Three and a half stars.
Let’s focus on the most memorable character of this strange little tale: a young adult named Sumire, who dropped out of college to pursue her dream of becoming a published author. She’s disorganized both in her personal upkeep as well as her approach to writing: she can start or finish stories, but not both. She suspects she will never become a pro, but can’t imagine doing anything else, and when she turns twenty-eight, her parents will stop financing her lifestyle.
She’s used to calling the narrator at odd hours of the night to discuss her worries and seek his guidance, even though the guy is a school teacher and could use the sleep. However, they’re each other’s only friend in lives that have been characterized by solitude and detachment. Sumire is unaware that the narrator is in love with her, or pretends that she doesn’t know, but she can’t reciprocate his feelings because she’s in love with a Korean-born woman who’s about fifteen years older than her.
The little there is plotwise (not that I mind; I tend to dislike convoluted stories) involves the Korean woman, named Miu, hiring Sumire as an assistant; the lady runs a wholesale business that buys wine from fancy places and sells it in Japan. Even though Sumire fears that keeping a job will wreck her literary aspirations, she surrenders to the flow of a routine that allows her to spend her days with her beloved Korean mommy. Soon enough they’re jet-setting all over the world.
The narrator fears that he’s going to lose Sumire. She writes him a letter from Rome, but shortly after he stops receiving news from her. Suddenly, the Korean lady herself calls him: he’s to abandon everything he’s doing in Japan and hurry to a small Greek island, because something has happened to their friend.
That’s all I want to reveal about the plot. My favorite parts of this story take place in Japan, when Sumire and the narrator are interacting. Murakami knows how to weave a spell when he’s letting you experience the private lives and interactions of his characters, who are usually lost and trying to understand themselves as well as the world they have found themselves in. His Norwegian Wood reached the heights in that regard, as far as I know from his works. But as in plenty of his other stories, Murakami introduces supernatural elements that for me weren’t supported by the story, and that distanced me from the characters. Even though Norwegian Wood made Murakami a known author (and a millionaire), it’s perhaps one of the least Murakami-ish books of his. Worse yet for me: often the supernatural elements he includes feel random, as if he came up with them during freewriting but couldn’t make them fit in, or didn’t care to do so.
Murakami’s writing also has this thing in which he’s on the verge of saying something profound, of hitting some transcendental point, only to screw it up with a few lackluster phrases that don’t say much of anything. I don’t recall how common that was in Norwegian Wood, but I had that impression quite a few times during this story. The narrative also features texts written by Sumire, and it didn’t help that her style annoyed me.
My least favorite element of the story was the narrator himself. Murakami’s male narrators are often bland, tepid, non-committal, and the one from this novel I’m reviewing is the epitome of those, that I can recall. His opinions seemed vague, unconvincing, held because they wouldn’t require him to take a firm stance on anything. I had a hard time understanding why Sumire would care so much for him. Worse yet, his morals were beyond questionable: all his girlfriends were other men’s girlfriends or wives, and he let a shitty little kid get away with his kleptomaniac ways for reasons that for me had more to do with dislike of authority.
The main theme that Murakami was playing around with centered on the notion that some people are doomed to a life of solitude, and that their instances of true contact with other alike souls will be fleeting, like two satellites briefly passing each other. By the end, the story left me feeling empty, as if something important had been lost along the way, so good job for capturing that impression.
Here are some quotes from the book:
Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. Like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.
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