"NW" is a coming of age novel, for its protagonist, Toru, and Japan. It's not as surreal as HM's other novels - it's not surreal at all - but it's as good or better. The novel details the changes that Japan faced as a culture, post WW2. Toru, the narrator, experiences love and loss and life, as a student in Tokyo in the '60s. He encounters many great characters as he adapts to the changing times, and his changing life, socially, sexually, intellectually. And HM's steady narrative takes the reader straight through the dark moments - the book has 4 suicides in it - and brings you, along with Toru, to a new understanding of Japan.

the title seems especially appropriate - as with music, the impression of this book upon the emotional reader's memory is strong and lasting - and will almost certainly be recalled many times at the mere mention of a simple image or series of words.

More than 20 years ago,when studying abroad in Brazil,I read A Wild Sheep Chase sent by her. It is not in 1973 but 1983 for me. Returning to Japan, when my friend committed suicide, after I went to his funeral,I went to meet her. I should not meet me that day, although. Then She got married with the other man. Norwegian Wood which I read that time.

Now, in Mexico , South of Border , I live. When going to Mcallen ,a town of the border in Texas , which takes 200 miles' drive from my house , I found Haruki Murakami at the book store. That surprised me why American people read Haruki Murakami. This half year , more than 10 books of Haruki murakami in English, everything I read. To tell the truth ,this Norwegian Wood was not in good impression for me among Murakami books. Now in the book which is translated in English, I have strangely feeling that I like this book best of it . Because these 20 years , it has probably lost many things from me.
Even now I wonder why she went away from me and got married.
What a foolish man you are ! the voice is coming out of the well.

20 years has passed as if I heard the wind sing.

Norwegian Wood was translated by Jay Rubin. The people at Amazon often don't identify translators, but they should. Of Murakami's principal translators, Rubin and Philip Gabriel can be depended on to produce conscientious, elegant English versions without taking unjustifiable liberties with the text. If you enjoy a book you're reading in translation, you can thank the translator as much as the author.

I gave this 2 stars simply because it kept me reading, and I think Murakami is a good writer in that he can string sentences together well and keep things moving and interesting enough that you don't chuck the book across the room at the wall in utter boredom. Really I'd like to give it 2.5 stars though.

It's missing 3 stars because this book had me laughing in incredulity half the time, and left me at the end with both a sort of slimy, need-a-shower feeling, as well as a "huh?!" sort of feeling of total pointlessness. I got about 3/4 of the way through the book before I realized, no, it's not actually going to suddenly change directions and get a point or depth.

Perhaps it's that I'm not very clued up on Japanese culture, perhaps the translation really is a bad one, as at least one other reviewer thought, but I feel like if there was a point, I completely missed it. To me it was a random succession of inexplicable, sudden, almost porn-movie-esque bowchickabowbow simply-for-titillation one-night-stand sex scenes and entirely too many suicides to make ANY sense. It got to a point where I felt like he was just throwing in cheap plot thrills of sex and death to keep a really pointless look at a self-absorbed college kid's life going to the wimpy end, and in the end, the number of cheap plot thrills he resorted to was pretty laughable.

On a positive note - the characters are quirky in a pretty believable way, and I liked Midori's character especially, although I felt like their romance had a sort of strange pace to it, like it all sort of came to a head rather over suddenly. The book is not totally lacking in depth - there are some interesting thoughts on triangles and relationships between people that suffer or improve because of the presence of a third person. Some of it strove for depth though and just sort of fell short and just seemed pretentious, to me. I wish I felt more for any of the characters - I didn't really like or care about any of them, which I think was my main problem - I couldn't identify, really. There was either too much vulnerability (Naoko) or too little (Toru, who, I'm sorry to say, just seemed like an unfeeling oaf who plodded his way through whatever life handed him).

In general I feel a bit undecided about Murakami. I think he's a very good writer in a way - everything was well described, so you do get absorbed into the setting, and can see everything clearly as he describes it, and I must admit, it did keep me reading, but the plot itself just seemed to be pretty lackluster and full of sudden, unrealistic dramatic plot devices that just were too frequent and unsupported to really make it believable or worthy of much thought or praise.