Norwegian Wood
Last year, knowing nothing at all about Haruki Murakami, I read 1Q84 and After Dark and became an immediate admirer of his work. Though I am wary of literary pigeonholes, I guess you could call him a magic realist with some justification: His fictional worlds, like those of Borges and Kobe Abe, are totally concrete and believable but for a few surreal elements that intrude upon them and drive the plot. In 1Q84, for example, the heroine enters a parallel universe in which Japan conforms to the reality she knows—except that there are now two moons in the sky, the police uniforms are different, a billboard has changed position. And while later tiny beings will emerge from the mouth of a dead goat to weave a chrysalis from which doppelgängers hatch, the two Japans remain so alike as to be confusable: The lovers who finally escape unreality are not assured of the fact until they see that the billboard has been restored to its original position. After Dark, too, follows this formula: It spans a single night in Tokyo with complete realism—until an unplugged television comes to life and displays enigmatic and ominous images that overlap symbolically with the plot.
Norwegian Wood is different. Absolutely everything that occurs in its pages could occur in the real world. The opening scene is set in Hamburg, where the narrator, Toru Watanabe, hears a song that inspires the long series of reminiscences making up the rest of the novel. These concern his days as a student in Tokyo and the two formative love affairs that marked his passage into adulthood. So opposite are the women in question that Watanabe’s struggle to choose between them almost lends itself to allegorisation. Both are young and beautiful, but while the first, Naoko, is ethereal, pensive, frigid, melancholy—the perfect muse for a Provençal sonneteer—the second, Midori, is exuberant, sexual, earthy and fun; the one an apotheosis to be worshiped from afar, the other a reality of flesh and blood to be embraced. This novel is less than 30 years old, and I do not want to spoil the ending, but I will say that after mourning two suicides, and a great deal of personal anguish, Watanabe makes the mature decision. In this sense Norwegian Wood shares something in common with Mary by Vladimir Nabokov, in which the expatriated Russian narrator schemes throughout to be reunited with his lost lover—until at last the reader is given to understand that his idealized memories of and love for this woman are really just a misplaced nostalgia for the homeland, and his surprise decision to jilt her when she is at last able and willing to meet him, symbolic of his rejection of the past and his entry into a new life. In both novels, it seems that we are being invited to view the narrator's lover as the projection of a romantic ideal. I find it interesting that Murakami was dismayed by the popularity of this novel and his subsequent rise to fame. It’s possible that he prefered to write under less pressure to a smaller readership. Or perhaps it’s because the novel was an experimental foray into naturalism and not at all representative of his artistic vision. Having read the novel for myself, I am inclined to favour the second of these two reasons. For while it is true that the uncharacteristic material is handled with Murakami’s characteristic skill, that the writing is sparing and beautiful and filled with striking images and metaphor, and that the dialogue and the characters lively and believable, I was left feeling disappointed. Norwegian Wood reminded me of the late naturalistic painting The Lacemaker by Salvador Dali. Sometimes, an artist experiences a personal compulsion to set aside what they do best in order to prove to themselves that they can do something else. I have no special quarrel with this, but it is arguably an enterprise of more interest to the artist than anyone else. |