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Theme Of Norwegian Wood

Decent Essays

Norwegian Wood is a nostalgic novel imbued by death, suicide and sexuality. Murakami describes a Japanese youth beset by doubts, embedded in the Spleen and surrounding by dreams. The protagonist and narrator, Watanabe, is remembering his past as a university student, while in a plane bound to Hamburg. All his memories appear because of the song during the landing, Norwegian Wood by The Beatles. The song brings him back twenty years earlier, during the Sixties in the middle of the Japanese student revolution.
After this preamble, we discover the high school life of Watanabe and the original context on which the whole story rely. The trio composed by him, Kizuki, his best friend and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko. This represents the stability of …show more content…

He simply describes facts and the collective life doesn't seem to affect him. The only important elements are the fates of his two girlfriends, Naoko and Midori. They both turned twenty and are caught in the turmoil of their age : orientation, choices, independence, sexuality…

The title « Norwegian Wood » is meaningful to understand the story. The song by The Beatles is a driving thread throughout the novel. It follows the narrator, but is also Naoko’s favorite tube, the most important character for the protagonist. The quiet and peaceful nature is besides omnipresent in the story and perfectly match with Murakami’s poetic writing. It is even more noticeable in the movie by Trần Anh Hùng.

Murakami’s characters have all deep personalities and underlined the subtleties of the author’s work. The protagonist, Watanabe, is not really interested by the material life, by what he’s studying of by the community. Loneliness and reading are his main loopholes from a life without futur. He has also a lot of common points with Murakami, for instance his taste for american literature, Jazz and his fascination towards United-States. During his stay in the dormitory, he became friend with a cynical student, Nagasawa. This strange fellow, devoid of sensibility, makes Watanabe come out of his relative innocence by introduced him to a depraved nightlife. Everything seems to succeed him, brilliant studies, promising …show more content…

From the beginning of the novel, we feel that the different conceptions of what is to live to Watanabe and Naoko will make their love story impossible. The distance is unbounded between the two characters in their platonic relation, and take a geographical dimension early in the book. However Watanabe does not hesitate. If he is uncertain about everything in his life, he want to live and is not absorbed by Naoko’s death drives. Likewise he is not attracted by the inhumanity of Nagasawa. Every characters of the book are allegoric of Japanese and widely more generally human beeing. Here is the strength of Murakami’s work, beyond a very Japanese context firmly anchored in student turmoils of the Sixties in Tokyo, story and characters are universal. Main subjects like suicide, responsibility, depression and aspiration to live fully resonate in the reader’s mind, and the very Japanese sensibility that emerges from the work is transcended by

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