Murakami Norwegian Wood

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
This book is undeniably hip,full of student uprisings,free love,booze and 1960's pop.It's also genuinely emotionally engaging,and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows'Independent on Sunday.


作者简介
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949.He met his wife,Yoko,at university and they openet a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat.The massive success of his novel Norwegian Wood(1987)made him a ntional celebrity.He fled Japan and did not return until1995.His other books include Dance Dance Dance,Hare-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,A Wild Sheep Cbase,The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,Underground,his first work of non-fiction,Sputnik Sweetheart,and Soutb of the Border,West of thd Sputnik Sweetheart,and soutb of the work of F.Scott Sun.He has translated into Japanese the work of F.Scott Fitzgerald,Truman Cppote,John Irving and Raymond Carver.
Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese literature at Harvartn University.He is the author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words and he has also translated Murakami's Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Cbronicle.

村上春树，1949年生于日本兵库县，早稻田大学戏剧系毕业，1979 年以第一部创作小说《且听风吟》得到当年日本的群像新人奖。获得野间文艺新人奖和谷崎润一郎奖的作品－《挪威的森林》－迄今卖了超过700万本，使作者成为日本最畅销的作家。村上春树曾翻译F.scott.Fitzgerald,Paul Theroux,John Irving及Raymond Chandler的小说，九十年代在美国普林斯顿大学和Tufts大学任客座讲师。

Book Description
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Amazon.com
In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets. And now he's finally authorized a translation for the English-speaking audience, turning to the estimable Jay Rubin, who did a fine job with his big-canvas production The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Readers of Murakami's later work will discover an affecting if atypical novel, and while the author himself has denied the book's autobiographical import--"If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than fifteen pages long"--it's hard not to read as at least a partial portrait of the artist as a young man.

Norwegian Wood is a simple coming-of-age tale, primarily set in 1969-70, when the author was attending university. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the novel's backdrop. But the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs, and the pain and pleasure and attendant losses of growing up. The collapse of a romance (and this is one among many!) leaves him in a metaphysical shambles:

"I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it."

This account of a young man's sentimental education sometimes reads like a cross between Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women. It is less complex and perhaps ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical work. Still, Norwegian Wood captures the huge expectation of youth--and of this particular time in history--for the future and for the place of love in it. It is also a work saturated with sadness, an emotion that can sometimes cripple a novel but which here merely underscores its youthful poignancy.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Mark Thwaite
Amazon.co.uk
"I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me" "Norwegian Wood" (Lennon/McCartney).

With Norwegian Wood Murakami, best known as the author of off-kilter classics such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland, finally achieved widespread acclaim in his native Japan. The novel sold upwards of 4 million copies and forced the author to retreat to Europe, fearful of the expectations accompanying his new-found cult status.

The novel is atypical for Murakami: seemingly autobiographical, in the tradition of many Japanese "I" novels, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age tale set, primarily, in 1969/70, the time of Murakami's own university years. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the backdrop of the novel but the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs and the pain (and pleasure) of growing up with all its attendant losses, (self-)obsessions and crises.

The novel is split into two volumes and beautifully presented here in a "gold" box containing both the green book and the red book. Young Japanese fans became so obsessed with the work that they would dress entirely in one or other colour denoting which volume they most identified with. And the novel is hugely affecting, reading like a cross between Plath's Bell Jar and Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, if less complex and ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical, work. He captures the huge expectation of youth, and of this particular time in history, for the future and for the place of love in it. He also saturates the work with sadness, an emotion that can cripple a novel but which here underscores the poignancy of the work's rather thin subject matter.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Mark Thwaite

From Publishers Weekly
In a complete stylistic departure from his mysterious and surreal novels (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; A Wild Sheep Chase) that show the influences of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Tom Robbins, Murakami tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story, reminiscent of J.R. Salamanca's classic 1964 novel, LilithAthe tale of a young man's involvement with a schizophrenic girl. A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki, inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered. She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young love bound for tragedy. Published in Japan in 1987, this novel proved a wild success there, selling four million copies.

About Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo.

Book Dimension:
length: (cm)19.6 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)12.9

书摘
　I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach
to Hamburg airpor.Cold November rains drenched the earth, lending everything the gloomy air of a
Flemish landscape: the ground crew in waterproofs, a flag atop a squat airport building, a BMW
bill-board. So - Germany again.
　Once the plane was on the ground, soft music began to flow from he ceiling speakers: a sweet
orchestral cover version of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood". The melody never failed to send a
shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever.
　I bent forward, my face in my hands to keep my skull from splitting open. Before long one of the
German stewardesses approached and asked in English if I were sick..
　"NO," I said, "just dlzzy."
　"Are you sure?"
　"Yes, I'm sure. Thanks."
　She smiled and left, and the music changed to a Billy Joel tune. I straightened up and looked
out of the window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of all I had lost in the
course of my life: times gone for ever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would
never know again.
　The plane reached the gate. People began unfastening their……