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Norwegian Wood: Emotionally-warped youth, raging hormones, and ever-present death
It's mysterious how most of my adult life revolves around Japan, and yet I'd only previously read one book by Japan's most famous contemporary writer, Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World about 25 years ago. Partly that may be the Important Literature label - I tend to avoid such books, and I also know that many of his themes are more melancholy, elusive, and introspective than I usually are keen to tackle, since I spend much of my free mental moments already dwelling on the strange and sad ways of this world and our short mortal coils, so why fall further into self-reflection and navel-gazing.

In any case, I decided that age 45 was plenty long enough to wait to experience his most famous books, so I started with the least overtly surreal book, Norwegian Wood. I actually saw the film maybe five years back, and it was both engrossing and deeply tragic and depressing, so I knew what I was getting into. Despite that, I felt this was the best entry point for his works.

I won't summarize the story or the writing or the characters, all of who are carefully and beautifully crafted. It's a truly moving tale of those intense emotions of youth, the selfishness, love, despair, contempt, and disconnect from the prosaic adult world that characterize our inner worlds as we start to perceive the world more clearly. It's all about the traumas of the past and how they haunt us, how difficult it is to get past insurmountable tragedy, and all features a ton of sex in various forms, both standard and kinky. And suicide and death, did I mention that already? It's a central them that looms over every character and action. It's both ominous and yet courageous to make this them so closely tied to youth and love. It's like no other story I've read before, and will put you through an emotional roller-coaster and have you reminiscing about your own college days and loves and heartbreak and so forth. It's definitely a powerful experience and I'm glad I listened to it, though the audiobook narrator was quite clumsy with the Japanese people and place names, and some of the accents he chose for the characters were quite jarring, like a Texas drawl for instance. Still, if it let me spend my train commute in a more introspective place, then it was well worth it.