Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
Vintage Books

Norwegian Wood sold four million copies when it debuted in Japan in 1987, propelling its author, Haruki Murakami, to stardom. But while bestsellerdom is an unreliable sign of elegant prose, the newly-translated Norwegian Wood is an exception: a well-structured tale of vivid characters responding to misfortune in the Tokyo environs at the end of the '60s.

Each of the novel's college-age characters faces the question of "Which of these two lovers do I love the most?" Toru Watanabe, the narrator and protagonist, doesn't know for sure which flaws, virtues, habits and interests are reliably his own. Mixed up, he can't decide whether he wants to pursue Naoko, an unworldly childhood friend who lives hours away by bus, or Midori, an earthy fellow student who attends the same university in Tokyo.

Each woman attracts different aspects of his emerging personality. In grief, while Midori chooses between him and her boyfriend, and Naoko chooses between him and her boyfriend, Toru soon figures out which lover he loves the most after forming a fuller, more stable understanding of who he is.

Norwegian Wood is unlike many of Murakami's other books, such as the critically-acclaimed "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," in that it contains no fantastic events or detective-story mystery. It is indeed like Murakami's other books, though, in its Western inflection. Its uncluttered prose is modeled after the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom it explicitly mentions. And its title refers to the Beatles' enigmatic folk tune Norwegian Wood, about an elusive lover.

Murakami favors nostalgic ramblings as the preferred way to reveal character in this novel. Sadly, he's not as good at writing such ramblings as Thomas Mann is in The Magic Mountain (which is also mentioned several times in Norwegian Wood), or, a bit lower on the evolutionary chain but also with similar characters and themes, Ordinary People by Judith Guest. Murakami's characters spark to life more often during the occasional dialogues.

In general, though, the book is peopled with didactic talkers whose characterizations sometimes lack enough shaded complexity to sway older readers with tender tremors, even though the older readers were once young and felt similar urges and betrayals. Still, for an elegiac yet unsentimental take on first love and first loss, Norwegian Wood is among the best novels newly in print.

— Sean O'Neill (NewsFromDC@cs.com)