These are just some personal notes I want to lay down before going to bed. Twenty minutes ago I finished reading Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森). This is the fifth Murakami book I've read and I have all along been hoping that there would be one I don't gushingly love, just so I don't look like a non-discriminating stooge. With this one, I may have found that book.
To say that I don't love Norwegian Wood is both scandalous and inaccurate. Surely, there are thousands who adore this novel. It is, after all, the book that added an extra zero to the end of the number of readers of Murakami's novels; it is what he's famous for. To not praise Norwegian Wood is deliberately to look like an iconoclast. But for me, it's also not the whole story. Of the five I've read, and five are enough for an ordered list, my favorite to least favorite go: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; Sputnik Sweetheart; Kafka on the Shore; and Norwegian Wood. If I appear lackluster in my feelings for the last, it is only because I'm a flaming devotee to the first four.
Two motifs attract me to Murakami's writing. The first is the characterization. The autobiographical sketch aside, the three novels I previously read all have characters to which I was inextricably drawn, to the point I could barely keep from blazing through the books in one sitting. Kafka's life in Kafka on the Shore could've been expanded into a twelve-part encyclopedia, and I would've wanted to read more. In the beginning of Sputnik Sweetheart I was somewhat annoyed by Sumire, but after she went to work for Miu, I was hooked on the relationship between the two. (Not to mention the Greek isle on which the latter half of the book takes place--almost a character in and of itself.) The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, the first one I read, was perfect in its creation of characters forever etched in my memory: May Kasahara, Malto Kano, Creta Kano and the narrator as well. It still stands on a plane above the rest, quite possibly in my five favorite books of all time.
Plot spoiler in next paragraph
Though Watanabe's character in Norwegian Wood is certainly someone I can relate to, I never found myself too drawn toward him, for whatever reason. Nor were either of the two main female interests all that intriguing, either. Of all the people in Watanabe's life, there was only one who I felt some particular feelings toward, his friend Nagasawa's girlfriend, Hatsumi. The short passage, a page at most, that lays her suicide on the reader like a splash of cold water in the face, caught me totally off guard. Perhaps the only normal person in the entire book, her dismal fate was all the more unfair. (I take this back; Reiko is a character that will stick with me for some time in the grand tradition of memorable Murakami characters.)
The other mainstay of Murakami's writing that so speaks to me on a personal level is, as a matter of fact, alive and well in the book. I have some sort of obsession about the neat and orderly life that Murakami's characters, and so far as I can tell from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Murakami himself, lead on a day-to-day basis. When Watanabe leaves a sleeping girl to slink off into the night, he is careful to wash his tea or beer cup before he goes. He learns from his neurotic roommate to keep a neat and orderly dorm room as well. This tendency is probably most manifest in the daily routines of Kafka from Kafka on the shore, but Watanabe has perhaps the second most regimented lifestyle of all the characters, a steady diet of reading and doing laundry and taking long walks. I don't know why I envy this modern cliché of East Asian culture (I think it is this, and its corresponding interior decorating schemes, via Korean movies like 301/302 and any number of romantic dramas, that drew me into Asian cinema to begin with--what I once heard described in a Takako Minekawa review as "space-age bachelor pads"), but it has something to do with the self-discipline, as well as the calm introversion of a life spent perfecting routines, that minimizes human experience to an intricate art form of insignificant, yet epic, events.
Plot spoiler in next paragraph
The last fifty pages of Norwegian Wood held my attention much stronger than the first 250. Probably the two scenes I will take away from this book will be the still quiet of the sanatorium in the forest, when Watanabe first visits Naoko, but more so the reconciliation of the narrator with Midori atop the roof a downtown Tokyo shopping mall, rain pouring down in torrents:
"I set the umbrella down and held her close in the rain. The dull rush of tires on the highway enveloped us like a fog. The rain fell without a break, without a sound, soaking her hair and mine, running like tears down our cheeks, down to her jeans jacket and my yellow nylon windbreaker, spreading in dark stains."
It's something of a cliché unto itself, the passionate kiss in the rain, but then so is the whole French New Wave-influenced, witty characters smoking cigarettes and coping with deep psychological torment that makes up the rest of the book. But it's damn good at what it is. The few times I felt the book sank below the weight of its supercool was in some of the sex scenes, or rather some of the conversations about sex, that seemed TOO contrived. No matter how outlandish the event, replete with the Murakami-trademarked "act of defilement", never in his other books does sex seem unnatural. At times in Norwegian Wood (worth pointing out, the earliest of his books that I've read), the language harkens back to the type of passages that feel thrown in to rouse the middle school, reading-and-snickering-in-secret crowd. In Murakami's later works these elements have matured and grown into integral plot developments. Perhaps there was something lost in translation?
Finishing a Murakami book, even Norwegian Wood, always leaves me feeling refreshed in life, but also with a hint of anxiety. Though the back catalog is still quite extensive, the idea of having no new Murakami book to read leaves me on edge, and reluctant to hasten that inevitable day. I've been told that South of the Border, West of the Sun is a good one, so I'll probably put it in the queue. Until then, however, I'll revel a little longer in thinking of Reiko's last visit to Tokyo, the faux-funeral in which she and Watanabe drank excessively and played guitar renditions of Bach, and, of course, the elegiac Norwegian Wood, which I'll never listen to in the same way again.
