Authors: Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood (47 page)
10. At the center of the novel, Reiko tells the long and painful story of how her life was ruined by a sexual relationship with a young and pathologically dishonest female student. How does this story within the story illuminate other relationships in the novel?
11. What is unusual about the asylum where Reiko and Naoko are staying? What methods of healing are employed there? How do the asylum and the principles on which it is run illuminate the concerns about being “normal” that nearly all the characters in the novel express?
12. Naoko attributes Kizuki’s suicide and her own depression to the fact that they shared such an idyllic childhood together and eventually, as adults, had to pay the price for that early happiness. “We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due” [p. 128]. Do you think this is an accurate way of understanding what’s happened to them? What alternative explanations would you propose?
13. After Kizuki and Naoko have both committed suicide, Watanabe writes: “I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it part of myself in the form of a philosophy: ’Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life’” [p. 273]. What do you think he means? Is this view of life and death resigned or affirmative? How would such a philosophy change one’s approach to life?
14. What makes Midori such an engaging and forceful character? How is she different from everyone else in the novel? What kind of love does she demand from Watanabe? Is she being selfish in her demands or simply asking for what everyone wants but is afraid to pursue?
15.
Norwegian Wood
appears to end on a happy note with Watanabe calling Midori and telling her: “All I want in the world is you…. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning”[p. 293]. But when Midori asks where he is, Watanabe is plunged into a kind of existential confusion. How do you interpret the novel’s final mysterious sentence: “Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.” Is there anything positive in Watanabe’s not knowing “where he is”? What is the significance of his being at the “deadcenter” of no place, wishing for a new beginning?
16. The events of the novel take place in the fictional past. What can you infer about Watanabe’s present condition from the way he tells this story? Do you imagine that he and Midori have remained together?
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem PRize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.
Fiction
1Q84
After Dark
After the Quake
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Dance Dance Dance
The Elephant Vanishes
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart
The Strange Library
A Wild Sheep Chase
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Nonfiction
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
H
ARUKI
M
URAKAMI
AFTER DARK
Murakami’s trademark humor and psychological insight are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery. Combining the pyrotechnical genius that made
Kafka on the Shore
and
The Windup Bird Chronicle
international bestsellers, with a moving infusion of heart, Murakami has produced one of his most enchanting fictions yet.
Fiction/978-0307-27873-9
AFTER THE QUAKE
Set at the time of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Murakami’s characters emanate from a place where the human meets in the inhuman. An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package—and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or not be his human father. A collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-71327-9
BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
This superb collection of stories generously express Murakami’s mastery of the form. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be closest of all.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9608-4
DANCE DANCE DANCE
As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Murakami’s protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls, plays chaperone to a lovely teenage psychic, and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75379-7
THE ELEPHANT VANISHES
With his genius for dislocation, Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75053-6
HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Japan’s most popular fiction writer hurtles into the consciousness of the West. Murakami draws readers into a narrative particle accelerator in which a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his undemure granddaughter, Bob Dylan, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74346-0
KAFKA ON THE SHORE
This book is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home—either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister—and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7927-8
NORWEGIAN WOOD
Toru, a college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. But their relationship is colored by the tragic death of their mutual best friend years before. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70402-4
SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN
Born into an affluent family, Hajime has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career. Yet a sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens his happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76739-8
SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
A college student, identified only as “K,” falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to the writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments—until she meets Miu, an older and more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, “K” is solicited to join the search party and finds himself beset by ominous, haunting visions.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72605-7
UNDERGROUND
It was a clear spring day, Monday, March 20, 1995, when five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin, a poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. The unthinkable had happened, a major urban transit system had become the target of a terrorist attack. In an attempt to discover why, Murakami talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe—from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt, to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators, to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum. Through these and many other voices, Murakami exposes intriguing aspects of the Japanese psyche.
Fiction/978-0-375-72580-7
WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING
While training for the New York City Marathon, Haruki Murakami decided to keep a journal of his progress. The result is a beautiful memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid memories and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical,
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the expanding population who find similar satisfaction in athletic pursuit.
Memoir/Running/978-0-307-38983-1
A WILD SHEEP CHASE
A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard and appropriates its image for an insurance company’s advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-71894-6
THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77543-0
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
A VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2000
Copyright © 2000 by Haruki Murakami
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Japan in two volumes as
Noruwei no mori
by Kodansha Ltd. in 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Haruki Murakami.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murakami, Haruki, 1949–
[Noruwei no mori. English]
Norwegian wood / Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
p.cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76271-9
I. Rubin, Jay, 1941– II. Title.
PL856.U673 N6713 2000
895.6′35—dc21
99-053821
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
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