Thomas Weber Post 2 - Finishing Norwegian Wood

     This book definitely marked. To be more specific, the atmosphere that it created through Murakami's natural surrealist style of description, the characters innate humanity, and the unabashed strangeness of each relationship created a comprehensive story that I felt encapsulated a person's coming of age very well. Murakami let his characters exist in harsh narratives without giving them excuses or pathways out that would seem easy. 

     The most interesting part of this novel, in my opinion, is Toru's relationship with death. Something that marks every major moment in the story. Whilst not explicitly said till towards the end of the book. There always existed this sort of detachment and distance that Toru seemed to create that wasn't just a part of his innate personality. But something formed by his relationship to Kizuki's death. Fundamentally, I think that this is what makes Toru so different from a character like Nagasawa. Toru isn't someone who exists without worries of others perception, instead existing within the framework of death within life. Constantly recognizing the impermanence of life, which often leads to "aloofness," and accepting his inability to control the world around him.

    Outside of the direct scope of the book, I greatly appreciate its very sensitive description of suicide and the complexities of keeping on living after having lost someone to themselves. Throughout the book, death and suicide seems to be presented as not only a moment of great sadness, often pausing the lives of those around them, but also as a transition. Throughout every death someone moves forward in some way. Whether in Midori moving from her parents bookstore to "live a fuller life" or Reiko moving form the sanitorium after Naoko died. This book emphasizes the beauty of death in its ability to present people with the impermanence of their own lives and breaking their "protective bubbles."

    I truly enjoyed reading this novel, even with all its strange sex descriptions and awkward moments, feeling its sincerity bleeding through every page. 

Norwegian Wood: Realism or Illusion?

Norwegian Wood stands apart from both Haruki Murakami's earlier and later works. It lacks the abstract symbolism of A Wild Sheep Chase and the magical realism of Killing Commendatore. In many ways, it is the first and only novel in Murakami's career with a distinctly realist sensibility. Yet upon finishing it a second time, I found it far richer than the impressions left by my first reading, when it had seemed a straightforward coming-of-age love story. Beneath its realist surface, the novel conceals a quiet idealism and a current of deeper allegory.

When I first encountered Ami Hostel in the novel, my mind did not leap to the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (though that novel is repeatedly referenced when Boku visits) but rather to a celebrated classical Chinese text: Taohuayuan Ji (The Peach Blossom Spring), written by Tao Yuanming around the fifth century CE. In it, a fisherman passes through a narrow mountain gorge and stumbles upon a hidden community, completely cut off from the outside world, where the people live in self-sufficiency and quiet contentment, untouched by the chaos beyond.

The parallels between Ami Hostel and the Peach Blossom land are striking: both are self-sufficient and isolated from the outside world; both are insulated from external political turbulence; and in both, the inhabitants live peacefully, with little desire to leave. Crucially, after centuries of scholarly debate, the Peach Blossom Spring is now widely understood not as a real place, but as a utopian ideal ---- a world that exists only in the imagination. Reading Norwegian Wood a second time with this in mind, I began to wonder whether Ami Hostel might similarly function not as a literal setting, but as a utopian symbol.

Throughout Boku's time at Ami Hostel, various people tell him: "We are all honest here, we say everything that is on our minds"(Ch.6). On the surface, this speaks to a kind of radical transparency, a community free from concealment and pretense. But as the remark is repeated: casually, insistently, by person after person, it begins to feel less like reassurance and more like warning.

Adding to this unease is a telling exchange in which Boku asks Naoko whether anyone ever wants to leave. She replies that almost no one does, and that those who do leave cannot come back. Taken together, these details suggest a darker possibility: that the residents of Ami Hostel are not honest because they have genuinely chosen openness, but because dishonesty carries the threat of expulsion, and no one is willing to risk that. What presents itself as a virtue, then, may in fact be a form of enforced compliance.

Yet for all its apparent calm and beauty, Ami Hostel is not truly a place one could long for. A comfortable life, for human beings, is not reducible to mere survival, it must be filled with something more: genuine connection with others, the honest exchange of feeling, the friction and warmth of real relationships. We are, at our core, social animals.

Boran

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.