scste16 's review for:

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

4.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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A departure for Murakami from the surrealism of his earlier novels. On hearing the Beatles’s ‘Norwegian Wood’, the protagonist, Toru Watanabe, recounts his time at university, centred on his relationship with Naoko. A truly emotional read, exploring concepts of love, life, loss and death and heartbreaking in parts. If you don’t like Murakami, this book has the usual points of criticism - his male protagonists are mostly the same character (think: a variation on Toru Okada) as are his ‘supporting’ females. However, quite a beautiful novel