Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹, “1Q84”, a novel published in 2009; and, was the topic of an earlier blog post.
George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, 1949 also was the topic of an earlier blog post.
AUDIO PLAYER “Norwegian Wood”.
Here I present: Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹, “Norwegian Wood “, 1987 which was a “coming-of-age” story. The book title “Norwegian Wood “ is the from lyrics of John Lennon & Paul McCartney.
”NORWEGIAN WOOD”, lyrics 1965 year.
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
Here I presented: Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹, “Norwegian Wood “, 1987 which was a “coming-of-age” story.
The book consists of eleven (11) untitled chapters. The first sentence of each chapter is shown BELOW.
Chapter #. “First Sentence”.
- “I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN THEN, STRAPPED IN MY SEAT AS THE HUGE 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.”
- “ONCE UPON A TIME, MANY YEARS AGO—JUST TWENTY YEARS AGO, in fact—I was living in a dormitory. I was eighteen and a freshman: I was new to Tokyo and new to living alone, and so my anxious parents found a private dorm for me to live in rather than the kind of single room that most students took.”
- “NAOKO CALLED ME THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, AND THAT SUNDAY we had a date: I suppose I can call it a date.
- “DURING SUMMER BREAK THE UNIVERSITY CALLED IN THE RIOT police, who broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside: this is nothing special.”
5. “THANKS FOR YOUR LETTER, WROTE NAOKO: HER FAMILY HAD forwarded it here, she said: far from upsetting her, its arrival had made her very happy, and in fact she had been on the point of writing to me herself.”
6. “AS SOON AS I WOKE UP AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON MONDAY MORNING, I washed my face, shaved, went straight to the dorm head’s room without eating breakfast to say that I was going to be gone for two days hiking in the hills.”
7. “IN P.E. CLASS THE NEXT MORNING, THURSDAY, I SWAM SEVERAL lengths of the fifty meter pool.”
8. “HALFWAY THROUGH THAT WEEK I MANAGED TO CUT MY PALM OPEN on a piece of broken glass.”
9. “THERE WAS NO SIGN OF MIDORI AT THE DAY’S LECTURE, either: what was happening with her ?”
10. “THINKING BACK ON THE YEAR 1969, ALL THAT COMES TO MIND FOR me is a swamp – a deep, sticky bog that feels as if it’s going to suck my shoe off each time I take a step.”
11. “REIKO WROTE TO ME SEVERAL TIMES AFTER NAOKO’S DEATH: it was not my fault she said.”
#END. “Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.”
SUMMARY
Toru Watanabe, protagonist of the story is a serious college student in Tokyo, JAPAN. He is devoted to the beautiful, young woman Naoko.
The protagonist couple of Toru & Naoko experience the suicidal death of their best friend. Naoko retreats, introspectively into her own world ;and then to a sanitarium. Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated woman Midori Kobayashi.
The book is a sixties “coming-of-age” story of a young mans first love. The lyrics of the song “Norwegian Wood” blend together the mood ethos of that era. The plot is based on the “love triangle” of Toru, Naoko & Midori.
Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹, ”Norwegian Wood”, 1987 novel was adapted to film in 2010.
