An adult Watanabe at Hamburg airport is overwhelmed by The Beatles' 'Norwegian Wood,' which pulls him into memory. The narrative drops to 1969 Tokyo, where we meet Watanabe as a first-year university student. His best friend Kizuki died by suicide two years earlier; Watanabe is learning to carry the absence.

Watanabe encounters Naoko — Kizuki's girlfriend — by chance on a Tokyo train. They begin spending Sunday afternoons walking together through the city, rarely speaking about Kizuki, bound by an unspoken understanding. The walks become a ritual of mourning that neither can name.

On Naoko's twentieth birthday, Watanabe and Naoko sleep together. It is her first time. The encounter is tender but underlaid with grief. The next day, Naoko vanishes from her apartment and stops responding. Weeks later, a letter arrives: she has checked into a therapeutic community in the mountains.

University life deepens. Watanabe befriends Nagasawa, a brilliant senior who sleeps with women systematically without care. He also meets Midori Kobayashi, a first-year student who is abrasive, funny, and nakedly alive. The contrast between Watanabe's two new acquaintances — one who feels nothing, one who demands everything — defines his fork in the road.

Watanabe visits Naoko at Ami Hostel, the mountain sanatorium in Kyoto where she is recovering. He meets Reiko, Naoko's roommate — a woman in her late thirties, a former piano teacher, who had her own breakdown years ago and now lives at the hostel indefinitely. The three spend three days together, talking, eating, and listening to Reiko play guitar.

Reiko tells Watanabe the full story of her breakdown: a brilliantly gifted piano student, a false accusation, a psychological collapse, and the years since at Ami Hostel. The story illuminates the thin membrane between functioning and not — and serves as warning and parallel to Naoko's situation.

Watanabe returns to Tokyo and to the dual life of writing faithfully to Naoko and growing closer to Midori. He resists both completely — unable to leave Naoko, unable to fully arrive with Midori. Midori's father dies. The student protest movement has collapsed into bureaucratic shell. Watanabe lives in a suspended state, loyal to the dead world, tempted by the living one.

Watanabe visits Ami Hostel again. Naoko is more fragile than on his first visit — sometimes lucid and connected, sometimes slipping into a state where she seems not fully present. Reiko and Watanabe talk long into the night about the future. Watanabe promises to wait for Naoko. He already knows, somewhere he cannot acknowledge, that waiting may not be possible.

Back in Tokyo, Midori makes her position explicit: she wants Watanabe, and she needs him to be present — fully, not partially. She is tired of competing with an absence. Watanabe, honest for the first time about his situation, tells her about Naoko. Midori listens, then tells him that she will wait — but not forever.

A letter arrives from Reiko: Naoko has died. She hanged herself in the woods near Ami Hostel. Watanabe receives the news and does not react in any recognizable way. He disappears — hitchhiking across Japan for weeks, sleeping in fields, talking to no one. The wandering is grief that cannot find its form.

Reiko, having left Ami Hostel after Naoko's death, comes to Watanabe's apartment in Tokyo. They spend a night drinking, talking about Naoko, and listening to Reiko play guitar. In the morning, they sleep together — a ceremony of farewell, not desire. Reiko leaves for Sapporo and a new life. The novel's dead world releases Watanabe.

The framing narrative closes: Watanabe in middle age, having just told this story to himself, sitting in the Hamburg airport. The 'Norwegian Wood' of his memory fades. He has named what he carries. The story has been a reckoning with the past, not an escape from it.