A memoir style of Norwegian Wood

The vitality of Norwegian Wood is largely due to the expressive memory of Watanabe. When reading it, it doesn't even feel like a recollection across years because the writing is so vivid and concrete. Especially in the chapters where Watanabe visits Naoko at the mountain asylum, the description is so detailed including the scene of mountain, the environment of the room they live and so on. This creates an illusion that this is not a fading memory, but an eternal "now."

For Watanabe, life is a series of departures, like Kizuki's. The most impressive scene for me when reading is the firefly gifted by his roommate Trooper. It was trapped in a coffee bottle. Watanabe released it and watched the glow of the fireflies gradually fade away in the darkness. This firefly is a metaphor for those who have passed. Though their light was dim, they left an impressive mark of his memory.

This reminds me of the movie Coco: "Death is not scary; the final death is being forgotten by everyone." The meaning of those captured details and recorded moments lies in the act of remembering itself. As long as someone remembers, those "fireflies" that vanished into the night will never truly go out.

Vivian (Zihan Yan)

Are you going to be in my dreams tonight?

 Norwegian Wood is a more grounded detour from the other Murakami works that we have read so far. Toru’s memory is triggered after hearing the Beatles song Norwegian Wood on a plane, sparking his recollection of the events of the story. This differs from the structure of stories like A Wild Sheep Chase, as we as an audience are given a personal telling of past experiences rather than an objective view of current events. This inadvertently raises questions regarding Toru’s reliability. On page 8, we see Toru describe his experience with Naoko walking through a meadow in October 18 years ago. Notably, Toru depicts a field well in this memory; a feature he admits he has no recollection of and is only informed of by Naoko after the fact, “Once she had described it to me, though, I was never able to think of that meadow scene without the well. From that day forward, the image of a thing I had never laid eyes on became inseparably fused to the actual scene of the field that lay before me. I can go so far as to describe the well in minute detail” (Page 8). This makes it seem very early into the book as though Toru’s memories could simply be constructions of past events rather than objective truths. This depiction of the well suggests that remembering Naoko is a descent into something dark and unknowingly deep for Toru, “All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world's darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density” (Page 8). We also see Toru doubt the reality of the world around him when he wakes up from his dream and has an encounter with Naoko on the first night of his stay,” I felt as if it were the continuation of my dream” (Page 158). Due to Toru’s continued detachment from reality when it comes to recalling specific interactions with Naoko, I think it would be fair to assume that we are not getting an objective retelling of events. The trauma sustained by Toru influences the reliability of the story, especially in his ability to describe Naoko. 

-Bradley

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. 

Hello Murakami, My Old Friend

Haruki Murakami makes direct reference to the film, The Graduate, in Norwegian Wood. The protagonist, Toru, watches the movie in a theater, stating that "I didn't think it was all that good, but I didn't have anything better to do, so I stayed and watched it again." (81) The film is also brought up on page 139 when Reiko and Toru talk about Simon and Garfunkel, as their music was extensively used in the film and helped bring the group cultural success within the mainstream. It's ironic for Toru to not like the film as he has a lot in common with Ben, the protagonist of The Graduate.

Both Ben and Toru are disillusioned young adults who don't have a place in the world. both men also attempt to fill their meaningless lives with sex—Ben with Mrs.Robinson, a close neighbor he's known since he was a boy, and Toru with the many women he sleeps with in part due to his friend Nagasawa's help. Both also finally find meaning in their dreadful lives due to a woman they madly fall in love with, Naoko in Toru's case and Elaine, Mrs.Robinson's daughter, in Ben's.

However, Ben takes a bit more of a passive role. He chases Elaine all the way to Berkeley, California after she moves away for college, attempting to prove his love and adoration for her despite all the people within their family forbidding their relationship from transpiring, mostly due to Mrs.Robinson's affair coming to light. Although Toru does visit Naoko while she's in the care of a mental hospital, he makes no attempt to stay there as long as he could, returning to his mundane life after some time. Ben also heavily loves Elaine due to her being the first person he shares a genuine, personal connection with, and not for superficial reasons like his sexual desire for Mrs.Robinson. Even after their genuine heart-to-hearts, Toru is left with a throbbing memory of Naoko's pleasing body as a memento from their time together at the hospital.

Murakami and The Graduate also share a connection through their use of popular music. Prior to The Graduate, pop music in film was sparsely used, often seen as cheap or simply piss-poor if use was attempted. Only smaller filmmakers attempted to break these industry rules, such as pioneering queer filmmaker Kenneth Anger. It wasn't until The Graduate where pop music in film went mainstream due to the film's heavy use of Simon and Garfunkel music. Murakami essentially does the same thing with his constant allusions to musicians and music he finds enjoyment from. Both The Graduate and Murakami helped reinforce pop music's use in art, as a tool that helps establish the audience to the cultural zeitgeist that the artists had found themselves within the time their work inhabited. 

-DK 

 

 

Norwegian Wood and Sex- Carly

 After reading chapter 6 of Norwegian Wood, I find it interesting how central a theme sex is in this book. I don’t think it is a bad thing to mention sex in a book about college students, it makes sense. However, I think the frequency and how sex shows up overshadows other interesting parts of the novel. It also comes off as self-insert fanfiction. Like, Midori’s whole fantasy being Toru trying to have sex with her against her will just made me question who he was writing this for. Moments like this and Reiko’s lesbian “sex” scandal could all partially be explained by the book being a product of its time. It could also be that Murakami used sexuality to transition into realism as a writing style. Even with this in mind, I still can’t help but to I feel like his portrayal of sex was just odd, and it felt like sex would randomly take over certain scenes. When Reiko was explaining her having another mental breakdown and having to leave her marriage, the main point of that story was “lesbian sex,” instead of the fact that the person she was having sex with was 13. It could’ve gone into any feelings of remorse or even how she would deal with it as a mother, but no, the only time her daughter was properly mentioned was when she was worried about getting caught. It almost feels as if sex is used as a transition between topics. First, Toru and Midori are talking about Naoko, and then she immediately starts talking about porn movies. Midori’s dad dies, and she ends the call asking about porn movies again. I just wonder what this story would be like if sex were included differently and how the characters would change as a result. I also wonder if this is common amongst Murakami's stories as a first-time reader.

The Restaurant POV in Murakami's Writing

Having read Norwegian Wood during my time working in the food industry, one scene really stood out to me—when Midori is cooking for Toru. In Norwegian Wood, the scene is described in such detail that it focuses, or rather obsesses, over some of the most mundane or “uninteresting” things. The reason this stood out to me is because of the kind of crowd drawn into restaurant culture. Chefs are extremely odd people (if you’ve never worked in a restaurant, just trust me). The way Murakami lingers on small actions and tiny details felt familiar, almost like being back in a kitchen watching someone take plating way too seriously. For example, some chefs would watch a cook plate and before sending it to the pass, take the same plate and spend minutes moving around random greens or sauces until it became "perfect". 

The way Murakami writes about spaghetti in The Year of Spaghetti stood out to me in the same way. The story centers around something so simple (boiling pasta) yet it becomes this intense, almost ritualistic act. While part of that is just Murakami’s prose style, I think part of it also comes from the culture he was a part of. Japan has an abundance of smaller Izakaya-style bars and cafés, spaces that revolve around routine, repetition, and attention to detail. 

Restaurant culture can be neurotic, obsessive, and strangely intimate. In a lot of Murakami’s writing, especially in these two works, that same energy is there. The focus on process, on small repeated actions, on quiet moments inside kitchens or apartments. It was only after I learned of Murakami's jazz bar, Peter Cat, and reading The Year of Spaghetti, that it felt less like coincidence and more like influence.

Raul 

Reconstructing Shadows of War in "Tony Takitani" & "Abandoning a Cat"

On December 7, 1941, an infamous strike was launched by the Japanese military on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, causing the United States to cease its neutrality and enter World War II. Both Murakami's father and the fictional father of Tony Takitani, Shozaburo Takitani, are safely sequestered when this occurs—one was released charitably from military service just before, and the other had never shed any sweat over the war to begin with. These two fathers and their two sons have the war, its atrocities, and the subsequent American occupation of Japan stitched into them, and when reading "Tony Takitani" and "Abandoning a Cat" it seems almost inevitable that the traumas of war are carried in the body and then passed on, though diluted, to those who come after.

In the case of Tony Takitani, with "his curly hair," "his somewhat deeply sculpted face," and the Italian-American origins of his namesake, it could very well be that America is reflected onto him in place of his mother, whose absence the story depends upon. He is named casually by the American major his father plays jazz with, who assigns himself as Tony's godfather. I think this naming of Shozaburo's son by an American military leader could be representative of the effect that militaristic occupation has on a native culture since the matter is unceremoniously handled by the major and Shozaburo, numb from his wife's sudden death, can do nothing but acquiesce: "The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last a while yet, and an American-style name might come in handy for the kid at some point." This thought on Shozaburo's part is especially interesting when you consider that if he and Tony's mother wedded in 1947, Tony is born just a few short years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next paragraph immediately refutes the slightly disruptive thought that an American name would be (someday) beneficial: "For certain people, coming face-to-face with a child called 'Tony Takitani' was all it took to reopen old wounds." This lends nicely to the beginning of "Abandoning a Cat."

From the first few paragraphs of this nonfiction piece about his father and these cats, American violence sits immovably in the corner of the reader's eye with the mention of ruins of a building "bombed by American planes—one of a few still visible scars of the war." (Again for me, the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan were brought to mind.) Murakami's father was discharged from service only days before Pearl Harbor, and, despite having survived narrowly, felt a sense of guilt over those he had left behind: "having his own life saved while his former comrades lost theirs became a source of great pain and anguish. I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life." This event of American entrance into WWII becomes central to his father's life as a moment in which his life split decisively into two paths, one leading to life and one to a nearly certain death, and it is this moment that makes a part of Murakami's father permanently inaccessible to Murakami himself. It is impossibly to extract the effects of war from those who are affected by it, and I understand why Murakami ends "Abandoning a Cat" the way he does: "Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it's absorbed into a larger, collective entity."

The description of the relationship between Tony and his father are also very similar to the dynamic painted between Murakami and his father. Of Tony and Shozaburo, Murakami writes that "being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal agree of habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other." Of him and his own father, he writes, "Both of us were unbending, and when it came to not expressing our thoughts directly, we were two of a kind. For better of for worse." For Murakami, he describes also how his life was free from the worries of war that took up his father's youth, that he could study unmoored and enjoy what his father couldn't. But this expectation from his father carries this latent burden of war from father to son. This sublimation (or absorption to follow Murakami's metaphor) of pain into other emotionally intensive narratives is present in "Tony Takitani" as well. In both stories, it is the disconnect between father and son that paint the seemingly unrelated stories of a wife with a shopping addiction and a cat escaping up a tree with similar thematic undertakings: they convey a tragic inaccessibility to those you love as a result of trauma. The scars of war show up, though transformed and translated. Murakami communicates a dreadful sense that even after surviving war or violence or death, the loved one coming back unscathed returns as only fraction of the person who left: "Going down is much harder than going up." 

(There is so much much more to say here about the connection here to American culture, the ending of "Abandoning a Cat" with the mention of "individual integrity" in relation to the solitary raindrops history, and collective history! But I am very interested to see this effect in Norwegian Wood as well because I do see some of it there also!)

Alana Lopez