Prompted by a Beatles song heard on a landing plane, Toru Watanabe looks back on his student years in late-1960s Tokyo and the two women who shaped them: the fragile, grief-haunted Naoko, tied to him by the suicide of a mutual friend, and the lively, unpredictable Midori. A quiet, melancholy coming-of-age story about love, memory, mental illness, and loss.
Books mentioned in Norwegian Wood (9)
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann: “Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I told her. ... Then I picked up The Magic Mountain again, reading and sipping brandy and waiting to get sleepy.”
Light in August by William Faulkner: “I bought a copy of Faulkner's Light in August and went to the noisiest jazz cafe I could think of, reading my new book while listening to Ornette Coleman and Bud Powell.”
The Centaur by John Updike: “At 18 my favourite book was John Updike's The Centaur, but after I had read it a number of times, it began to lose some of its initial lustre and yielded first place to The Great Gatsby.”
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I wanted to tell people what a wonderful novel it was, but no one around me had read The Great Gatsby or was likely to.”
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad: “I went back to the dorm and stretched out on my bed reading Lord Jim, which I'd borrowed from Nagasawa.”
Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse: “I picked a discoloured copy of Hermann Hesse's Beneath the Wheel that must have been hanging around the shop unsold for a long time, and left the money for it by the till.”
Das Kapital by Karl Marx: “"Have you ever read Das Kapital?" "Yeah."”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe, no Catcher in the Rye.”
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger: “No War and Peace, no Kenzaburo Oe, no Catcher in the Rye.”