I seem to mostly read Murakami’s books while I’m
travelling. I started this book on the way to Japan
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.
