Reading List #1- Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood
By: Haruki Murakami

"It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly,"

1. It's pretty much a love story. Accessing it seems pointless being thoroughly unJapanese myself.

2. Murakami: "Norwegian Wood is, as you've said, 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. I gained the confidence I could write this way; otherwise it would have been pretty hard to complete the work that came afterwards. For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life. It's also a way of descending deep into my own consciousness. So while I see it as dreamlike, it's not fantasy. For me the dreamlike is very real."

3. Its gone now; tucked between the stacks. I can't remember the line that's been dicing up my brain. This place that is no place? This place that is no space? I can't remember. It seems irrelevant though; what the words are precisely.

4. Place: Easy to identify: 1960's Tokyo primarily, secondarily a few geographically insignificant countryside locales (something out of a Sōtatsu painting or a Hiroshige ukiyo-e: busy within the placidity of blank space; irrelevant chaos). In lieu of geographic purpose the primary and secondary function in orbit of each other.
Space: Does Tokyo even exist? Wantanabe walks through it again and again, but its vastness makes it slippery with nothing to hold on to. Incomplete memory? Maybe; the novel's tone echos through dreamlike whispers. Geometrically speaking however, the space, if we include the characters themselves as space, functions in perpendicular lines: Tangential from assumption, but examined beyond the eye separate with vacuous breadth.

5. "It's pretty much a love story". If so, what is the lover and what is it's the love object? Which characters are main, and which secondary? Who do we look at? but more importantly, where do we look? Are the absences of such distinctions irrelevant in the love story?

Conclusion:

A ghost town; here plants grow.

No one lives
under the wooden eaves
of Fuwa Barrier.
For years in ruins:
now only the autumn wind.

Cooling, so cooling,
with a wall against my feet,
midday sleep—behold.

When I awoke, I was alone
this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire
isn't it good Norwegian wood?