Norwegian Wood, written in the 1980s by the now-famous Japanese surrealist Haruki Murakami, follows an introspective young college student named Toru Watanabe through his first year at university. In brief, the novel reads like another Catcher in the Rye, lingering vainly on descriptions of scenery and conversation that fall short of the deep importance they are supposed to have.
The main character and narrator is pretentious, self-indulgent, and generally unlikeable. This is made worse by the novel's presentation of Watanabe as impressively philosophical, honestly sacrificial, and wildly fascinating to all of the women in his life. These women (Naoko, Midori, and Reiko) are each caricatures of a feminine failing: emotional fragility, sexual delinquency, and middle-aged desperation.
Furthermore, each woman in Norwegian Wood exists solely to augment Watanabe’s vision of himself (or the reader’s vision of him) as an endlessly different and exceptional man, one whose pure honesty about the nature of life and human desire causes every woman to fall easily into his bed. In reality, Watanabe is dull and lifeless, reliant on the quirks (usually symptoms of the established mental illness) of his companions to serve as a foil to his level-headedness and irreproachable reason. It is an unrealistic construct for the sake of the story, an attempt to display a kind of dramatic and earth-shattering love/lust awakening that is as hollow and false as the characters themselves.
Perhaps the novel reads this way because the narrator is 37-year-old Watanabe looking back at his youth, naturally imbuing commonplace events in his own life with more depth and significance than they truly had. Often early loves and losses strike with more shaping force than later ones do. However, whether the failing is on the part of the author or the narrator, Norwegian Wood is equally disappointing and deluded.
Norwegian Wood is the critically-acclaimed equivalent of the suicide and sex poetry written in American middle schools every day. The novel received two stars only due to its occasionally powerful moments of lucid reflection on life generally, independent of the disappointing narrative and impossible (often offensive) characterizations. Haruki Murakami can write a beautiful sentence - it is just not guaranteed to mean anything.
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