Thoughts about the movie

One of the biggest problems I had with the film adaptation was the casting. The actress who played Naoko was especially disappointing to me. When I read the novel, I imagined Naoko as someone pure, fragile, and almost otherworldly. In the film, however, she did not give that impression at all. Her expression often felt empty in a way that made her seem less like a delicate young woman and more like someone who had already been worn down by many years of suffering. This completely changed the feeling of her character for me. 

Midori was also very different from how I pictured her in the book. In the novel, she has a playful charm, but the film did not really capture that side of her. Instead, she came across as too elegant and fashionable. Details like her sunglasses and the way she spoke made her feel much more polished than the Midori Murakami described. The only character I thought fit my impression fairly closely was Kizuki. Even though he dies at the very beginning, his appearance and presence matched the image I had while reading. The car suicide scene also conveyed a real sense of struggle.

Another weakness of the film is the way it handles the other characters and the flow of the story. I understand that a movie has limited time and cannot develop every side character as fully as a novel can. However, some characters, such as Storm Trooper, appear so briefly and strangely that their scenes may feel confusing, especially for audiences who have not read the book. More broadly, the entire film often feels like a sequence of disconnected images rather than a continuous story. At times, the transition from one scene to the next feels abrupt and almost random. For example, one moment Storm Trooper is by Toru's bed, and the next moment Toru is in a bar talking with Nagasawa about girls. Because of this, the film loses the emotional and narrative continuity that makes the novel powerful. In my opinion, these details were handled poorly, and in some cases it might actually have been better to leave them out rather than include them in such an incomplete way.

- Wendy

Thoughts on Norwegian Wood: The Movie

Even though we only watched 50 minutes of the Norwegian Wood movie in class, there were many things that I noticed that came across as interesting. First, the beginning felt more like a montage rather than a movie where we are just hit with scenes after scene after scene. We go from Toru, Naoko, and Kizuki, to Toru and Kizuki's pool game, to Kizuki's suicide all within a matter of 5 minutes. This feeling continues throughout the movie where it seems like a bunch of information that is barely held together is just thrown at the audience. For example, Stormtrooper plays a much lesser role in the movie, as we only see him twice before he leaves and also never get to hear his name. The same goes for Nagasawa. We don't get the scene where he finds Toru reading the Great Gatsby and how that moment kick started their friendship. All we see is that the two of them are already friends. This opening felt rather rushed and if we hadn't read the book in class, I would not have been able to understand what was happening. Many people say to read the book instead of watching the movie, but for Norwegian Wood it is a necessity. 

There were other parts that were either completely skipped over, or just different from the book. The meeting with Midori again seems rushed, but then we cut straight to when they meet up after she ghosted him at lunch, which then cuts straight into when she invites him over for food. Similarly, he gives her pink and white flowers in the movie while in the book he gives her daffodils.

I also noticed how important of a role music plays in the film. Almost every scene was set to some background track, ambient noise, or the shouts of the student protest. To me, this seems like a good way to captivate Murakami's obsession with music from his novels. While reading, it can be hard to visualize what a mentioned song is if you've never heard it before and no one is going to take the time to look each song up and listen to them before getting back into reading. Therefore I feel this element and the sound design are one of the more well executed aspects of the movie from the half we have seen so far. 

- Angus Black

When grief doesn't seem like grief

 One thing that was interesting to me was the portrayal of grief in Norwegian Wood. The novel gives Toru a voice that seems calm and controlled most of the time, sometimes too much that it can feel unsettling to the reader. This calmness makes it seem like he is narrating almost as if he's describing someone else's life rather than his own. That distance reads less like indifference and more like coping, and staying detached is the only way he can keep moving forward. I've noticed how Murakami doesn't treat grief like a single emotion, as it shows up as a whole shift in how Toru experiences the world. He can still go to school, talk to people and follow routines but even then, everything feels slightly hollow, as if he was functioning on autopilot. When the novel returns to Kizuki's death, it becomes clear that the loss isn't just about sad memories, it's something that permanently changes the atmosphere around Toru and Naoko. With Nook specially, grief feels like being stuck in a certain place or time, like everything in her life paused at the moment. Being with her pulls Toru into the same space, even when he tries to stay rational.

- Shurun Li

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