Sipping red wine late into the night, sitting on the floor listening to records, talking, laughing ... the Beatles captured the feeling of the fleeting connection between strangers and lovers in “Norwegian Wood” in 1965. Using George Harrison’s sitar to accent an off-kilter, quirky melody, the song conjures up a feeling of intensely personal nostalgia. It is beyond the sphere of time, a broken clockwork of a song that ends almost as soon as it begins.
Wading through the awkward and careless translation of Haruki Murakami’s novel, “Norwegian Wood,” is a more difficult process, but the resemblance between the two same-named works in terms of atmosphere, originality and story brings disrepute to neither of the authors.
Protagonist and narrator Toru Watanabe describes the world as he knows it, without the omnipotent deus ex machina around to fix things: “A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.”
A love story and a tragedy with a modern sensibility, “Norwegian Wood” does away with history, bunching and jumbling time in Watanabe’s head. While this tactic is at once compellingly personal and devilishly frustrating, it succeeds in creating a tightly-woven story that can breathe and still hold up extremely well in re-reading, where details and allusions missed the first time around rise to the surface.
Murakami’s debt to the stacatto prose and discombobulated narrators of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger is referenced directly – “Don’t tell me you’re trying to imitate that boy in Catcher in the Rye?” says one character to Watanabe – while Murakami’s themes of the destruction of expectation and the volatility of love pay a more subtle homage.
Released in Japan in 1987, the best-selling novel has only this year been approved by the author for American publication. The resonance of Western music and literature peppering the tale and the intriguing unfamiliarity of the Japanese point of view should make American audiences sympathetic fans. Unfortunately, the problem of a ineffective translation clouds the impact of an otherwise quietly addictive novel.
While there was certainly a thesaurus of ways to avoid the plague of “tiny voices,” a term used exhaustively in the book, the killer end notes (“Because Naoko never loved me,” or “It was the last time I ever saw her”) were probably Murakami’s bad idea. The sex scenes can be uncomfortably explicit and unsexy. And finally, the use of 1987 as the present and the bulk of the book as an uninterrupted flashback to the unrest of Tokyo in the ‘60s seems unnecessary and gives the reader only cursory insight into the other characters’ fates while refusing to elaborate on Watanabe’s mental status.
Nevertheless, by the end of the none-too-uplifting story, the reader has been wholly immersed in Murakami’s realm, stepping away from the book not exactly “filled with self-loathing and disillusionment, sunlight stabbing my eyes, mouth coated with sand,” but certainly and admirably with a “head belonging to somebody else.”
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