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I revisited Norwegian Wood remembering nothing about my college year experience with it, nothing except that I loved it. And I can see why: the plot is propulsive, with Murakami’s kinetic prose once again keeping me up late; the lead character is a well-realized loner archetype; the world, 1960s Japan during the student protests, glimmers in the background. There are excellent long-sequences (hospital visit, fire, sanatorium) It is salacious and often funny, well-observed:

“The second feature was a fairly normal sex flick, which meant it was even more boring than the first. It had lots of oral sex scenes, and every time they started doing fellatio or cunnilingus or sixty-nine the soundtrack would fill the theater with loud sucking or slurping sound effects. Listening to them, I felt strangely moved to think that I was living out my life on this odd planet of ours.�

And yet, things gave me pause. The book is set in the past, yes, but the rape humor (several jokes), the shocking scene of lesbian pedophilia (which is as bizarre and creepy a sequence I can remember reading (more on that in a second)), the way every female character in the book is a sex object, and the extremely rare trio of Magic Pixie Dream Girl characters, all of it vexed me. I do not hold this against Murakami, necessarily—he wrote it in the 80’s, and the book is about sex—but the gender issues keep me from giving this book my full endorsement.

As ever with Murakami, the western canon’s influence is fascinating. Toru, the lead, reads Magic Mountain while visiting a sanatorium; he makes friends by talking about The Great Gatsby; he spends a late-night reading Hermann Hesse; most pertinently to the plot, he is a lover of John Updike, particularly The Centaur. There’s a good running joke in the undercurrent of the novel � everyone except Toru is reading and loving Kenzaburo Oe.

SPOILERS, BIG SPOILERS:

(view spoiler)[The resolution of the plot bugged me. This is a book w/ too many suicides (three!), and the ending is very frustrating. There’s a fan theory that makes a lot of sense that suggests that Reiko � the woman who tells the pedophilia story � is a liar, and that the letter Toru sends her is used to convince Naoko to kill herself. The one bit of Murakami magic realism in the story comes at the ending—it is little written about in online synopses, but Midori’s final question (where are you now?) doesn’t leave Toru confused. He is stunned, because he is where Midori’s father said he would be on his deathbed, the specific train station that will bring him to Midori. This is nice, and can be read as further support of the theory that Reiko pushed them together. Great, cool! And yet, though all this makes sense, it is too far beneath the surface to be fact, and so for me it is a what-might-have-been, not a clever burial of plot. It would be like if Vertigo ended 30 minutes early: you have to show a bit of the work to get credit. (hide spoiler)]