Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami was shocked and
depressed to find his normal six-figure
readership exploding into the millions
when he published Norwegian Wood in
1987. Fame was one thing, superstardom
another, and the craziness of it sent him
back to the anonymity of Europe (he had
written the book in Greece and Italy). In
1991 he moved to the United States. Not
until 1995 was he prepared to resume
living in Japan, but strictly on his own
terms, without the television appearances
and professional pontificating expected of
a bestselling Japanese author.
Norwegian Wood is still the one
Murakami book that “everyone” in Japan
has read, but Murakami’s young audience
has grown up with him as he has begun
wrestling with Japan’s dark past (in The
Wind-up Bird Chronicle) and the 1995
double punch of the Kobe earthquake
and, in Underground, the sarin gas attack
on the Tokyo subway.
Accustomed to his cool, fragmented,
American-flavoured narratives on mysterious sheep and disappearing
elephants, some of Murakami’s early
readers were dismayed to find that
Norwegian Wood seemed to be “just” a
love story—and one that bore a suspicious
resemblance to the kind of Japanese
mainstream autobiographical fiction that
Murakami had rejected since his exciting
debut in 1979. As Murakami himself tells
it, “Many of my readers thought that
Norwegian Wood was a retreat for me, a
betrayal of what my works had stood for
until then. For me personally, however, it
was just the opposite: it was an adventure,
a challenge. I had never written that kind
of straight, simple story, and I wanted to
test myself. I set Norwegian Wood in the
late 1960s. I borrowed the details of the
protagonist’s university environment and
daily life from those of my own student
days. As a result, many people think it is an
autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not
autobiographical at all. My own youth was
far less dramatic, far more boring than his.
If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life the novel would have been no
more than 15 pages long.”
The author may joke away its
autobiographicality, but the books feels
like an autobiography; it favours lived
experience over mind games and shots at
the supernatural, and it does indeed tell us
much more straightforwardly than any of
his other novels what life was like for the
young Haruki Murakami when he first
came to Tokyo from Kobe. Back then, in
the years 1968-70 that occupy the bulk of
the novel, Murakami’s experience centred
on meeting the love of his life, his wife,
Yoko, amid the turbulence of the student
movement. The author is right, though:
there is a lot of fiction here, and a lot of
caricature and humour, and a lot of
symbolism that Murakami’s regular
readers will recognise instantly. It is by no
means “just” a love story.
Determined Murakami readers abroad
may have succeeded in obtaining copies of
Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation of
Norwegian Wood, which was produced
for distribution in Japan, with grammar
notes at the back, to enable students to
enjoy their favourite author as they
struggled with the mysteries of English. Although the novel has appeared in
French, Italian, Chinese, Korean,
Norwegian and Hebrew, the present
edition is the first English translation that
Murakami has authorized for publication
outside Japan.
Notes by Jay Rubin
The following music on this CD is taken from the Naxos catalogue
MOZART Piano Concerto No. 23
8.550204
Jenő Jandó, piano / Concentus Hungaricus / Antal, conductor
J.S. BACH Sonata in A minor, BWV 1003 (trans. F Zanon)
8.554431
Fabio Zanon, guitar
BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 2
8.550204
Jenő Jandó, piano / BRT Philharmonic Orchestra (Brussels) / Rahbari, conductor
MILES DAVIS Buzzy
8.120607
Miles Davis
MILES DAVIS Milestones
8.120607
Miles Davis
MAHLER Rückert-Lieder
8.110871
Kathleen Ferrier, contralto / Julius Patzak, tenor
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Walter, conductor
The following music is also included
LENNON & MCCARTNEY Norwegian Wood
Acker Bilk His Clarinet & Strings
ANTONIO CARLOS Jobim Desafinado
Alex Heffes, keyboards
BILL EVANS Waltz for Debbie
OJC20 025-2
Bill Evans
