After struggling to really make odds and ends of 2666, I chose to go back to a Murakami book that would likely be less..  hard to put together.  So I went with Norwegian Wood, bringing the number of HM books I’ve read to 8, leaving only a handful of novels left and a couple non-fiction titles.  Despite the way I have in the past dismissed Murakami a bit for having such similar themes, I never acknowledged how the recurring themes in his books really allow you to keep developing an understanding of previously read books as he expands on the themes in later situations.

My book posts are boring and long, so let’s not sully the front page with the following blather…

Reading Norwegian Wood immediately after Sputnik Sweetheart is especially striking in this regard, because they have a very similar cast of characters: male protagonist (Toru Watanabe), his unattainable crush (Naoko), and her awkward mother/lover figure who was formerly a classical musician until a bizarre sexual experience made her go crazy (Reika). Yeah, this last character is so odd and so similar to the woman in SS that I wonder how much to think about it.  Like, why?  What is it about this character that’s so interesting?  Having this character with a kind of up-in-the-air sexuality and mature detachedness allows your love triangle to remain stable, because this character won’t allow/cause any progress to be made, so the action has to come from someone else.  Still, I think there’s a better way to make that happen without relying on the same bizarre character.

The title, Norwegian Wood, was appropriate.  The song itself makes several appearances in the story as Naoko’s favorite song, several of the scenarios in the song also apear, in some form, in the book, and one of the verses pretty much captures the central element of the book.  “Norwegian Wood” lyrics:

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me… (1)
She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.

I sat on a rug, drinking her wine, biting my time,
We talked until two and then she said, “It’s time for bed”

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood.

The song tells a single story- basically about being led on and left and, depending if you believe the folks on the internet, burning down the girls house.  This is a lot like what ahppens in the general storyline with Toru and Naoko, however Toru’s first time hanging out with another element of a different love-triangle also mirrors the song- they sat at her house, drinking, sitting on the floor of her porch (where the narrator makes a point of saying there wasn’t a chair), and watching a house down the street burn.  Also, on a one night stand with another girl, he spends some time sleeping in the bathtub, and this girl is gone in the morning.  Not that big of a deal, but whatever.  So, ten points for title-appropriateness.

Like SS, this one doesn’t have much of the spiritual weirdness.  Actually, it doesn’t have any- just the normal sort of bizareness you might expect.  What it says about life is less than ground breaking- that you have to fight through pain, that it never goes away, that you have to grow up, etc.  I liked the way it painted kids in their late-teens/early-twenties: super dramatic and acting like everything is a huge deal.  It’s not presented as bad, really, but the main character is congratulated for choosing to move on.  It’s funny, I wonder how I would have felt if I would have read that when I was 19- if I would have thought HM was being some sort of cynic and dismissing the keen sensitivities of young adults.  But, a few years away from college, I think he was pretty on-target.

In a more discrete examples, he makes fun of the would-be revolutionaries and how they’re so quick to give up the strugle for equality and join the corporate world.  That political/personal radicalism that comes around that age is something to grow out of, although he doesn’t dismiss it as pointless.  Heart break does exist, and there is inequality in the world, and life is hard, but unless you’re going to kill yourself, you have to be pragmatic and keep making progress, rather than wallowing in pity or going through an equally pointless political uprising.

Anyhow, he talked about winding up a bunch in the second half of the book, he talked about wells a lot in the first ten pages of the book, like in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  There was also a neat passage about being a teacher- the opposite sentiment to the those-who-can-do cliche:

“…I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.  But that’s fine with me.  I don’t mind at all.  Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match…”

Actually, its a similar sentiment, but a positive one.  Still, I’d never thought about the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.