Thomas Weber - Norwegian Wood and Liminal Spaces

Whilst Murakami specifically stops himself from drawing on the surreal and magical throughout Norwegian Wood what exists in its place is the clever use of setting and pacing. More specifically, throughout chapters 6 and 7 Murakami utilizes themes commonly associated with mountains, power lines, and narrow cliff roads to convey to the reader the precarity, isolation, and uncertainty of different scenes. One such scene is found in Chapter 7 when Toru goes to visit Midori's father in the hospital. When entering the room before lunch, Toru quickly is given a kind of break in momentum in the scene to look out the window and notice the power lines, quickly commenting on sparrows intermittently perching on the lines right outside. This struck me as interesting as, from my knowledge, sparrows, across many cultures, are strong symbols of resilience, fortune, and friendship. I took this very short choice of imagery as being a reference to Midori visiting her father in the hospital. Acting as a sparrow perching for limited times on a liminal space (power lines) between life and death. 

    Traditionally, moonlight is used in literature to convey feelings of love, mystery or even the subconscious. While I do think that Murakami utilizes these motifs in Norwegian Wood, he pushed it farther to the point of using moonlight as a liminal space for Toru and Naoko. The most obvious example of this can be found in the scene where Naoko presents herself naked to Toru during the night, backlit by moonlight. While the existing setting where Toru and Naoko are, specifically the motifs of the mountains, dense forests and total isolation, already add to this sense that they are existing in a liminal space away from society, the moonlight exacerbates this feeling by being used as a carrier for the space between life and death itself. Specifically, the moonlight acts as a tool for the reader to understand two crucial things about Naoko. First, the true fragility of her state and her constant proximity to death. Second, her existence within a liminal, "inaccessible to Toru," space. On the one hand, the transparency of Naoko's eyes during this scene described by Toru can be taken as a presentation of both the distance between Toru and Naoko, or as Naoko as being mere steps away from death. With the eyes of the dead often being described as glassy or transparent. On the other hand, there are lines showing that whilst she is at a mere arms-width away she seems inaccessible and distant. This presents the liminality of not only Naoko's mind but also her place on earth. She exists in a constant state of in-between, getting better and staying as she is with no true path towards either.