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Norwegian Wood

Author: Haruki Murakami
Creator: Jay Rubin
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

165 reviews
Sales Rank: 8963

Media: Paperback
Pages: 298
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.8

ISBN: 0375704027
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9780375704024
ASIN: 0375704027

Publication Date: September 12, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Also Available In:

•	Paperback - Norwegian Wood
•	Paperback - Norwegian Wood (Vintage East)
•	Hardcover - Norwegian Wood
•	Unknown Binding - Norwegian Wood
•	Audio Download - Norwegian Wood (Unabridged)
•	Paperback - Norwegian Wood
•	Paperback - Norwegian Wood
•	Audio Download - Norwegian Wood (Unabridged)
•	Paperback - NORWEGIAN WOOD

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man.

Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles:

I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.

This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, Norwegian Wood captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy. --Mark Thwaite

Product Description
First American Publication

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time.It is sure to be a literary event.

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before.Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable.As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

Customer Reviews: Read 160 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A haunting story November 17, 2008
Thomas Fekete (Philadelphia, PA USA)
Murakami is internationally known for a body of work that encompasses a surreal, dreamy, time-sequence-challenged form of fiction (as well as a number of non-fiction pieces). This novel -- said to be somewhat autobiographical -- is a mesmerizing piece of fiction. Narrated by an adult looking back on an adolescence of confusion and uncertainty, it will certainly trigger knowing nods from its readers. The book is more dramatic than my life (and I suspect more than yours as well), but the deep uncertainty of life in the transition between living at home and making one's way in the world should be familiar to most. Characters in Murakami's books tend to talk a lot and even write letters (how dated!). But they also tell intriguing and believable stories that both anchor them in a specific time and place but also express the universal. A lot in this book is not as it seems. On a superficial level, life is treated as a chore or a bad joke. But what good would it be to have a story that never scratched deeper than an American television prime-time drama into the lives of college students?

Murakami teases us by setting up story lines that never get fully resolved. By this, I don't mean that you have to fill in small details. I mean that people veer off like rockets and you never hear from them again. Or, at best, they are like comets that make recurrent entries into your orbit before being destroyed or escaping forever. People like this are intriguing and stories that include them are somewhat addictive. Suicide makes its way through this book as a reasonable alternative to life. But Murakami craftily asserts again and again that death is part of life and not its opposite. What's hard in life is not avoiding death, but rather living true to your "creed" or belief system. One of the most effective moments in this moving novel is the scene where the narrator spends a considerable amount of time in a hospital talking to (talking at?) a dying man. This scene is not maudlin, nor is any scene in this book manipulative. The book is an exploration of growth, challenge, stumbling and realignment. If you like this book, you have a lot more Murakami to explore. And if you like this book, you might also like the books of David Mitchell, an English novelist with a strong attraction to Japan and Japanese themes.

4 out of 5 stars

proof that i have a soul. November 15, 2008
Belinda Lam (California,USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

one of the few written works that have solicited tears, even days after finishing the novel. i speak for myself when i say this: norwegian wood was depressing as hell, but it was the greatest and most eloquently expressed account of young love that i've ever come across.

5 out of 5 stars

My First Murakami Book November 7, 2008
Alberto Estua Zardain (mexico city)
It was kind of autobiographic, I guess. The characters are so lonesome, weird, emotional cripples and so needy.
Is not the story that it's so great about this book, is the way he is guiding the reader through an awkward journey of emotions and feelings.
You will not have a way out and you'll feel absolutely close to all of the characters

4 out of 5 stars

Not just a love story September 26, 2008
Girl Interrupted (United Arab Emirates)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

It is always a hard task for me to review a novel by Murakami because of the sheer complexity of his work. This particular novel christened 'Norwegian Wood' after the famous Beatles' song has been looked at as one of Murakami's simplest novels where he was accused of succumbing to the story lines that he has prided himself on avoiding. After reading 'Norwegian Wood' I must say with absolute conviction that these accusations are indeed invalid and have been based on the apparent plot of the novel that at first might seem simple, it is true that there were no signs of any sheep or disappearing elephants in this novel, but it is far from being simple.
I think Murakami has taken a great risk with this novel in the sense that he had the courage to step out of what is natural to him and attempt to write a story in a different style yet he succeeded in making it his own. 'Norwegian Wood' is simply a love story but by saying that we have not even scratched the surface on the intensity of this novel. By the time Murakami was finished with it, this love story has sucked you in its nostalgic era of the 60's and enveloped you in the smells and sounds of every season from January through to December. This isn't just a love story, it is a coming-of-age story, and it is a story within a story. The characters have the definite Murakami style, selfless, sweet some even lovable yet all are intriguingly twisted such is the real world we live in.

4 out of 5 stars

Good book by Murakami September 23, 2008
Andres C. Salama (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
This is the third book by Haruki Murakami I read (after Sputnik and South of the Border) and the best so far. Originally written in 1987, the book begins in an airport in Germany, as the titular song by the Beatles playing in the sound system makes middle age Toru Watanabe remember his life as a college student in the late 1960s. As a drama student living in a pension in Tokyo he has to chose between the love of the unstable Naoko (a friend from high school, girlfriend of a friend of Watanabe that commited suicide, and who now lives in a sort of asylum in rural Japan) and the increasing approaches of his college classmate Midori. Meanwhile, he makes two friends: the nerdy, cleanliness obsessed, geography student nicknamed "Storm Trooper" and the ladies man Nagasawa, an amoral student who plans to enter Japan's diplomatic corps. A great book about remembrances, love and the joy and occasional sadness of young life. Perhaps not for the prurrient, since, as in other books by Murakami, explicit sex often punctuates the story.

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