{"id":1658,"date":"2010-09-08T17:47:54","date_gmt":"2010-09-08T21:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=1658"},"modified":"2010-09-08T17:47:54","modified_gmt":"2010-09-08T21:47:54","slug":"norwegian-wood-by-haruki-murakamitranslated-by-jay-rubinvintage-books-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/norwegian-wood-by-haruki-murakamitranslated-by-jay-rubinvintage-books-2000\/","title":{"rendered":"Norwegian Wood by Haruki MurakamiTranslated by Jay RubinVintage Books, 2000"},"content":{"rendered":"

Picking a book to bring along on vacation—especially a vacation where I was traveling alone and traveling light—was tricky: I was busy making a packing list and rolling up my clothes to make them fit in my backpack, and I wasn’t finding the process very conducive to reflecting on what I wanted to read next. Practicality dictated a paperback, and fiction seemed easier for travel than nonfiction: I am perpetually looking things up when I read, and wanted a book that wouldn’t make me want to look too many things up. (Which also pushed me toward something reasonably contemporary and popular, which is why I nixed The Life of Henry Brulard<\/em>, though I do want to read that one eventually.) Finally I grabbed Norwegian Wood<\/em>. And then once I had carried the book across the country, I found myself sitting in a restaurant trying to read but unable to focus.<\/p>\n

I just couldn’t get into Norwegian Wood<\/em> at first. I kept picking it up and putting it down, which I partly blamed on being on vacation in a city other than my own (so much to see, so many places to explore). But I think it might also be the style of the story, which begins in a very self-conscious way: our narrator, Toru, remembers being on a plane when he was thirty-seven years old, hearing an orchestral cover of “Norwegian Wood,” and being overcome by a flood of memories. So there’s this double distance: it’s not a present-tense narration of “I’m on a plane, I hear this, I feel this, I remember this” it’s “I remember this: I was on a plane, I heard this, I felt this, I remembered this other thing, which I’m now going to tell you about” The self who is narrating now is twice removed from the self of the main action of the story, and it’s a little off-putting. But as the narrator gets into the heart of the story, which centers around college years in the late 1960s, I found myself more interested. <\/p>\n

The story itself is often drifting, meandering, with a sense of people pulling toward one another then pulling away again. After not having seen her for some time, Toru reconnects with Naoko, the girl who had dated his high-school best friend until the best friend died. Now, having run into one another on the train, Toru and Naoko become friends again, and I liked the description of their friendship, how they would meet every Sunday to take long walks around Tokyo. But Naoko is depressed, and leaves to go to the country; Toru, meanwhile, befriends another girl, Midori, even as he’s still waiting for Naoko to recover and return to him. I like the descriptions of the city (and, later, when Toru goes to visit Naoko, of the countryside), like this passage, from when Toru goes to visit Midori’s apartment for the first time:<\/p>\n

The streetcar almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the yard of another house, a little kid was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from someplace, and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The streetcar snaked its way through this private back-alley world. (64)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another highlight of the book is Reiko, a sanatorium patient who Toru meets when he goes to visit Naoko; she’s older than Toru is and definitely wiser, and kind and funny and quirky and, ultimately, hopeful, which is nice in a book with a lot of sadness. By the end, this book felt more graceful than I’d expected it to, and I was glad I’d chosen it as a traveling companion. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Picking a book to bring along on vacation—especially a vacation where I was traveling alone and traveling light—was tricky: I was busy making a packing list and rolling up my clothes to make them fit in my backpack, and I wasn’t finding the process very conducive to reflecting on what I wanted to read next. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}