“How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvellous. Of course once I do put them into words, I find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say.”
Above portion from the book seems equally relevant to writing a book review for Norwegian wood, a love story from Haruki Murakami. This book is distinctly different from his other books that I have read. It involves no tear or gate in space and time to travel to the other world and remains strongly tethered to the mortal world we all know and live in. However this aspect doesn’t limit the book in anyway.
Story of this book revolves around a boy named Toru Watambe and his journey from adolescence to adulthood. It poignantly describes the dilemmas of growing up. Toru struggles to reconcile the differences in world he sees ahead of him and the one he sees behind him. The world ahead is constantly barraging him with larger than life success, living on one’s own terms, and a quasi immortality created and fostered by popular culture. Whereas the world behind has a gripping memory of loss of his friend Kizuki to death, guilt of being in a relationship with Kizuki’s girlfriend, his other adolescence romances and the eternal urge of staying seventeen forever.
Post Kizuki’s death, Naoko and Toru come close for a brief moment, however things fall apart as Naoko further sinks in grief and has to be transferred to a mental institute for treatment. Toru finds himself conflicted whether to wait for Naoko to return to normalcy or to move forward with other romantic interests that life may bring to him.
Through wide range of characters the book’s story transcends from just love story to a wider narrative about current times. For example, character of Nagasawa shows to Toru difference of hard work and manual labour. Nagasawa is shown as supremely successful young man who always believes in staying one step ahead of the time to ensure he can position himself at the right time at a right place. Toru contrasts his input to the condition of a man on deathbed who has worked just as hard in maintaining a book shop and raising his daughter. If that man did not get a chance to check what was ahead of him and place himself to leverage that, is it really his fault ?
Another interesting character is Midori, a girl Toru finds attractive. She is the one who lends Toru much needed relief from his emotional conflict between waiting for Naoko and moving forward with life. Even by the end of the book, we are not sure which road Toru finally took, but one can definitely say that Midori was the only source of comfort when Toru found it very hard especially after Naoko succumbed to suicide.
Story of this book brings many other characters that touch readers’ lives, Reiko, Storm Trooper, Hatsumi - all of them are brief yet able to offer a glimpse into different parts of human psyche with which readers can connect easily.
Murakami’s strong understanding of human nature reflects throughout the book, and provides soothing assurance of finding beauty even in most dark moments of life!
Italicised part is taken from the book.
