My feelings on Norwegian Wood are really conflicted. The most prominent thing that stands out in my mind, as a few other people have already commented on, is the way women are portrayed in the book. I think this affects my appreciation of the book as a whole in an unfortunate way. It really feels that the women in the book are a vehicle for Watanabe to experience life, process his emotions and figure out his inner self. Many of the interactions felt quite reductive. I did appreciate that there were moments of reflection by Watanabe at some points but it fell flat for me in the end. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending either.
It was interesting to read this after the presentation on “Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy”, as it feels like it has so much influence from Murakami’s life experiences and his own relationship with loss, grief, women, and friendship. I found what Jay Rubin says in the translator’s note really interesting: “The author may joke away its autobiographicality, but the book feels like an autobiography, it favors lived experience over mind games and shots at the supernatural (...)” (296) A feeling I continually got was one of inevitability - of course these events are playing out in a fictional novel that has a finalized, unchangeable story, but the sense that everything truly did happen this way, and nothing could have changed it, made it feel very tactile. Murakami has an impressive way of doing this, and in this realistic book even more so.
Kaito
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