Norwegian Wood Synopsis
The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world
Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20.
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' Guardian
'Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith' Sunday Times
'A masterly novel' New York Times
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781529957716 |
| Publication date: |
3rd July 2025 |
| Author: |
Haruki Murakami |
| Publisher: |
Vintage Classics an imprint of Random House |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
400 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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Haruki Murakami Press Reviews
A deeply troubling yet poetically beautiful story - Marie Claire
Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around - Time Out
Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility - Guardian
This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows - Independent on Sunday
Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. - Times Literary Supplement
About Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. Following the publication of his first novel in Japanese in 1979, he sold the jazz bar he ran with his wife and became a full-time writer. It was with the publication of Norwegian Wood - which has to date sold more than 4 million copies in Japan alone - that the author was truly catapulted into the limelight. Known for his surrealistic world of mysterious (and often disappearing) women, cats, earlobes, wells, Western culture, music and quirky first-person narratives, he is now Japan’s best-known novelist abroad. Nine novels, three short story collections and one work of non-fiction are currently available in English translation.
More About Haruki Murakami
