Living with Loneliness

 In Norwegian wood, loneliness follows almost every character like a shadow. As Schopenhauer once said, “Either one is alone or one is vulgar.” In this work, loneliness can be both a poison and, at times, a remedy for life. The story begins with the suicide of Kizuki. Kizuki, Toru Watanabe, and Naoko were once an inseparable trio, but Kizuki’s sudden death forces Watanabe to realize that death is not the opposite of life, but rather a part of it. Kizuki’s death not only takes away his life, but also leaves Watanabe and Naoko trapped in a loneliness they cannot escape. For Naoko in particular, Kizuki had been her entire world. When that world disappears, she gradually becomes lost within her own inner darkness.

In her relationship with Watanabe, Naoko seems to depend on him, yet Watanabe understands that he can never truly enter her inner world. She holds his hand and leans on him, but her heart still belongs to the memories of Kizuki. Although the two grow close to each other, they cannot truly fill the emptiness inside one another. This kind of loneliness: being unable to be understood or saved, eventually leads Naoko toward death.

Other characters in the novel are also surrounded by loneliness. Hatsumi deeply loves Nagasawa and patiently waits for him, even though she knows he is selfish and emotionally distant. In the end, after marrying someone else, she is still unable to escape her inner emptiness and eventually takes her own life. Nagasawa appears confident and rational, yet his world is closed as well. He neither seeks to understand others nor desires to be understood. Each character remains trapped in their own form of loneliness.

Unlike Naoko, Midori represents another way of facing loneliness. She is lively, direct, and full of vitality. Rather than escaping from life’s difficulties, she chooses to continue moving forward. Midori’s presence gradually makes Watanabe realize that although loneliness may be unavoidable, people can still choose to keep living.

For this reason, this book is not only a coming-of-age love story, but also a novel about loneliness and growth. Through these characters, Haruki Murakami suggests that loneliness is an inevitable part of life, yet it does not have to consume us. When faced with loneliness, people can either escape from it or learn to move forward despite it.

As the novel quietly implies, no one truly likes loneliness, people simply fear disappointment. When loneliness follows us like a shadow, what truly matters may not be escaping from it, but learning to live with it while continuing to search for light in life.

Wendy

Murakami and Trauma

Norwegian Wood, unlike The Wild Sheep Chase, is not abstract or surreal. Murakami instead describes a realistic college life, including loneliness, sex, grief, and emotional confusion in a very relatable way. He openly addresses suicide and mental health without glamorizing or stigmatizing it. For example, Kizuki’s death is not romanticized or explained, and Naoko’s emotional instability is quietly addressed rather than dramatized. Even as we learn more about Naoko’s state and her living arrangements, she is shown in a “bubble” or utopian-like society, rather than a dramatic psychiatric ward.

I also noticed that Toru is very passive and detached, particularly in his relationships with Naoko and Midori, as well as in the emotionless sex he engages in. This passivity feels consistent with Murakami’s other male protagonists, who often observe rather than act. Toru seems to function more as someone who listens to other people’s stories rather than someone who actively changes events himself. As the novel progresses, this aspect of Toru’s character becomes increasingly apparent. Toru remains very composed while hearing about and experiencing different traumatic situations. Because of this, he often comes across as a relatively stable presence compared to the other characters around him. This seems especially clear when Naoko mentions that she and Kizuki felt more at ease when Toru was with them, and also during his lunch with Hatsumi and Nagasawa, where he again seems to occupy the role of the most grounded person in the group.

When thinking about Murakami’s motives for writing the novel, I kept thinking about his essay “Abandoning a Cat,” where he reflects on his father and the difficulty of fully understanding his experiences and trauma. In that essay, Murakami describes how certain memories, like abandoning the family cat, stay with him even though they seem small or ordinary at first. What stood out to me is how trauma and memory are often discussed indirectly, through fragments and reflections rather than clear explanations. I think something similar is happening in Norwegian Wood. Many of the characters are shaped by trauma, but it is rarely fully explained. Thinking about Norwegian Wood through the lens of “Abandoning a Cat,” it seems like Murakami may be interested in how people carry trauma quietly, often without fully understanding it themselves. Just as Murakami reflects on his father’s experiences from a distance, Toru seems to observe the pain and histories of the people around him without always being able to explain them. Instead of dramatic explanations or clear resolutions, Murakami presents these experiences as complicated parts of everyday life.

- Alexia Koulikourdis

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.