59 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiNorwegian Wood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Haruki Murakami’s Life and Work
Born in Kyoto in 1949, Haruki Murakami is one of Japan’s best-known contemporary writers. His dreamy, surrealist style intrigued readers worldwide with novels like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995). Norwegian Wood departs from that style, and its more straightforward approach makes it an outlier in Murakami’s body of work. Based on the short story “Firefly,” which appears in his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006), Norwegian Wood is missing much of Murakami’s signature supernatural feel, focusing instead on love, loss, and the struggles of growing up and finding one’s identity. It is, in the author’s words, a “straight, simple story” (295). Nevertheless, the novel is one of Murakami’s most popular. It catapulted him into literary stardom, expanding his readership so much that Murakami moved out of Japan to avoid being recognized.
Although Murakami resists referring to Norwegian Wood as autobiographical, he admits to having “borrowed” details from his own life, and there are many parallels between the novel and the author’s biography. Like Toru Watanabe, Murakami grew up in Kobe and moved to Tokyo, where he was a freshman drama major in 1968. His university was closed due to student protests, which he, like Watanabe, didn’t participate in. Both Murakami and Watanabe worked in a record shop during college, and the author met and fell in love with his future wife while he was at college.
Historical Context: Japanese Student Protests in the 1960s
Like much of the world, the 1960s in Japan were a time of significant social and political change. In 1968 and 1969, the years in which Norwegian Wood is primarily set, student protests occurred at universities across Japan. The demonstrations were part of a larger movement of protests worldwide to bring awareness to various issues, including anti-war sentiment, civil rights, workers’ rights, and political changes. Students in Japan began protesting against the unfair treatment of medical interns at the University of Tokyo. The movement spread to other universities and came to encompass other issues, such as embezzlement of university funds. As the protests spread, they forced the closure of many universities, and rioting led to violence both on and off campuses. While the protests started as student-led events with specific demands, their demands changed as the movement became diluted and confused by new ideologies. The movement started to lose momentum and public support, and in mid-1969, Japan passed a new law giving police the authority to forcibly dispel protesters.
Because of the movement’s lack of cohesion, concrete results were difficult to see. There was no sweeping reform of the educational system, and the protests ended in what could be called a defeat: an 11-hour-long siege between student protesters and police resulting in the students’ removal. Haruki Murakami was a college freshman in Tokyo in 1968 and experienced the student protests first-hand. In Norwegian Wood, he depicts the movement as ineffectual. The demonstrations and their implied lack of success help illustrate Watanabe’s existentialism and contribute to his sense of hopelessness. As a young student, Watanabe opts out of protests and political affiliation, which becomes his own form of rebellion and attempt to forge his identity.
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