Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

• Release Date: 1987
• Genre: Literature, Translation

This Story is on one side a story of misadventure and a melancholic exploration of adolescent love and another side a thought-provoking and poignant study of memory, morality and mortality. Murakami never disappoints and always writes with a poetic richness that leaves almost every line hanging with symbolic possibility, loved it!
The main protagonist takes you back to the 1960s and his youthful goings on with his peers, his adventures are steamy so comes with adult warning! The story is set in thriving Tokyo and also shifts location to a relaxed mountainous retreat. You really get to love the characters that Murakami creates which I also felt with his other novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. To think that his works have been translated from Japanese into English and still hold a poetic and deeply thought-provoking quality is truly mesmerising stuff. It’s by no means just a love story. This story is more about lived experiences, where his other novels have tones of supernatural and incorporated mind games. The book title if you are wondering is taken from a Beatles track ‘Norwegian Wood’ which is one of the novel’s characters favourite songs.
There is a movie adapted from this book which is worth checking out, that was what gave me the incentive to read this book during April instead of ‘Kafka on the Shore’ of which i was more eager to read before this title. Thanks to the movie release prompting me, turned out was one excellent story of Love and Loss. Considering I used same procedure ‘read the book watch the movie’ with a few other novels and was disappointed with books like ‘Let the right one in’ ‘Girl who played with fire’ ‘Never let me go’ and ‘Rosemary’s baby’ theres still hope for watching the movie adaptations of these titles, now I need to find time to watch these movies.