Review: Norwegian Wood by Murakami

Off the bat, I have to point out the bias in this review in true post-modern self-referential manner: I read this book as a break from Infinite Jest and that was a huge mistake. NEVER read any book with Infinite Jest if you're interested in writing reviews that so much as try to be fair to the author of the secondary book. IJ colors your life in its own special hue for the period you are reading it and it's hard — near impossible — for any novel that's composed of only a fraction of the words of IJ to match David Foster Wallace's prose or non-linearly of plot or the depth and variety of his characters.

Now that the apology for this flawed review is out of the way, the reviewing shall commence! Norwegian Wood is a straightforward narrative about the not-particularly-interesting lives of young adults living in 60s Tokyo, where people commit suicide and give/get handjobs. The word "lonely" gets penned around a lot in Murakami reviews, but I didn't find Toru Watanabe, the narrating protagonist, particularly lonely at all. He was certainly withdrawn but the isolation wasn't visceral or even palpable. And there's of course Murakami's trademark obsession with English music/literature and a mild layer of anti-establishment campus politics but none of these really added much to the novel for me; the descriptions were vague and left too much to imagination (particularly so, for a non-Japanese reader such as yours truly).

Having read another book by Murakami previously, A Wild Sheep Chase, at the beginning of this one, I was struck by the linearity of it all. It is too simple, uncharacteristically simple. A Wild Sheep Chase is beautifully textured; when you turn the last page, you are left attuned in a startlingly fresh manner to the idea of living in this world of ours, with all of its cultural and sociopolitical legacies and the lonesome notion of being an individual. On other hand, in Norwegian Wood, it's just this 19-year-old telling his life story. But soon, I came to understand that my suspicions were not unfounded after all. According to the translator's note, Murakami was, in this novel, experimenting with the style that characterizes Japanese mainstream novels. Hence, the single perspective, the atypical lack of magical realism, etc, etc. Considering the limitations of his selected subgenre, this is a very admirable piece of writing indeed, but as a selfish reader, I still find the novel flat and disappointing.