“My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots. And that’s why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don’t wait for me. Don’t let thoughts of me hold you back. …Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me.”
Norwegian Wood is a melancholy love story entwined with death, ghosts of the past, mental illness, and the strength it takes to see hardships through, even if it means living with sorrow. The story, while following protagonist Toru Wantanabe, weaves many seemingly-unrelated episodes together, creating an authentic and meaningful portrait of life – and of death.
Plot Summary
Toru Wantanabe is attending university in Tokyo when he unexpectedly runs into an old friend, Naoko. He and Naoko were close once, but their friendship fell away after the suicide of their mutual friend and Naoko’s former boyfriend, Kizuki. Now, meeting more than a year later in Tokyo, they walk for hours, talking, or else saying nothing at all – and in the same gradual manner, a year passes. Naoko and Watanabe rebuild their friendship.
Then Naoko turns twenty. “Naoko was unusually talkative that night,” Watanabe recalls. Naoko chatters on about everything, without end. She speaks for hours and hours, sliding from one subject, one memory, one story to the next, and eventually it becomes clear to Watanabe what is wrong: all her speech is measured, careful. In everything she says, she is leaving out Kizuki. When Watanabe finally interjects, Naoko suffers a breakdown. Watanabe stays with her for the night, and in the morning leaves a note asking her to call him. But the call never comes. After a week, when he goes to check on her in person, he learns Naoko has moved.
Two months later he receives a letter. Naoko says she is taking a year off from school to deal with personal issues. She came home to see a doctor, she explains, and at his recommendation she is going to live in a sanatorium in the remote hills of Kyoto.
Watanabe travels there to visit her. He finds that, among good company such as her roommate Reiko, daily activities including farming and lessons, and an atmosphere with an “everyone helps everyone else” attitude, Naoko is in a much better condition than before. But she also reveals a chapter from her dark history: when she was a little girl, Naoko says, her older sister – who had the perfect life – hung herself. She was seventeen, just like Kizuki. Naoko tells Watanabe not to wait for her; she is far more damaged than he knows.
Watanabe goes on through the motions of his life, as is Naoko’s wish, but does all that he can to help her. He writes her letters every week, even as he meets and grows close with Midori, an offbeat girl who is clearly interested in him as more than a friend. Sometimes he hears a word from Reiko, but mostly his letters go unanswered.
Then, after hearing no news for a month, Watanabe receives a letter – from Reiko. Naoko’s condition has been declining, she explains. She is hearing things, and lately can’t even hold an ordinary conversation. If things remain this way, Naoko will have to be transferred to an actual hospital for medical treatment.
Watanabe’s world is shattered. Up until now, he realizes, he has been harboring the delusion that Naoko was getting better. He was even planning out their lives together. Watanabe comes to understand that if he does not deal with the painful truth, he may not only be incapable of helping Naoko – he himself may be in danger of going under.
Death Theme
Norwegian Wood is a narrative driven by death. Watanabe and Naoko share a special relationship over the shared bond of Kizuki’s suicide. Naoko is haunted by her sister’s hanging. Other minor characters make their exits: Watanabe’s eccentric roommate, Storm Trooper, does not die but uncharacteristically and mysteriously disappears and is never heard from again. A former girlfriend of Watanabe’s friend Nagasawa kills herself after he leaves to live in Germany. Watanabe's relationship with Midori grows as he helps care for her disease-stricken father as he withers away in a hospital bed, and they become even closer after his death.
In his less stable moments, Watanabe approaches the same verge of death that he felt Naoko had been on all along. He describes this as “a place where I lived with the dead”—and where Naoko lived, with death innately inside her. As he learned from Kizuki’s death, Watanabe ultimately decides that death is “not the opposite of life, but an innate part” of it.
Psychological Theme
Though for many other characters Wantanabe is an anchor to the real world – a rock of strength on which they lean – even the protagonist shows signs of instability. There are times in the story where Wantanabe can only cope by being alone, where he travels until he is haggard, gaunt, starved, and sleeping on beaches in efforts to shake or deal with his demons. There are moments when he feels himself lost to the real world, as if withdrawn into some vacuum where he cannot be reached by anything. The words people say to him fall flat. In the present day, he often finds himself remembering, in total clarity, a field well he has never before seen, but which was once described to him by Naoko:
“It lay…a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by the meadow grass. Nothing marked its perimeter – no fence, no stone curb. …It was deep beyond measuring, crammed full of darkness.”
The most frightening detail in Naoko’s account – apart from what a slow, miserable death it would make to fall down the well and be surrounded by the bones of those who died there before – is that no one knows where it is. The field well, nearby and hidden, is a powerful metaphor given early on in the book, and one that fills the unsuspecting reader with a sense of dread; its builds a feeling that at any moment, with the next twist or turn, someone who is peering into the depths of that mental darkness could, in one slip, be enveloped by it.
ISBN: 0-375-70402-7
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