older woman with a lot of money and the means to advance Okada’s needs. And of course, quite passively, Okada begins to develop strange powers of his own, powers that actually seem to transcend those of the women around him and make him necessary to them. Trust me when I say that this is all very typical stuff for light novels. There’s a lot of the same set-up in To Aru as well.

But of course much happens here that is not the territory of such light entertainment. There are long and detailed passages about Japanese military actions in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which include quite brutal violence. There is a lot of sexually explicit description and erotic writing, although invariably presented rather clinically. There is much musing about metaphysical matters, the meaning of life, how events in childhood deeply affect a person’s story, and discussion about people’s place in one another’s existences. And of course, Okada being in his thirties there is a different outlook from teenaged protagonists, a far greater sense of impotence and ennui.

I resent the book a little. As seems to be the trend for Murakami books, very little happens. The ending is contrived and could have happened at any point previously, meaning there’s not really any sense of true progression. Though I’m reading in translation, there’s also the fact that we get so many voices in this book, so many storytellers, yet except for the easy imitation of teenage speech given to Kasahara Mei, they all express themselves in the same, slightly off-kilter way, a prim and matter-of-fact style given to metaphysical tangents.

Yet the fact is that Murakami definitely has the quality a writer should prize most highly, which is readability. He can have his character meander and think trite philosophical thoughts at great length, and he can have next to nothing happen for chapters on end, yet I still wanted to go back to the story. Only in the old man’s stories about his army life did I get bored, and yet they might be the part that endures most clearly in my mind. Okada is not a blank slate, nor is he incredibly ordinary, but he is extremely easy to identify with and even like. That’s a rare gift, and I suspect what makes Murakami the success that he is. Okada is not like me, his interests are not like mine and nor is his life, and he does a whole lot of things that I would never do. Yet he never seems strange or hard to understand. He is always sympathetic, even when psychotically violent or completely irrational.

Very little happens in the book, and much of what does happen defies explanation. A lot is purposely vague, and the fact is that making something random seem significant by having something that parallels it popping up in a flashback is just smoke and mirrors. I dislike open-ended meanings and bizarre supernatural events that can be explained away by saying ‘oh, this is magical realism’. And yet I still liked the book, and its writer. I think that is Murakami’s trump card, his own magic power. I don’t think he needs to write a good story to write well.

So I will at the very least read another Murakami book. I don’t think I will call myself a fan, but I certainly don’t regret the time I gave to this book, or think I should be cautious with giving my time to another. Murakami has an undeniable gift, of making his reader feel they’re very like the character narrating the book even if he is thinking or doing the strangest things, and I find that undeniably fascinating.