Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Now, let's dive into Norwegian Wood.

So one of the things I wanna start with, just a general kind of picture of Norwegian Wood.

On the one hand, Murakami's language is relatively straightforward and simple.

He is not a modernist, he is not writing in... and he's not a postmodernist really.

He, y- you could argue that magical realism is, in its form, postmodern, but I think this novel is straightforward.

It's a realist novel.

It's written with an emotional directness and honesty.

Murakami is not necessarily using complex language or sentence structure.

He aims really for the direct simplicity of, of youth, of a young man, of, which, which echoes, I think, the, the age of the character as he's narrating this since this is written in the first person.

I think he wants to capture the voice of a character who is somewhat direct and straightforward, but also someone who, as we're gonna see, has a certain emotional reticence because of the suicide of his friend.

At the same time, despite this directness, one of the, there, there are a lot of, there are a lot of passages of profound lyrical beauty in Norwegian Wood, and I think the experience of reading the novel in its totality is sometimes hard to convey with just a selection of passages.

We're gonna look at a selection of passages as we always do on this podcast, but I want to first speak to what I, what I call the, the totality of the experience of reading this novel.

There are so many beautiful passages of direct sensory experience and direct sensory detail where we experience the world as Watanabe, as Toru experiences it, uh, as he walks through Tokyo with Naoko, as he spends an evening drinking with Midori, uh, and then of course, that wondrous middle section where he goes to Kyoto, where he goes to the sanatorium to visit Naoko and Raiko.

And we see in each of these scenes, in each of these sections, Murakami writes with such attention to detail, with such specific detail that every scene comes alive.

And I think when considered all together, all of this specific detail, all of this sensory detail, all of the sensory experience, it serves a much larger point, a much larger theme.

This is a novel that is about memory, that is about, and it's framed as a memory where w- Toru, when he's older, is remembering this particular year when he turned 20, when he went through the ups and downs of, of this coming of age and his relationship with these two, these two girls, these two women, you could say, Naoko and Midori.

And so sensory detail becomes so important because sensory detail is a product of his memory.

He remembers these scenes and these moments through the specific sensory details.

And I think it speaks to the power of fiction more broadly.

I think in a way, through writing the novel in this particular way, with this heavy emphasis on sensory detail and sensory experience as Toru recounts these memories, Murakami is, I think, making an argument for a certain style of fiction, a certain style of fiction in which what we call today interiority is less important than direct sensory experience.

Now, we get moments of interiority here, of course.

This is a first-person novel.

We will get and we will look at moments where Toru pretty directly reflects on his own experience.

But those moments of interiority only work because there is so much sensory richness in the other scenes of the novel.

And because by the time we get to those moments of personal interior reflection, we have already essentially walked in Toru's shoes.