Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami (1987)
“The novel about grief that a generation of Japanese readers recognized as the first honest description of their own inner lives — and then couldn't stop giving to people they loved.”
At a Glance
In late-1960s Tokyo, nineteen-year-old Watanabe Toru grieves the suicide of his best friend Kizuki while falling into an impossible love with Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko, who is unraveling in a mountain sanatorium. He is simultaneously drawn to the electric, life-embracing Midori. When Naoko dies by suicide, Watanabe must choose whether to stay in the dead world of memory or step into the living world Midori represents.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The first novel to make Murakami a mainstream Japanese phenomenon — four million copies sold in Japan in 1987 alone, two years after publication it was in nearly every household. Often credited with making literary fiction acceptable to a generation of young Japanese readers who had been reading manga and genre fiction. Established Murakami as a cultural figure and permanently altered how Japanese fiction was written — the direct, Western-influenced prose style he used here became aspirational for a generation of writers.
Diction Profile
Conversational with occasional lyrical passages — unusually direct for Japanese literary fiction, influenced by American writers
Low to moderate