Norwegian Wood

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami's beautiful prose made me cry.The english translation of the book was superb, I wonder how its like to read it in Japanese.His descriptions were so graphic you can actually feel,taste and smell everything he writes about. With one exception- "the cold coffee tasted like printer's ink". Did he actually drink printer's ink to say with certainty that his coffee tasted like it or should he just have said " like I imagined printer's ink tasted like". This book is so different from the first two that I read. Dance,Dance,Dance and Kafka on the Shore, were peopled with strange individuals, had supernatural and metaphysical overtones and perplexing mind games.Norwegian Wood is a coming of age story of Toru Watanabe set in the late 1960s when he was in college. Its about unrequited love and complicated love triangles that one can really empathize with, because its like a shared experience.Reading the book is like entering a time warp as Murakami vividly brings back the 60's with songs like the Beatle's Norwegian Wood. But the characters had such a complicated,angst ridden life that I'm actually thankful how relatively simple and boring mine was at that age.I found a kindred spirit in Midori Kobayashi who tells Toru "I've got pretty good intuition.I'm hopeless as a logical thinker." That actually defined me but that's about all that I had in common with her. For me this line on page 292 summed up the transitory nature of being, of love, of memories and experiences that the book was all about. "Letters are just pieces of papers."Toru Watanabe said."Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay.Keep them and what vanishes will vanish."The world after all is a world of illusion, the realm of impermanence. And it is only in our hearts, the repository of all these feelings, emotions and memories , that we will truly experience eternity.