![]() ![]() “Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky.” So begins Toru’s journey his past, spurred by hearing a rendition of “Norwegian Wood” as his flight touches down in Hamburg, Germany. As Toru’s memories rush back and mix together, the delineation between these two modes of memory often becomes blurry, rendering difficult moments more beautiful and pleasant ones more tense than they may have been in reality. Toru’s recollection of his formative years is precise and near-perfect, yet also tinged, at various times, with the hazy wash of nostalgia and the sharp, uncomfortable pain of regret. The world of Norwegian Wood is one based on memory. Ultimately, Murakami uses the mixture of painful and pleasurable memories Toru recollects to show that feelings of nostalgia and regret can often be intermixed and muddied within one’s memories-sometimes, even, to the point of these two different emotions becoming indistinguishable from each other. His immersive retreat into memories of the Tokyo of his youth and all that happened to him there is somewhat reluctant, and yet the sharpness of his memories from this time is astounding-soon, it becomes clear that these memories are the most important of his entire life. ![]() ![]() At the beginning of Norwegian Wood, 37-year-old Toru Watanabe is flung backward into memory and nostalgia when he hears a version of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” playing on an airplane loudspeaker. ![]()
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