Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan.

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before.Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable.As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love."

Review

"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)

Format Paperback | 400 pages
Dimensions 128 x 196 x 30mm | 280g
Publication date 04 Jul 2003
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Imprint VINTAGE
Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
Language English
Illustrations note 0
ISBN10 0099448823
ISBN13 9780099448822