LiteratureBook · 1987
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
Toru Watanabe hears the Beatles song on a landing plane and remembers his student years in Tokyo, and the two women he loved, one of them the girlfriend of the friend who killed himself. It is a novel about depression and survivor's guilt that never says either word, and about how little use being decent turns out to be.
Why you should read this
This is the realist novel that made Murakami a literary star in Japan, deliberately stripped of the surrealism that defines most of his other fiction. It suits readers who want his sensibility without the magical realism, in a coming-of-age register closer to conventional literary fiction than his genre-bending later work.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1987
- Themes
- Japanese LiteratureLiterature
