Norwegian Wood

“Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones.”

Watanabe decides to write down his memories as he feels them slipping away, but he worries that he has already forgotten too much or that he remembers things incorrectly. However, as many of the people from his past are gone forever, his memories, however “imperfect” they might be, must stand on their own. The image of a starving man sucking on bones gives the impression that Watanabe’s memories are all he has to sustain himself but that they can give him no true nourishment.

“‘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. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.’”

On the first afternoon that Naoko and Watanabe spend walking together, she tells him about how she struggles to express herself. It is an issue that will plague Naoko and Watanabe throughout their relationship. The way she speaks about it illustrates the way mental illness is addressed throughout the novel, never directly in clinical terms, but rather abstractly. Naoko’s description of it here is almost supernatural, which in turn disguises the reality of her struggles with mental health.

“There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else.”

Here, Watanabe describes adjusting to his new life in Tokyo. In order to forget the pain of Kizuki’s death, he isolates himself, creating a cool and uncaring veneer to avoid the possible hurt that comes with love and attachment. While Watanabe is largely successful, his quest to protect himself from the world leaves him feeling isolated and alone.

“Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.”

This is Watanabe’s realization after Kizuki’s death. Previously, he thought of life and death as two distinct things. However, his friend’s death profoundly changes him, and he learns that the living are affected by death just as much as the dead. Death has changed his own life forever as he lives with Kizuki’s absence every day.

“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.”

On the night of Naoko’s 20th birthday, Watanabe notes that it feels wrong for the two of them to be leaving their teens. Age is an undeniable marker of time that is taking them further and further from Kizuki, who will always be 17. This passage is a clear indicator that Watanabe refuses to move on with his life, even though he has come to Tokyo in an attempt to start over.

“I slept with Naoko that night. Was it the right thing to do? That I cannot tell. Even now, almost twenty years later, I can’t be sure. I guess I’ll never know. But at the time, it was all I could do. She was in a heightened state of tension and confusion, and she made it clear that she wanted me to give her release.”

The question of whether Watanabe was right to sleep with Naoko is a central problem in the novel and in Watanabe’s life, as evidenced by the fact that he still wonders after 20 years. More than anything, their sexual encounter and Watanabe’s insistence that “it was all [he] could do” illustrate his limited emotional resources. While Naoko might have been looking for a “release,” Watanabe clearly has some doubts that sex was what she needed. However, having spent the past year suppressing his own feelings, Watanabe doesn’t have the capacity to help Naoko in any other way.

“When the strike was defused and lectures started up again under police occupation, the first ones to take their seats in the classrooms were those assholes who had led the strike. As if nothing had ever happened, they sat there taking notes and answering ‘here’ when roll was called.”

Here, Watanabe describes returning to school following the student strike. For the whole summer, the university was shuttered and occupied by student protesters. However, all these students are back, obediently fulfilling their obligations as if they never rebelled. This fills Watanabe with a new sense of hopelessness as it represents yet another way in which striving for something better seems useless.

“‘Girls are supposed to be a little more elegant when they put their cigarettes out. You did that like a lumberjack. You shouldn’t just cram it down in the ashtray but press it lightly around the edges of the ash. Then it doesn’t get all bent up. And girls are never supposed to blow smoke through their noses. And most girls wouldn’t talk about how they wore the same bra for three months when they’re eating alone with a man.’

‘I am a lumberjack,’ Midori said, scratching next to her nose. ‘I can never manage to be chic. I try it as a joke sometimes, but it never sticks. Any more critiques for me?’”

Sitting on the roof after eating lunch with Midori, Watanabe outlines just a few of the ways that Midori doesn’t conform to conventional standards of femininity. She rejects notions that women must be delicate and elegant and casually mentions taboo subjects, like her underwear. She even embraces these aspects of herself, admitting that she isn’t very ladylike with no shame or desire to change.

“Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn’t tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon at the end of September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness that was new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”

Watanabe’s budding relationship with Midori makes him feel even lonelier when he is by himself. He feels more separate from the world than ever. However, instead of appreciating the protection afforded by his isolation, Watanabe begins to see how he has limited himself by guarding against connection.

“‘I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.’ ‘What happens when people open their hearts?’ Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this. ‘They get better,’ she said.”

When Watanabe first meets Reiko, she tells him a little bit about Ami Hostel and what he can do to help Naoko get well. She tells Watanabe that he must be open and honest about his thoughts and feelings; this is what will help both of them heal from their loss. This is, perhaps, the first time that Watanabe has considered a tactic other than avoidance and isolation to deal with his pain.

“‘That song can make me feel so sad,’ said Naoko. ‘I don’t know, I guess I imagine myself wandering in a deep wood. I’m all alone and it’s cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me. That’s why Reiko never plays it unless I request it.’”

“Norwegian Wood,” the Beatles song that the novel is named after, is Naoko’s favorite song. Reiko plays it for her, but only by request because sometimes she cannot bear the sadness of the song. Forests play a significant symbolic role in the novel, generally representing borders between two worlds, like life and death. The fact that the song makes Naoko feel like she is wandering in a wood suggests that it speaks to her feelings of being lost between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

“Kizuki and I had a truly special relationship. We had been together from the time we were three. It’s how we grew up: always together, always talking, understanding each other perfectly. The first time we kissed—it was in the sixth grade—was just wonderful. The first time I had my period, I ran to him and cried like a baby. We were that close. So after he died, I didn’t know how to relate to other people. I didn’t know what it meant to love another person.”

Naoko describes her childhood relationship with Kizuki as one of effortless understanding. However, because she grew up with someone that she could relate to without even trying, she never developed the skills to build relationships with others. She only knows love and understanding in relation to Kizuki.

“‘Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it,’ she said, raising her eyes to mine. ‘The pain of growing up. We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I’m in here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we’d just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we’d go to sleep in each other’s arms. But that kind of thing doesn’t last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn’t work, of course.’”

As Naoko continues to describe her relationship with Kizuki, she explains that they became too dependent on one another, and it became too hard for them to exist in the real world outside of their perfect bubble. Watanabe was their only connection to the outside, and he remains Naoko’s only link to the rest of the world.

“I’m a far more flawed human being than you realize. 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. Sleep with other girls if you want to. Don’t let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don’t want to do. I don’t want to interfere with your life. I don’t want to interfere with anybody’s life. Like I said before, I want you to come to see me every once in a while, and always remember me. That’s all I want.”

Naoko reveals to Watanabe that her traumas started long before Kizuki’s death, and she warns Watanabe that she may never be capable of the kind of relationship he wants. Even though her only request is for him to always remember her, this responsibility weighs on Watanabe for the rest of his life.

“‘When it’s raining like this,’ said Naoko, ‘it feels as if we’re the only ones in the world. I wish it would just keep raining so the three of us could stay together.’”

Throughout the novel, rain appears as a motif to soften the world, making it fade away and bringing the characters into sharper focus. It creates a bubble for Naoko, Watanabe, and Reiko, where their problems seem more manageable, and the pressures of the outside world far away. This is the kind of space where Naoko finally feels safe. However, like the rain, the safety is fleeting. The outside world cannot be avoided forever.

“‘I’m glad I ran into you,’ I said. ‘I think I’m a little more adapted to the world now.’”

After returning from Ami Hostel, Watanabe feels strange and uncomfortable in the outside world. Being with Naoko, he became lost in a world of memory, fantasy, and contemplation. However, being with Midori helps Watanabe come back to the reality of the present.

“These guys are a bunch of phonies. All they’ve got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they’re so proud of and sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they’re seniors, they cut their hair short and go trooping to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who’ve never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke.”

Here, Midori criticizes the student protesters. She argues that none of them are truly committed to their cause, that their rebellion is just a phase to make them look cool. In the end, none of them are actually brave enough to stand up to the establishment.

“Just as you take care of the birds and the fields every morning, every morning I wind my own spring. I give it some thirty-six good twists by the time I’ve gotten up, brushed my teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed my clothes, left the dorm, and arrived at the university. I tell myself, ‘O.K., let’s make this day another good one.’”

In this letter to Naoko, Watanabe describes his weekly routine. He describes himself as a wind-up toy, going through the same motions day after day. There is no real joy in his routine, but there is a degree of determination to keep going no matter what.

“‘Where Watanabe and I are alike is, we don’t give a damn if nobody understands us,’ Nagasawa said. ‘That’s what makes us different from everybody else. They’re all worried about whether the people around them understand them. But not me, and not Watanabe. We just don’t give a damn. Self and others are separate.’”

Nagasawa incorrectly interprets Watanabe’s distance from the world as a disregard for others. He believes that Watanabe thinks himself above everyone else and doesn’t care about building genuine connections. In reality, Watanabe is desperate for love and understanding, and his withdrawal originates from fear of more loss.

“No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for—and to do it so unconsciously.”

As Watanabe starts to acknowledge his feelings for Midori, he realizes how poorly he has treated her. Totally preoccupied with his relationship with Naoko, Watanabe hasn’t considered his feelings for Midori or how she might feel about him. She seems so strong and self-sufficient that he forgets she can get hurt, too.

“What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori is a wholly different emotion.”

Watanabe finally admits his love for both Midori and Naoko, but he understands that the two feelings have nothing in common. The two women are so different that they could never inspire the same kind of love in him, and they both speak to equally important parts of his identity.

“But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko. I tried to establish a new life for the two of us. But forget it, Kizuki. I’m giving her to you. You’re the one she chose, after all. In woods as dark as the depths of her own heart, she hanged herself. Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another part of me into that world. Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.”

As Watanabe tries to let Naoko go, he acknowledges that Naoko always belonged with Kizuki. Because of his losses, a part of Watanabe will always reside in the world of the dead. However, unlike Naoko, he will remain alive, tending to his memories.

“We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live. ‘Be happy,’ Reiko said to me as she boarded the train. ‘I’ve given you all the advice I have to give. There’s nothing left for me to say. Just be happy. Take my share and Naoko’s and combine them for yourself.’”

This is Reiko’s last bit of advice to Watanabe. She insists that he must let go of his sadness, live his life, and be happy. He must do this for Reiko, Naoko, and others who could not find their own happiness.