Norwegian Wood

Toru Watanabe, now thirty seven and hearing an orchestral cover of the Beatles song Norwegian Wood on an airplane, is pulled back without warning into his memories of Tokyo in the late nineteen sixties. As a student, Toru remains close to Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki, after Kizuki kills himself at seventeen for no reason either of them can explain, and the two grow steadily closer through quiet Sunday walks around the city until, on her twentieth birthday, they finally sleep together. Naoko leaves soon after for a remote sanatorium in the mountains, unable to hold herself together, and Toru visits her there, forming an unusual friendship with her older roommate Reiko along the way, even as he grows closer at university to Midori Kobayashi, a blunt, funny, entirely alive classmate who represents everything Naoko's fragility cannot offer him. Toru writes faithfully to Naoko while his feelings for Midori deepen, caught between a promise to a dying past and an open, uncertain future, until Naoko takes her own life in the sanatorium woods. Devastated, Toru wanders Japan alone for weeks before returning to Tokyo, where an encounter with Reiko, who has left the sanatorium for good, helps him understand that grieving Naoko does not require refusing to live. The novel ends with Toru calling Midori from a payphone to tell her he loves her only her, and her answer, asking simply where he is calling from, is the last line of the book, left unresolved.

Murakami writes in plain, unadorned, deliberately restrained prose, a marked departure from the more surreal fiction that made his earlier reputation, and the novel reads quickly and quietly, its sadness delivered without any of the fantastical elements readers coming from his other books might expect, a stripped down realism that surprised much of his existing audience on first publication.