Orpheus Descending: Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"

Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" is a book I've been reading over breakfast these past few days. Though I am aware of how famous a writer he is, I only managed to get hold of 3 among 12 of his works of fiction (Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka On Shore of which I sold off to a friend).

A flush of memories overcome Toru Watanabe (37) upon hearing a sweet orchestral version of The Beatles's "Norwegian Wood". This haunting piece of melody took him exactly 20 years back, right at the time when Japan and the rest of the world (in effect of the ongoing "counterculture") was in the midst of various revolutions. He was 17, a university student and right about this time in his life he'd experience a love that he is bound to remember and the greatest loss he will ever have to go through, Naoko. Like the song, the book is dark and it caught me in a certain gloomy mood that took a few days to get over with. It is depressing, ridden with sexually eager and emotionally disturbed characters. They are greatly flawed. They are not preternaturally smart (with the exception of Toru), sometimes you just feel like shutting them off or give them a hard hit in the head for being so utterly perverse and daft. Yet despite these obvious flaws, one can still appreciate them for they are indeed characters with no hint of pretensions. They are young, curious and seekers of answers about various things in life. They make awful decisions which makes life even more complicated than how it actually is. But then, like the divine taking a hand in all these confusing chaos, there is always deus ex machina. On reading "Norwegian Wood", one finds one's self in a bit of competition between Midori or Naoko, who each has her own charm and peculiarities (Midori being too restricted by her rigid boyfriend, too caught up with looking after her ailing father and also too blatant with her sexual curiosities; Naoko too, who was too emotionally disturbed with no willingness to recover at all). I find Toru's heroic love for both women quite admirable, albeit wrong (when we really think about it) yet we find this willingness to embrace other people's flaws in the name of love (or lust) quite uhm ... relate-able?. I think Murakami has a knack for killing his characters just to lessen the tension that builds up in every chapter. Good enough. But still, despite the obvious "intervention" by the author, the book did not reach a predictable ending, in fact it was ambiguous and it got me thinking. The fuzzy ending leaves us to decide for it ourselves.

Toru (on Euripides)

"What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they've got all their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it's basically impossible for everyone's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple --- a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ' You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.' Like that. He's a kind of fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this 'deus ex machina'. There's almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that's the point where critical opinion divides over him."

***

I found myself reading this book right at a time when I feel like my life needed a drastic turn. And what more, I always find myself reading a Murakami book on such life-turning decisions. I find this quite odd since I can hardly say that Murakami is one of my writers (but that will soon change, I feel). The very first Murakami book I bought (Sputnik Sweetheart) was to earmark the start of a relationship which will run an unbelievable 4+ years. How timely, that I as soon as I put the book down, I am also putting this chapter in my life to a certain turn.

Meanwhile, "Let's wind our own spring."

I also found out that there was a movie adaptation of this book back in 2010.