Norwegian Wood By Haruki Murakami Vintage, 296 pages
Haruki Murakami is best known in this country for his distinctive and surreal novels like "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "A Wild Sheep Chase." So it comes as no small surprise that the book that first earned him fame in his native Japan turns out to be a tender, straightforward coming of age story.
Published abroad in 1987 but only now translated and published here, "Norwegian Wood" introduces us to Toru Watanabe, a successful businessman who finds himself overwhelmed with emotion when he hears a muzak version of the Beatles classic on an airplane. As he swoons over the musical madeleine, he's transported back to his days as a university student in Tokyo in the late '60s and his anguished love for two women -- fragile, enigmatic Naoko and wealthy, elusive Midori.
Watanabe vividly recounts his conflicts and complications, including the pain of watching Naoko slip out of his grasp and into madness. Along the way, he only occasionally veers into the maudlin, preferring instead to pepper his recollections with unexpected, welcome flashes of humor. While skillfully chronicling his helpless regard for the women who change his life, he broadens the picture. Here are dead-on observations of the frivolities of youth -- the erotic escapades, the eccentric roommates, the pretentious multiple readings of "The Great Gatsby," the endless nights of drinking and flirting and playing guitar.
Watanabe's wry digressions only serve to make the impending disasters more believable -- when, until we are very old, are we more susceptible to suffering than when we are very young and very sure of ourselves? Watanabe is hip deep in tragedies -- his best friend commits suicide, Midori's father wastes away and dies -- but he boldly declares, "I've chosen to live." Like all true survivors, though, he carries his past like a scar -- it marks him, it's part of him, but it only hurts when he reopens the wound.
The awkward fumblings and lonely regrets of a romantic college student may not be unique, but Murakami has such a warm, unaffected style it's impossible not to be drawn in, and the setting -- the Far East during the Free Love era -- gives the novel an exotic shimmer. Like the song that haunts its hero, Murakami's tale is a melancholy memory of what was and what could have been, a deft combination of adult wisdom and youthful heart.
