It is through this shared agony that Toru and Naoko find solace in each other’s company, and as they spend time together, Toru eventually falls in love with the broken Naoko.ĭuring his time in Tokyo, Toru also meets Midori Kobayashi, whose vibrant and spirited personality is a stark contrast to Naoko’s reserve. Naoko, Kizuki’s demure girlfriend, had also been suffering due to her lover’s death. While he meets several interesting characters in his dormitory, including his neat-freak roommate “Storm Trooper” and womanizing university student Nagasawa, who eventually coaxes him to sleep around with women, Toru remains at a distance.īy a stroke of luck or misfortune, however, Toru runs into an old friend from Kobe. With his idyllic childhood in shambles, Toru vows to remain detached from others as he starts his college life. Toru had fled from his hometown in Kobe to bustling Tokyo to start anew after his best friend, Kizuki, unexpectedly took his own life.
Memories and emotions then come flooding back as his mind travels back to the late 1960s, reliving his life as a man on the cusp of adulthood. The novel begins with a 37-year-old Toru Watanabe on a flight to Hamburg, Germany, when he hears the beginning notes of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. Despite being one of Murakami’s earliest novels, “Norwegian Wood” is one of his most well-loved books to date. Written by Japanese author and translator Haruki Murakami, whose wildly imaginative and magical realist stories have gained him a worldwide following, “Norwegian Wood” (ノルウェイの森) takes a step back from his usual prose and focuses on the mundane life of a young man grappling with grief, loss, and existentialism.
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