İmkansızın Şarkısı (Norwegian Wood)

Heavy content and plot. Suicide holds a central place in the book and affects more than one character. Below I also tell the ending.

Toru is thirty-seven, hears a song on a plane and goes back twenty years.

What had happened

In high school he had two close friends: Kizuki and his girlfriend Naoko. The three were always together.

Kizuki killed himself at seventeen, leaving no explanation. That day he and Toru had played pool.

Toru and Naoko meet a year later in Tokyo and become friends. They can never quite name what they are: two people meeting in the emptiness of Kizuki.

On Naoko's twentieth birthday they are together, and the next day Naoko disappears.

Afterward

Naoko settles in a sanatorium in the mountains. Toru writes her letters, goes to visit.

At the sanatorium there is Reiko: a woman in her forties who plays guitar and has a story of her own. My favorite character in the book; she looks after both Naoko and Toru and does what neither of them can: she speaks honestly.

In Tokyo there is Midori. A classmate, she runs her family's bookshop, and her father is dying in the hospital.

Toru is caught between the two.

Naoko finally kills herself.

What held me

It was not a love triangle. It was Murakami's way of telling grief.

In the book people do not heal. Or they heal unevenly.

Naoko writes a good letter, gives hope, starts talking. Then she sinks to the bottom. Then she pulls herself together again. In the end she does not heal.

Toru does not understand, and the book does not explain. No turning point, no trigger, no cause is given.

This was different from most of what I have read. Grief is generally told in stages: first this comes, then that, then you accept.

It made me think of my own weeks

What stayed with me is that it writes the fluctuation itself not as a disorder but as the course itself.

A bad week after a good week does not mean the good week was a lie.

It took me a long time to say this to myself, and hearing it from a novel worked unexpectedly well.

Midori

The living side of the book.

Lively, direct, shameless, someone who wants today. She says what she wants, does not wait, does not explain herself.

While telling about her father's death she both laughs and cries. When she is angry at Toru she says she is angry. When he disappears for months she demands an account.

I liked her, and Toru's inability to move toward her was the most infuriating part of the book. He stays undecided for months, writes letters, does not reply, disappears.

Then I understood that this is not a choice in love. It is a choice between staying loyal to the dead and continuing to live, and Toru is afraid to make this choice, because the second feels like a kind of betrayal.

The most quoted sentence

It says that death is not the opposite of life but exists as a part of it.

This sentence circulates everywhere, and torn from its context it looks like a light kind of wisdom.

Inside the book, though, it is the conclusion a seventeen-year-old boy reaches after losing his closest friend. There it does not look light at all; it is not a consolation but a diagnosis.

Reiko's story

In the middle of the book there is a long section: Reiko tells her past. She was going to become a pianist but her hands gave out, she married, had a child, then an incident with a student wrecked her life.

This section stops the main story, and at first reading it felt unnecessary.

Then I realized that it carries the book's thesis: Reiko is not someone who has healed, but someone who has not healed and goes on. What Naoko could not be.

How it differs from Murakami's other books

There is no fantastic element. No talking cats, parallel worlds, passages in wells.

A plain realist narrative, and I think the best door for someone who wants to begin with Murakami.

But it is not his most typical book; if you continue from here, the later books may surprise you. Murakami himself describes this book as an exception.

When not to read it

If you are in a hard period, put it on your postpone list.

I read it in a good period and still found it hard. This book is gripping but not soothing, and starting without knowing this would be unfair.

Around four hundred pages. Its language is plain, the chapters short.