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October 5–12, 2000

book quarterly

This Bird Has Flown

Long before The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, everything was in place for Haruki Murakami.

by Justin Bauer

Norwegian Wood

By Haruki Murakami (Trans. Jay Rubin)
Vintage, 296 p., $13

The newly-translated Norwegian Wood opens with a scene typical of Murakami’s novels: A middle-aged man, wrapped up and isolated in his private thoughts, receives a shock — in the form of a Muzak version of the title song — which severs him from reality and sends him into painful reverie. A pair of factors make Norwegian Wood’s scene remarkable, though. One is that this scene is public, in fact interrupted and shared by a German stewardess. The other is that the book beginning with so characteristic a setup should be only Murakami’s second.

Norwegian Wood established Haruki Murakami’s reputation in Japan, and marked a considerably different direction in Japanese fiction, a break from the historically-obsessed or miniaturist novels of an earlier generation that included Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe. This sophomore novel, much more narrowly realistic than the fantastical tours-de-force which followed it, remains Murakami’s bestselling work in his home country. And with the rapid release of this book and the brand-new translation of South of the Border, West of the Sun this year after the rather-more-than-modest success of the stellar World War II opus The Wind Up-Bird Chronicle, Murakami’s American publisher seemingly wants to position the Japanese star for crossover success.

The characteristic elements of a Murakami tale fall into place following the opening vision. There is the beautiful woman with the nebulous, mysterious problem; the complete banality and ordinariness of the hero’s life; the singular eccentrics who stand out in comic relief against the uniformity of Japanese life; the half-heard grindings of occult machineries and massive conspiracies behind the scenes; the curious events and odd inflections which only gain meaning as the narrative goes on. But where such elements coalesce into surreal romps in later books like A Wild Sheep Chase or Dance Dance Dance, or meld serious historical meditations with outlandish fantasy and personal crisis, as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does, Norwegian Wood sticks largely to the realist novel straight-and-narrow. Indeed, as Jay Rubin points out in his translator’s note, the book verges on memoir, its hero’s surroundings mirroring those of Murakami’s college days.

In this fashion, Norwegian Wood bears much stronger kinship with South of the Border than with the fantasies Vintage published earlier — even down to their titles, both taken from the English-language pop music (the latter song is one of Nat King Cole’s) that Murakami’s characters fixate on. Both work carefully on lost loves, and concentrate almost myopically on men who cannot understand the mysteries driving their lovers. And both present similar versions of the fragility, insanity and obsession that mark the affairs of their all-too-ordinary heroes.

But from the opening moment, the rupture with the present that begins all Murakami’s books, Norwegian Wood spins onto a different track. The character paralyzed on the plane isn’t thrust into incomprehensible terrain without a map, but disappears into an earlier self. Norwegian Wood trucks in memoir and recollection, and cloaks its virtuoso revelations and meditations in one of the oldest storylines novelists can use: the sentimental education.

The dilemma that powers the novel comes out of the directions Toru Watanabe is pulled in by different versions of love, affection and attachment. His connection to the girlfriend of a suicidal friend promises a kind of transcendental and mysterious affinity — but her fears of reality, and her ultimate institutionalization, build up a barrier almost impossible to overcome. Against the backdrop of this unreal magnetism, Toru falls into an equally odd, but far more immediate friendship with a dirty-minded and pathologically inventive student. Neither relationship, of course, runs smoothly, and the specters of insanity and suicide haunt the margins of the stories Toru recounts.

The pull between real and ideal, deferred communion and immediate love, establishes a counterpoint that drives Toru and fuels the book. Worlds away from the anguish that closes South of the Border, Norwegian Wood seems almost hopeful, nearly able to reconcile the stuff of ordinary life with an inexplicable world of emotion. And though it may lack the maturity or inventiveness of others of Murakami’s fictions, in all of its conventionality, it marks a path for what comes after.