“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin)

This is one of Murakami’s most straight forward novels. There are no strange dream sequences and no talking cats. His translator makes the claim that it is also Murakami’s most autobiographical work. After all, the protagonist is a small-town boy who is making his way through college in late 1960s Tokyo. He even has a part-time job at a record store. Music, both classical, jazz, and, of course, the Beatles, punctuates much of the plot. It is also a dark work. There are more than a handful of gruesome deaths referenced, most by suicide. In fact, the narrator’s working motto became, “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

Although a more or less straight bildungsroman, the book is still told with Murakami’s dead-pan flare built into his simple lines, “Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.” In fact, the suicide of his high school best friend would be the defining event of Toru Watanabe’s existence, “Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult.”