Norwegian Wood (1987) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

show spoilers

Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

show spoilers

• Toru Watanabe: A man reflecting on his life and loves during his college years eighteen years earlier, especially his love for Naoko, his dead best friend Kizuki's girlfriend.
• Naoko: A troubled young woman who has problems dealing with life after the suicide of her boyfriend and childhood friend Kizuki.
• Kizuki: Toru's best friend and Naoko's boyfriend, Kizuki unexpectedly commits suicide on his seventeenth birthday.
• Midori Kobayashi: Toru's classmate. She and her sister runs a small bookstore
• Reiko Ishida: Naoko's friend and roommate.
• Nagasawa: A wealthy and charismatic classmate of Toru, with whom he forms a bond over a mutual love of The Great Gatsby. (He makes it a rule to read only books by authors dead 30 years or longer.) Nagasawa studies diplomacy and leads a somewhat charmed, debauched life.
• Storm Trooper: The nickname given to Toru's assigned dorm roommate, who aspires to become a map-maker. He is obsessively clean and dressses ultraconservatively, hence the nickname.
• Sir Nakano: The nickname given to the 50-something-year-old head of Toru's dorm. He is given this nickname because he is rumored to have been a graduate of the "wartime Nakano spy school." (12)
• Uniform: Sir Nakano's assistant dorm head, who always wears a Navy Blue student uniform, but who may or may not actually be a student (no one is sure).
• Hatsumi: Nagasawa's girlfriend.
• Midori Kobayashi: A coed classmate from Toru's History of Drama course; she comes over to introduce herself when she sees Toru at a restaurant, and they become friends.
• Reiko Ishida: Reiko is Naoko's roommate at Ami Hostel, the sanatorium to which Naoko goes to recover from the stress of Kizuki's suicide. When Toru visits, he bonds with her, and learns that she and Naoko are very close.
• Itoh: An art student (oil painting) whom Toru meets at the restaurant where they both work. Itoh appears only in one brief scene about a fifth of the way to the end of the novel, but he a Toru bond, and speak frankly.
• Pepe: A dog.
• Mozart: Add a description of this character.
• Brahms
• Bach

Quotes edit see section history

• “Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.”

  Toru Watanabe

• “If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.”

  Reiko Ishida

• “"I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. "”

• “But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”

• “Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that”

• “Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”

• “Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish”

• “Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment”

• “"Midori: So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off? M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."”

• “"I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me."Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. "There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I'm pretty sure."People are strange when you're a stranger."”

• “"Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life."”

• “Halfway through April Naoko turned twenty. She was seven months older than I was, my own birthday being in November. There was something strange about Naoko's becoming twenty. I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the dead stay seventeen forever.”

• “Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start - the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”

• “"I can never say what I want to say," continued Naoko. "It's been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what i mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse.”

  Naoko Ishii

• “With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”

• “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

• “She would entwine her arm with mine, or cram her hand in my pocket, or, when it was really cold, cling tightly to my arm, shivering. None of this had special meaning.”

• “Nobody likes being alone. I just hate to be disappointed.”

• “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out of the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”

• ““I get hurt,” said Hatsumi. “Why am I not enough for you? “”

• “You’re always so damn sensible, you ruin everything. I’m drunk ‘cause I wanna be drunk. What’s wrong with that? And even if I am drunk, I can still climb a tree. Hell, I’m gonna climb all the way to the top and I’m gonna pee all over everybody!”

• “But I’m so lonely! I want to be with someone! I know I’m doing terrible things to you, making demands and not giving you anything in return, saying whatever that pops into my head, dragging you out of your room and forcing you to take me everywhere, but you’re the only one I can do stuff like that to!”

• “I don’t care what you do to me, but I don’t want you to hurt me. I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.”

• “"That was fun," said Midori. "Let's try it again sometime.""They just keep doing the same things," I said."Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things."She had a point there.”

• “"I have to talk to you," I said. "I have a million things to talk to youabout. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this worldis you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begineverything from the beginning."”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Tokyo
• Essen
• Uruguay
• Speisesaal
• Bergen
• Kyöto
• Schlafsack
• Kyoto
• Kobe
• Asahikawa
• Shinjuku
• Euripides
• Yotsuya
• Ueno Station
• Kichijoji

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• death frozen in time: Suicide - end of a life - memories remain frozen in time
• Love and self-sacrifice: Describe this theme.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Haruki Murakami (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Jay Rubin (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PL856.U673N6713
• Dewey: 895.635

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › Japanese
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Romance › Contemporary

More Books Like This edit see section history