Traumatic Realism: Norwegian Wood

An excerpt from Murakamian Magical Realism and Psychological Trauma.

The following is an excerpt from my book, Murakamian Magical Realism and Psychological Trauma. It may seem strange to share, as an excerpt, the only chapter on a book that is not actually a work of magical realism, but I thought it was interesting for precisely that reason.

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Through the writing of Murakami’s first four books, there was a definite progression. Each work was substantially longer than the one before it, as well as being notably more experimental, while the author added or developed an array of literary techniques that he crafted into an amorphous style of his own. There were still traces of Vonnegut in his work, as well as a few other influences, but he had created stories in what was becoming a unique literary voice. By now, Murakamian Magical Realism had largely taken shape. “My style,” he said, “is very close to Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I don’t like the realistic style. I prefer a more surrealistic style.”[i] With his first two books in the storytelling mode, he had allowed his mind to wander freely during the writing process, taking very simple concepts and allowing his unconscious to spit out whatever it wanted, creating the aforementioned “surrealistic style.” He explained:

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait. Norwegian Wood is a different thing, because I decided to write in a realistic style.[ii]

Certainly, Norwegian Wood (1987) was different from everything that came before it and everything that would come after. It is the only novel he has written that is primarily realist.

As Murakami alluded to in the above quote, he wrote his next novel partially as an experiment. “Norwegian Wood,” he claims, “is the only one written in a realistic style. I did this intentionally, of course. I wanted to prove to myself that I could write a 100% realistic novel. And I think this experiment proved helpful later on.”[iii] Indeed, each time the subject has been raised, he has claimed that Norwegian Wood was written as an experiment, a means of proving that he could write without the quirks and tropes of his more surrealist efforts, which some considered a crutch or a novelty. There were also more prosaic concerns at play. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World had been a financial disappointment and Murakami, a shrewd businessman, realised that a change may bring more success, saying, “I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.”[iv] He was successful in this sense, with the book selling many millions of copies in Japan and being translated into dozens of languages, earning the author celebrity status at home and abroad.

Norwegian Wood may lack the usual components of Murakamian Magical Realism, but thematically it is a continuation of his previous work. In fact, he has almost circled back to the themes underpinning his first two novels. Once again, we have a protagonist looking back on a point in his past, hurting from various losses. This time, it is the suicide of a friend rather than a lover, although during the course of the book one of his love interests will die by suicide, too. There is also a lament for the failures of Zenkyoto, which serves as the backdrop of this story. This time, however, it will be explored a little more coherently, given that not everything in this novel is approached as a symbol.

The story is told by a man called Toru Watanabe and, in a sense, is the tragic tale of a romantic triangle. Both he and a young woman called Naoko have been badly hurt by the suicide of Kizuki, Naoko’s boyfriend and Toru’s best friend. Naoko has also lost her sister to suicide and will take her own life later in the novel. Toru is torn between Naoko and another woman, Midori, who is dealing with her mother’s death from a brain tumour, while at the same time her father is terminally ill. There are various other deaths, betrayals, and abandonments in this sad story. The common theme appears to be the perpetuation of trauma, with one damaged character accidentally hurting another, creating endless cycles of pain.

As we can see, then, Norwegian Wood concerns many of the ideas explored in other Murakami books but it does so without ever really descending into Murakamian Magical Realism, and this is interesting for the purposes of this study because paradoxically we can gain more insight into Murakamian Magical Realism by looking at how the author explores issues in its absence. In other words, he appears interested in probing various forms of trauma and its manifestations, as well as the idea that trauma could function almost virally.

Perhaps the first great shock for Murakami’s followers upon the release of this book was the inclusion of real names for the characters. Our narrator is called Toru and the girl he loves is called Naoko. Of course, Naoko was one of the only names used prior to this book and was ascribed to the dead ex-girlfriend of Pinball, 1973. Like that Naoko and the real-life former lover of the book’s author, as well as the librarian girlfriend from The Town and its Uncertain Walls, Naoko will end up hanging herself in the woods.

The use of names was the first indication that this was a departure from form and an experiment in not using Murakamian Magical Realism. Whilst he would begin employing some names in his books in the future, namelessness and unconventional naming had been a big feature of his work thus far and the use of conventional names here is significant. When descriptive nicknames are used, they are done so in a believable way. The most notable inclusion is Toru’s roommate, known as Kamikaze in the Birnbaum translation and Storm Trooper in the Rubin version.[1] Names are also imbued with a certain meaning, too. One important character is called Midori, which means “green” in Japanese. Her sister is called Momoko, meaning “peach.” Reflecting on the significance, Midori feels that she looks bad wearing green but her sister looks great in pink, and hence she is cursed and her sister is blessed. Though there is nothing magical about this, and the curse is not literal, it shows Murakami exploring the same concepts in a more realistic way. It also gives us more insight into the characters, for Midori, despite her vivaciousness, is deeply insecure.

The time period here overlaps with the Zenkyoto movement. In previous books, we had glimpses of this but it was never entirely clear what Murakami’s perspective was except that he felt a great degree of sadness about it. In particular, he seemed to lament the wasted potential, the lost ideals, and the fact that his peers so readily gave up and participated in the very society against which they had stood. Here, his critiques are more obvious and specific. Toru feels contempt towards the protestors and their disorganised actions, which are little more than posturing. Interestingly, these scenes function almost as comic interludes amidst the otherwise relentless series of tragic occurrences. Murakami depicts the protestors as entitled and idiotic, filled with rhetoric but lacking reason. He quips, “The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination.”[v]

Murakami himself had been a part of the movement but had always been uncomfortable with the political views of the students, which he felt were hypocritical. “I enjoyed the campus riots as an individual,” he has said, “but I thought there was something ‘impure’ about erecting barricades and other organized activity, so I didn’t participate.”[vi] As a pacifist, he was also repulsed by what he perceived as the students’ support for the establishment of Japan’s Self-Defence Forces.[vii] The infighting between the various factions disgusted him, too, and this is what he mostly satirised in Norwegian Wood.

About the actual failure of Zenkyoto, Murakami says “I could not have cared less […] I felt nothing.”[viii] This may seem strange, given that the student movement clearly marks a divide in his life, with the decades after portrayed rather dismally as an era of boredom, but perhaps this also allows us to better understand his sense of loss. Towards the end of the book, he says “1970—a year with a whole new sound to it—came along, and that put an end to my teen years. Now I could step ahead into a whole new swamp.”[ix] Thus, the end of the student movement was not only the end of various possibilities but the end of his youth, hence the sense of nostalgia that permeates the book. Even now, Murakami looks back and sees the student protests as a moment of loss: “When I was in my teens, in the 1960s, that was the age of idealism. We believed the world would get better if we tried. People today don’t believe that, and I think that’s very sad.”[x] After the protests ended, there was some lingering violence with “minor fights almost on a daily basis” and an atmosphere that was “oppressive.”[xi]

Beyond just names, the story is realistic in terms of setting, character, plot, and even imagery. The traumas depicted are explored in more conventional terms, which is to say that the characters suffer from mental health issues and that the challenging experiences they face as they recover from the various sources of suffering are altogether mimetic representations of reality. Characters suffer from depression, self-esteem issues, anger, and resentment. Rather than embarking upon fantastic journeys filled with colourful characters, they battle mental health issues, sometimes alone, sometimes by reaching out to others, and sometimes by residing in mental health facilities, where they are provided a safe space in which they can attempt recovery.

However, it is noteworthy that he has created an atmosphere that seems to hint at the supernatural. Perhaps he was teasing the reader, but I think it’s also quite likely that Murakami was looking at his normal stories from a new vantage point. Perhaps, instead of Toru experiencing the primary trauma and dissociating to the extent that his story becomes unreal, it is Naoko who is venturing into her own mind, switching the physical for metaphysical, while those around her persist through a more familiar world. A clue that this is the case appears right at the start of the book. Toru looks back on his memories of Naoko and recalls her talking about a “field well.”[xii] A personal interest of Murakami’s since childhood, wells had been mentioned in every one of his books until this point and would appear in almost every one after it, usually with some supernatural connotation.[xiii] Toru says:

I have no idea whether such a well ever existed. It might have been an image or a sign that existed only inside Naoko, like all the other things she used to spin into existence inside her mind in those dark days. Once she had described it to me, though, I was never able to think of that meadow scene without the well. […] It lay precisely on the border where the meadow ended and the woods began—a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by the meadow grass. Nothing marked its perimeter—no fence, no stone curb (at least not one that rose above ground level). It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. […] All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density.[xiv]

Toru describes the well at length, making it incredibly real, yet he admits that it might have been made up and hints that Naoko made up many other things. The fact that it lies on a “border where the meadow ended and the woods began” is important, too. Wells take various forms and purposes in Murakami’s books but often serve as portals. As Naoko kills herself in the woods, it is also significant that the well is “precisely” on that border, hinting that it again marks a barrier between the physical and metaphysical realms, the land of the living and the land of the dead. Its depth and darkness hint at something supernatural, too, and Naoko goes on to explain that no one knows where it is but that it swallows people up every few years.

It is just a hint of the unreal and it suggests that Naoko’s mind is on a different plane from Toru’s. It is clear from the book that, although Toru and Midori and other characters suffer terribly due to their various traumas, Naoko is the one who suffers the most. Toru and Midori are resilient enough to struggle through, but Naoko cannot. She is a fragile character and it could be argued that her death is due to the fact that she crossed into the metaphysical world but could not come back, something that is hinted at when Toru laments her inability “to return to the real world.”[xv] In the context of the book, this could be taken as a distinction between the safe space of a progressive mental health facility and the harsh realities of urban life, but the use of “real world” throughout the book hints at the existence of another realm, one into which traumatised people may cross. This makes sense when we consider the author’s concept of physical and mental strength as prerequisites for surviving such a journey. Murakami is often asked about his writing process and his answers tend to reflect a similar journey to those facing his protagonists—namely, that he must “descend to the darkest realms of the mind” and then wrestle with what is there before returning to this world.[xvi] In Novelist as a Vocation, he says “What’s needed above all to stand up to that deep darkness […] is physical strength. […] Your mind has to be as tough as possible, and in order to maintain that mental toughness over the long term, it’s essential to increase and sustain the receptacle that is physical strength.”[xvii]

If we take this perspective, it offers a better understanding of other Murakami books and in particular the relation of the real and unreal. As his work by this point was written in the first-person perspective, the reader’s understanding of that world was filtered through the narrator’s perceptions. If the narrator of these books was traumatised to the point of dissociation, then their version of reality would be different from someone else’s or indeed from whatever constitutes objective reality. Thus, the reader would be made to experience a world filtered through the perceptions of a dissociated mind. In this book, however, Toru is clearly damaged by Kizuki’s death and by other, comparatively less significant losses, and he is struggling with a great deal of mental anguish, but he is not in a dissociative state, hence the realistic description. Had the narrator been Naoko, Midori, or Reiko (another traumatised character), the blend of real and unreal might have been quite different.

Whilst Murakami has described this text as “a 100% realistic novel,” there are two moments that perhaps suggest Toru has come close to a dissociative state and that the unreal may have intruded upon the real, or that perhaps he has come close enough to Naoko—the most damaged character in the book—and her dissociated state, which more closely resembles the magical realist-like experiences of other Murakami protagonists. The first takes place at what Toru estimates is two or three in the morning. He wakes from a strange dream to find Naoko sitting on the end of his bed, staring out the window. She moves to beside his head, takes off her nightgown, and stands naked in front of him for five minutes before buttoning up and going back to bed.[xviii] The next morning, Naoko seems to have no recollection of this.

Is this an intrusion of the unreal? It is an unlikely event but not impossible. Certainly, Naoko could have stripped off for Toru, whether consciously or otherwise. However, there are certain clues that hint at either this being a projection of part of Naoko or Toru descending briefly into unreality. The first clue is that his watch is not where he left it. This hints at the possibility that Toru is either dreaming or has been transported to a world similar to his own. The absence of time suggests the latter. Naoko is also wearing a butterfly barrette that Toru had watched her take out before going to bed. Whilst she could of course have put it back in, this strongly implies that the Naoko in front of him is not the same one that is presumably lying asleep in the next room. Her body is also completely different to what it had been a year earlier, although for a teenage girl it is not impossible for such changes to have occurred. Finally, when she leaves the room, she is described as gliding, giving her departure a ghostly quality. When Toru reflects on this later, he is uncertain of whether it happened at all:

Why had she shown herself to me like that? Had she been sleepwalking? Or was it just a fantasy of mine? As time went by and that little world receded into the distance, I grew increasingly unsure that the events of that night had actually happened. If I told myself they were real, I believed they were real, and if I told myself they were a fantasy, they seemed like a fantasy. They were too clear and detailed to have been a fantasy, and too whole and beautiful to have been real: Naoko’s body and the moonlight.[xix]

If we consider how frequently characters seem to divide in two in the Murakamian universe, then that invites the possibility that part of Naoko has been cut loose, at least temporarily. We know from other scenes that she wants to have sex, but that she is incapable for psychological reasons pertaining to trauma. It is possible, then, that part of Naoko has become untethered from her physical self, which presumably remains sleeping in the next room. A major clue is found much earlier in the book when Naoko, while playing with her barrette, says, “It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.”[xx] This scene stands out in the middle of an otherwise realistic novel, yet it is not obviously unreal. None of what marked it as strange was necessarily magical and, particularly in the middle of the night, memories and perceptions can become flawed. It can easily be explained away.

The other break with reality occurs right at the end of the book. In the final paragraphs, Toru calls Midori from a phone box, apparently ready to commit to her after struggling all through the novel with his feelings. She asks him where he is, but he doesn’t know.

Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.[xxi]

Aside from the ghostly visitation of Naoko that may have been real or a dream, this had been a mimetic novel. However, right here at the end we see the narrator appears to have lost touch with physical reality. For him to have suddenly lost track of his own location is strange but in keeping with the symptoms of severe trauma, yet the phrase “this place that was no place” hints strongly at Toru crossing over into the metaphysical realm.

Despite Norwegian Wood’s apparent difference from the rest of Murakami’s oeuvre, it is relevant here for it deals directly with trauma, allowing us to see the author’s interest in this area minus the usual obfuscation that comes with his more surrealist approaches. It is also important to see the expansion of his interests. On one hand, he is very obviously continuing to process his feelings about his dead ex-girlfriend and the troubling memories he had of his university days. It is, as many have noted, his most autobiographical work, with people and places very clearly modelled on real ones from the author’s life. However, the earlier works were far more concerned with personal interests and now Murakami is aware of how one person’s trauma might force them to hurt another, and that looking out for other people is necessary. In other words, he is beginning to transition away from such stark detachment and towards the pivot to commitment that would mark the middle point of his career. Additionally, the characters, particularly the female ones, in this book are far more developed than in his earlier works and they exist not just as symbols or devices to help the narrator explore his own issues. Going forward, he would continue to probe these areas and explore new perspectives. First, though, he had two more books to write that would continue his early experiments.

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[1] Birnbaum’s translation appeared in 1989 and Rubin’s in 2000. Although Birnbaum is widely regarded as an excellent translator of Murakami’s early work, his translation of Norwegian Wood is considered poor. He admits this and says it is because he disliked the book. [Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, p.100]

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[i] “Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182”

[ii] “Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182”

[iii] “Questions for Murakami about Kafka on the Shore”

[iv] Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182”

[v] Norwegian Wood, p.75

[vi] Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, p.22-23

[vii] Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, p.22

[viii] Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, p.24

[ix] Norwegian Wood, p.315

[x] “Haruki Murakami: ‘You have to go through the darkness before you get to the light’”

[xi] Norwegian Wood, p.315

[xii] Norwegian Wood, p.4-5

[xiii] “The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami”

[xiv] Norwegian Wood, p.4-5

[xv] Norwegian Wood, p.327

[xvi] Novelist as Vocation, p.120

[xvii] Novelist as Vocation, p.120-121

[xviii] Norwegian Wood, p.171-174

[xix] Norwegian Wood, p.248

[xx] Norwegian Wood, p.25

[xxi] Norwegian Wood, p.386